Chapter One: The Pan's Fury
Pan
In the first few days since the lost boys had left with Wendy for the real world, for a mother, for a father, and to grow old, he'd raged, and all of Neverland had been a tempest, mirroring the very tempest that raged within him. The heavens spilled forth endless torrents, and the soft, fluffy pink cotton candy clouds that usually hung in the sky had been replaced by dark, angry clouds that swelled with a righteous fury, not unlike Pan's. Tree branches were ripped from their respective trees like limbs from a body and lay strewn around the island. The trees, too, were not spared and were ripped from the ground they'd clung to since their birth like grass from soil. The water that surrounded the island turned to waves that crested and churned and swelled over the sand at the slightest touch of the wind as it gusted over it. Huge swathes of the island lay in ruins, reduced to shambles. But Pan did not notice; he was too furious at how the girl – Wendy – had undone all the hard work he'd done for years in a single second. He'd saved those boys from having to grow up. Those unwanted boys had had a home because of him, had had fun because of him, would never have had to grow up and grow old because of him, but now they would, all because of Wendy Moira Angela Darling. Those were the first days. Days filled with rage and hurt and a sense of betrayal. But what came after that was worse. If Pan's rage was terrible to behold, it at least meant that he had feelings. As long as the boy who wouldn't grow up had feelings, he couldn't be too dangerous, although less dangerous meant that Pan would only be a little less likely to go on a rampage, out for blood and vengeance. So now, no matter how bad the storm seemed, at least the Pan had feelings, even if they upset him. But in Neverland, there were always ways of removing things, things that seemed otherwise impossible to do so. Remove a shadow, remove a fairy, remove a grownup – those last two were easy – or remove memories of life and family left behind. And in the first few days, when the feelings finally became too much for Pan to bear, he cut the feelings from his breast with a dagger forged in the heart of an elm and fashioned from the coins placed on the eyelids of dead pirates laid to rest, and under a night sky barren of the moon. He'd held those feelings in the palms of his hands, messy, slippery, bright, swirling, and colorful, and watched as glistening strands and rivulets of his feelings dripped through the narrow spaces between his fingers onto the soil by his feet. And finally, Pan felt nothing. He'd fed his feelings to the birds, and finally, the raging storm stopped. The whole island then breathed a sigh of relief, but its relief at its reprieve was short-lived. At first, it was almost undetectable, when fall slowly crept upon the island of Neverland. It began as a single leaf here and there, turning golden, red, yellow, orange, crimson, and brown, desiccated and crackling, that lay in thick drifts at the bases of trees. And then the trees were bare and all too soon the air was cold and had a distinctive bite to it. The human inhabitants of the island's breaths began to appear, hanging in the frigid air and looking like plumes of fire expelled from the mouth of a dragon in the slowly weakening sunlight. Winter, too, crept upon the island like an assassin, silent, unexpected, and deadly.
The animals were unused to such cold nights and so succumbed to it in the dark. The predators soon found it difficult to find prey, and suddenly predators were becoming prey to other predators and there were new hunters to fear and be feared. The nights grew colder and the sky grayer, darker, and duller. The island awoke one morning to find itself blanketed in snow, and its ponds and lagoons frozen, and the mermaids drowned; they'd been unable to reach the surface. The longer the winter lasted, the more used to it the island became, and Neverland adapted to its new climate as best it could. The winter lasted for years, until one morning it was gone, and it was summer once more. That was the morning that Pan decided that he would start recruiting unwanted and unloved boys again and once more become the leader of the lost boys. And it was also the day he decided that if he saw Wendy, he would kill her, one way or another. He would kill her and destroy everything she loved.
