Ignorance is Bliss
42
Neverland—Past
In a world protected by magic, a world made up only of water, a small island began to form in the center. To anybody who saw it happen, it would appear that sand was breaking off the bottom of the water and floating to the surface, hardening there in the sunlight and creating a small strip, but it was slowly growing larger and larger. It was an island forged by sleeping magic, seeping into the magical world from the dreams of children.
Soon, the sand has grown into the full size that the island will be when it's first occupant arrives—a boy of no more than fourteen years old. A scar ran diagonally across his face, starting a few inches below his right eye, up across the top of his nose, and stopping at his forehead. It was dark red and fresh, no more than a few weeks old. He was tall for his age with pale blonde hair that fell in his eyes in unruly tangles.
The boy looks around him, rocks beginning to form from the sand, trees and bushes growing next. They were bright green like the trees you would see in the spring, reaching towards the sun and embracing its warmth. Like everything around him, the boy, too, has been crafted by the dream magic, though he came into being thanks to nightmares. He was everything people feared, a boy that could blend in and go unnoticed, a boy that most would pass off as normal as long as they couldn't see the dark thoughts bouncing around in his handsome head.
Those thoughts are what separated him from all the brightness of this new land, the thoughts that contained every child's fears. He looks down at his hands, hard with callouses and tanned a golden color even thought this was his human body's first day of life. His soul has been around for centuries, jumping from house to house and land to land, feeding off nightmares and making them grow in size. As an Alp, a rare species to find these days, he liked to think he was quite powerful. To test his abilities that have, until this moment, mostly been used to torment women and young children, he stretches out a hand and touches a nearby tree.
The pale brown bark turns almost black and the leaves change from bright green to a darker version—the stuff of nightmares. His magic spreads through the island, more trees growing to block out the sun and give the island a feeling of it always being night. He smiles, a dark and cruel smile that leant his face an eerie quality, and walks along a path, dark bushes and thorns growing behind him and taking over the trail. Some thorns are dark red, the color of blood, but not as harmful as the black thorns.
They oozed black poison, one simple drop enough to have a man dead in three days. As he walked he came to the edge of the island, finding a skull-shaped cave in the distance and a longboat dragged up on shore for his use. He ignores it, taking on his usual form of a shadow and flying across the dark waters and in through the socket to the top most room of the cave. A massive golden hour glass sits in the very center of the room, several golden skulls surrounding it and working as its base. Larger skulls are built into the walls and surround the room along the floor.
Inside the hour glass was sand from the island, trickling slowly from the top to the bottom half. He knew what it meant, now that he had an entire island to himself he would need to maintain his flow of nightmares. If he didn't get enough, he would starve and the island would disappear back into the sea. Though, how he would get to feed, he had no idea because he would have to stay here to make sure the island stayed stable enough and that could take anywhere from six days to six years.
Thinking quickly, he closes his eyes and separates his two forms, the human one would stay on the island and the shadow form would go for the dreams and blood. When he's stronger and knows the island would not sink while he was distracted, he would bring the more vulnerable children here to feed off of so that it would limit the trips he had to make to other lands.
Magic still exists in some lands, he would start there and place suggestions in the children's heads that they would want to come here, that their parents no longer wanted them. But what would he call his new home? It had to have a name or the children would doubt that it truly existed. And then it came to him, the perfect name for an island such as this.
Neverland.
Okay, so I based the being that my version of Felix is on the creature called an Alp, they basically made people have horrible nightmares and then drank some of their blood. I got the idea from one of the Supernatural books called Night Terror by John Passarella—you guys should check it out if you can, it's one of my favorites and was fun to read about! Sorry that this is so short, but consider it a filler chapter.