Paper Ghosts: the Paper Forest, #1.5 by Tegan Anderson

Author:Tegan Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little Oaks Independent Publishing

The Forest was peaceful on the twenty-seventh day. The occupants were four: Rowan, Isaac, Wesley, and Imogene. Rowan was the youngest, only seven when she met death, but she grew into her power effortlessly without questioning her newfound abilities.

Isaac fashioned a journal out of leaves and documented everything in the ashes of charred twigs from the fire, from the extent of Rowan’s powers to theories about how to return to their families. Wesley hung from the branches until they broke and built shelters and fences around the area of the Forest that they now called ‘home’. Imogene watched with a combination of awe and envy as Rowan manipulated the branches into planks and the shelters into a wood cabin, rooms adding and expanding with only a thought.

They all helped to craft Rowan a crown of ivy and she made a pear tree bloom so they could eat the fruit. One day, she bloomed bushes without realising that the berries were poisonous and then the occupants were three.

The ivy crown changed that day, the leaves darkening with rot and the vines growing bristles as if they could sense the death, as if it was intentional and there was a darkness brewing inside of Rowan. They brushed it off as a sign of natural decay rather than a sign of the Forest caring about what they did while residing in it.

But those three occupants were the first conscious beings that the Forest had ever seen, and it was excited to exist with something else that was alive. It had no mouth, no hands, no body at the time, so it could only communicate by sending sign after sign until it wasn't ignored anymore.

The Forest was no longer peaceful by the eighty-ninth day. Another group of four arrived, their names not important enough for Rowan to remember, but they came with another powerful child, a boy this time. The first three considered them dangerous, forcing the four to bow to the crown that grew blackened thorns and tied them to trees until Rowan’s power learned to make iron bars and windowless rooms beneath the beginnings of a castle. The powerless ones were released soon after her second death and the population had grown enough that none of them recognised her face anymore.

After that first imprisonment, the three passed around the crown like kids playing pretend, taking turns to be the monarch and rule over their paper kingdom, much to the Forest’s disdain. The Forest liked rules, liked consistency, liked order, and the lack of leaders and laws defied that. The three made up rules as they saw fit, changed them when they grew bored, and tricked people into breaking them for entertainment. Soon, the cells were full, and any further wrongdoers were exiled into the trees that had begun to house monsters. A girl broke Wesley’s neck and stole the crown – looking more iron than ivy by now – after her girlfriend was sent into the Forest, and then what remained of the first four occupants became two.

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