One minute, he wasn’t; the next, he was.
There was naught in between.
It was nothing. Then everything.
Pitch black turned to blue sky, green grass, sweet flowers, birds chirping, rustling leaves, warm winds, the croaking of frogs and crickets...a complete sensory overload that left the small, blonde boy gasping for air as fat tears rolled down his cheeks.
After a while (the calm after the storm), he observed that even though he had come from nothingness, he could still identify his surroundings. He became used to them - figuring out what would snap and what would crunch, what he could sleep on and what he couldn’t. It became vaguely routine - wander, wander, wander, nap under a tree on top of a pile of leaves, wander...
There was something strange about the woods, though. He was most definitely alone, but he felt as though someone was there with him. Not in the sense that they were standing close to him, or watching him from a distance, but more as though they were completely surrounding him. Holding him, maybe? It was a familiar warmth that he couldn’t identify but frequently pondered.
When the warmth started to grow, though, he felt on edge. He started second guessing his movements, looking behind him as he trudged through the brush and overgrowth, checking under bushes, and in the branches of trees - a scared little boy, in the woods, by himself, looking for something he didn’t understand.
Well, he wasn’t quite sure what it was. A man, it looked like. A man with especially pale hair.
The boy stopped in his tracks and stared at the back of the man, squinting in thought before deciding it best he observe from somewhere not so obvious. He ducked behind the closest tree, but immediately panicked when he heard a scuffling and an unfamiliar voice call ‘who is there?’
Hiding would do him no good, he eventually concluded. The man probably wasn’t dangerous - hopefully he wouldn’t be as offensive as the unidentified red berries he had tried to eat a few hours earlier. But he needed to be discreet.
Carefully and quietly, he edged his way through the brush, doing his best not to make any kind of rustling noise or to step on any of the snappy twigs or the crunchy leaves underneath his feet. He made his way to the clearing, picking up a stick for good measure (he had learned that he could hit things with them and they wouldn’t break if they were the right thickness), and stood directly behind the man with the very light hair.
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