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The fairy lights of the Glimwood Tangle always beckon them. A soft bioluminescence in the swallowing dark to brighten the velvety tops of overgrown mushrooms.[break][break]
The colors—pops of fuschia and cornflower and verdant green, are much more enticing than the dusty streets of Stow-on-Side. It’s the whimsy that pulls Fern there, all of eleven and knobby-kneed. Stick-limbed and messy hair. Scraped skin and eyes wide.[break][break]
The Glimwood Tangle whispers to them, low and inviting.[break][break]
And so he goes to play.[break][break]
The phantasms in the gloom and grass of winding tree knots and draping moss are not nearly so frightening. Not in the way the other kids their age claim. But then again, Fern has never fit in with them.[break][break]
Not really.[break][break]
He is loud and opinionated, and just a little too strange. They call his blithe, blue-eyed stare weird, and his stories stupid. He is, in their watered down, childish terms, a freak.[break][break]
He is a precocious child, and so he claims the word they should use is actually whimsical, thank you very much.[break][break]
Before he found the tangle, it bothered him more. Now he goes to get lost, because the spectral presence will always nudge him back in the right direction.[break][break]
This all feels familiar. Secondhand. But the draw of the glimwood tangle becomes foggy and dreamlike. Pink-tinged and dazey the further he goes.[break][break]
There is a certain respect and reverence in the silence. Their own chattery mouth goes quiet most days, though sometimes they speak to the corporal shapes of transparent gastly and patient misdreavus.[break][break]
But it is better to be quiet, though, because then they will help Fern find things. Trinkets mostly, or gifts from the forest. They follow that lead. Their dreepy bundled in the safety of their arms.[break][break]
And this is how he finds another lost boy.[break][break]
A boy from the other side of the tangle.[break][break]
Soon their laughter fills up the quiet of the glimwood tangle. Startling the litwicks and the phantumps who peer out of their hiding places—curious at the sound of childish glee.[break][break]
And somehow, this too, is reverent.[break][break]
This is a wealth of the heart.[break][break]
They simply do not know this. Not yet.[break][break]
The boy from Ballonlea has violet eyes and a mop of cinder dark hark and a more naturally quiet disposition unlike his own. But his cheeks don rosy shades with little more than a word from Fern, and he is endlessly entertaining, Fern decides.[break][break]
The same sort of unspoken lonely, too. For people do not ghost Pokémon make.[break][break]
Michail Volkov from Ballonlea.[break][break]
Their knees are drawn toward their chest, and azure eyes peer at him from just above the fold of their arms.[break][break]
They are rich and they are full, just in this. To find someone else here in their haven, because it is his haven too. He understands in a way even Fern’s da does not quite. He only pretends with an amused shake of his head.[break][break]
But in the low cast off glow of neon hue, they feel seen in a way that feels older than eleven. They can’t say what makes the trickle of words filter into their mind, or where it comes from. How these aching words are somehow older than themself:[break][break]
“—Do you ever wonder what it would be like if our lives were like this every day?”[break][break]
They don’t have to wonder, because it is so.[break][break]
“Shall we indulge in a daydream, then? Just for a little while?”[break][break]
They don’t have to ask, because it is real.[break][break]
In a hazy, glowbug dim world built between them, that is only theirs—[break][break]
always, from the very start…[break][break]
they call him Mischa.

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MILKY