tried to change the ending, peter losing wendy.
[ steve harrington x original character ]
[ book three in the folklore trilogy ]
[ stranger things four ]
STATUS: COMPLETED
[ STARTED: february 25th, 2023 ]
[ FINISHED: june 17th, 2023 ]
cover by @-swr...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
prologue: nightmares & nosebleeds
╚══════✮❁•°♛°•❁✮══════╝
THE NIGHTMARES HAD gotten worse.
For the past three years, Serenity Alexander had experienced a lot of things that had caused her usual sunshine to dim into darkness. Here, she'll give you a quick summary.
First, Will Byers, one of the kids she had babysat for years, had gone missing out of the blue. Then, she had gone with Steve Harrington to apologize to Jonathan Byers, only for an actual monster called the Demogorgon to drop from the ceiling. It was then revealed that Will was taken by that monster to a parallel dimension called the Upside Down. For about a year, all of them lived without another hiccup, until a miniature version of a Demogorgon, nicknamed by Dustin Henderson as a Demo-Dog, had come back, along with a new monster called the Mind Flayer that inhabited Will to use under his control. Serenity had fought against the Demo-Dogs (she had the scars on her legs to prove it) and burned the Upside Down tunnels, along with Steve Harrington, Mike Wheeler, Max Mayfield, Lucas Sinclair, and Dustin, while Eleven, a girl with supernatural powers, closed the Gate to the Upside Down. And then when it was believed to be over, the summer came, and along with it brought a resurgence of the Mind Flayer, but this time, it was made of flesh and guts from melted people. The Mind Flayer had been defeated yet again, but it came with a sacrifice of Jim Hopper, and the Byers family plus Eleven moving all the way to California.
So, basically things that no normal person would have to deal with. But Hawkins wasn't a normal town, as Serenity would come to learn. For some reason, the Upside Down had a fascination for the small town, and it just wouldn't leave it alone.
It was natural for Serenity to get nightmares abut these things. Who could blame her? She had seen actual monsters that she had to fight against. They had started with the Demogorgon, and she had started to get better until the Mind Flayer and Demo-Dogs. Then they got worse again, but summer came, and she was okay. And then summer came, and everything went to shit again. It had been months since then, and around winter, things started to get a little bit better.
But now, for some reason, they had gotten extremely bad.
They took her through a journey of all the different monsters she had encountered, like a horror movie.
Fade into view. She stood in the Byers household, surrounded by blinking Christmas lights and the smell of gasoline. Serenity watched as the ceiling crumbled away, only for the Demogorgon to fall out. Her legs burned as she ran, jumping over a bear trap on the way, to a back bedroom. She had left with Steve, only to run back and see the Demogorgon's face open like a flower to reveal sharp teeth.
