The Hidden

        My name was Kalla Barron, I was 15 years old, I had an older brother and a younger sister, and I was 4 inches tall. That may seem abnormal, but for people like me it was completely typical. I was a hidden. The hidden was a race exact to human in every way, well every way except for our size.

        Some might think of us like borrowers, those fictional beings from that book, but we were far from it. In fact borrowers were kind of a joke to the hidden. If I remember correctly, the borrowers lived in human houses in the walls or under the floorboards. In the book the borrowers took small objects and such from the humans when they weren't looking. The borrowers would survive off of what they could slip away from the humans.

         Well despite the jokes we made, the hidden used to do exactly what the borrowers did. They lived in houses and survived off of the humans' scraps. But after a while more and more of our kind began to die due to humans and it became too dangerous. So two generations before mine, the hidden decided to become even more hidden and left the human houses, at least my clan did.

        My mother's parents and my father's parents along with some other families fled from the human homes and into one of the few place uninhabitated by humans: the forest.

        Despite our scoffing, we weren't too different from borrowers other than the living situation. Hidden 'borrowed' things too, except we didn't need to sneak around. We used what nature offered us. Our clothes were made from leaves and petals, we often drank out of acorns and ate off of small slabs of bark. We lived in small little huts, constructed out of tree bark, leaves and whatever else we could find. Our diets consisted mostly of wild berries and other wild plants. But sometimes in the winter if our stores ran dry we'd have to eat one of the emergency dead bugs we kept in case of a food shortage. Everyone hated eating bugs, they tasted horrible and had an even more horrible texture, but they kept us from going hungry.

        I had only ever met someone from another clan once, but I knew there were plenty out there. Each clan differs from another, but I was pretty sure none of them were dumb enough to live in a human's house those days. My clan was  one of the biggest I had ever heard about, made out of four different families.

        There was the Clearlys, the Hillens, the Blanches and my family, the Barrons.

        My parents, Mr. and Mrs. Clearly, Mr. and Mrs. Hillen and Mr. and Mrs.  Blanche all moved into this part of the forest 24 years ago, away from their former clan. So I guess I was lying when I said I had only ever met one person from another clan. Technically my parents' old clan counts as a different clan, but they're almost just like us and we see them every so often. That clan consisted mostly of the extended family of either my family or another family in our clan's extended family, they lived about a day's walk away.

        My grandmother on my mother's side more than anyone stressed to me the dangers of humans. Whenever she would visit when I was younger she would tell me the most gruesome stories about humans and would they could do and have done to people like us. She seemed to hate humans more than anyone else, I used to ask her why when I was little, but all she would say was that humans were bad.

        All my life it had been drilled into me, a hatred and fear of all humankind. I had never in my life seen a human in person, the most I had ever seen was an old faded clipping from a human newspaper  my grandfather had taken . In the picture the grinning man looked harmless, dressed up in a long black coat with a big top hat atop his head. But what the picture didn't show was the man's size. He would be a giant compared to me. I was used to things being bigger than me, especially being surrounded by huge trees, but trees couldn't move. Trees couldn't step on you or grab you. Yes,  humans were bad, no matter how harmless they appeared in photographs.

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Kalla's clan:

The Clearlys-

Oliver Clearly (52)

Mora Clearly (48)

Cecile Clearly (23)

Eve Clearly (20)

Tess Clearly (17)

Thalia Clearly (17)

Aven Clearly (16)

The Hillens-

Bracken Hillen (37)

Julianne Hillen (38)

Flint Hillen (17)

Quinn Hillen (15)

North Hillen (13)

Iris Hillen (10)

The Blanches-

Felix Blanche (35)

Aspen Blanche (33)

Faye Blanche (13)

Dalia Blanche (8)

Miles Blanche (5)

The Barrons-

Stephen Barron (45)

Helena Barron (45)

Ash Barron (18)

Kalla Barron (15)

Cassia Barron (12)