Shadow

Shadow has been a drake grown for longer than he had been a hatchling. Stories were simply stories, about heroes of old embellished by bardic tradition. Simple tales of calamity repelled by a hero and his Goddess-blessed patroness. But with every shadow that crept too close to comfort, for every village that pleaded for help against emboldened monsters, for every new path closed off to impenetrable darkness…

It was enough to make people believe in those faerie tales. Whispers wondering if The Hero would rise again, if the Goddess-born would seal away the darkness. If wishful thinking worked, Shadow’s sister would return to him. If a hero emerged from the darkness, brought light to the land, then so be it. Until then, he’d simply contend with the hand fate dealt. It was far simpler than the thin razor of hope.

He wandered because nothing truly felt like home. What remained of civilization was far between and far gone to paranoia. Lone newcomers were suspicious, and should one spy Ghastlight that suspicion turned to witch hunt. Shade, some called him. Shade-Touched, Corrupted, Herald of Twilight.

There was no reasoning with them. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy: the drake with the Twilight Beast arrives; the shadows gather in his wake.

The easy way out was to get rid of Ghastlight. But he wasn’t the type to find the easy way out, to pray to god and believe in heroes. Calling people like that his neighbors eclipsed the loneliness and foreboding of being in shade-drenched wilds. He and Ghastlight tied their fate long ago, he wasn’t going to give up a piece of himself that easily.

Most Twilight Wasps were deep black, with veins of emerald green. Small cogs blurred the line between animal and automaton, but they functioned much like joints. Ghastlight was a lighter grey-blue, almost the same hue as Shadow’s fur, some of her gears gleaming a coppery tone. They looked alike, acted as separate parts of selves. Ghastlight could fetch, help grip and twist things he had difficulty with. She could look and scout, be his eyes in dream-sight. They worked in tandem, weaker if apart.

The changes to him were slow, ponderous things. With the world’s borders slowly hazing, his definition of normal had slipped so far that any difference seemed mundane. After facing and dodging corporeal, hulking behemoths of shade and hunger, listening to the whispers of the incorporeal did not startle him. When he noticed that his veins began to bulge, tinted green where fur parted, would Shadow admit there was a connection.

Ghastlight was his evidence that the creatures of Twilight did not exist to kill. That there was something churning far deeper, far more complex than he could even begin to fathom. The ghosts that pooled at his claws, gently grasped at his fur with the morning mist, each and every one had a chant that reverberated in his bones.

Lightbringer, Lightbringer. A name that they called with rattling, cloying breath. Counterparts to those who hid in churches, prayed for heroes of eld. Shades that moaned and pleaded in the wake of their corporeal kin, that turned their sallow eyes to him when their words fell on deaf ears.

It was overwhelming, frustrating. Two opposite sides that alighted at the same point. Why grasp at heroes, at bringers of light? Why would Twilight’s dead spill that name from their tongues? The more he rejected, the more they grasped at him, the more followed him to the ends of the earth. They were his wake, a funerary march, pilgrims following their prophet, awaiting awakening.

- Written by Helix