The Shadows, They Grow Dark

The nights were so long and so dark, and how terribly alone I was. Yet, I was not alone. No one is ever truly alone. Trailed by our shadows all our lives, yet thinking nothing of them. How mistaken we were, to think it a simple thing, cast by the light of day and nothing more. I could feel them creeping in, drawing ever closer as the winds howled and whipped and clawed at the fragile panes. They were coming for me, those shadows in the night. The things that go bump and jump out and get you, how terribly real they were. I could see them moving out in the white snows, the moonlight giving them away in the tiny hours of the morning. Between flurries and branches they shifted, their eyes staring at me, hungry. They craved me, and I them, for they were death and I was life.

And it was the stars which grew brighter by the night, and the shadows which grew darker. As I slipped into the late night and the early mornings, the sun came later and the moon stayed longer. The ravens called to me and through the scope I saw the stars which circled my world and taunted me with their mystery. And I looked, and saw, the shadows staring back. The shapes and forms and beings in the night with eyes like stars piercing the veil of the night sky, seeking to pierce only me.

Demons in my mind, haunting me perhaps. The nightmares of my past and the emptiness of my soul filled me with the dread of the shadows. They hungered for me, and I for them, for they were death and I was life. It wasn’t enough, though, to hunger. They needed to feast, and I was ripe with sorrow, with pain, with the hurt enough to feed them all. The death of the only love I knew, the years of life without it and the loss so soon after finding it filled me with the kind of sadness that killed. The ghosts of my past ate at my mind, faces and names and places filling it with bloody memories. How had I ever thought I could handle such guilt, such sorrow? I had been a fool to seek the soul that now plagued me. I could not endure on like this forever, and I had no choice.

And so I went to meet them, into the snow and the wind and the freezing cold which to any other would bite and claw and ravage flesh to blackened death. Onto me it did none but grasp and grope, begging for me as the shadows did. Only they would feast, though, for I was ready to leave this world. Though it would not be so, no, it would not end tonight. This was only the beginning. The shadows had a soul, a life, a seed from which to grow within me. They took to me like moth to flame, and struck me through the heart with an arrow blacker than the night. Clawing, tearing, biting at flesh with shadowy teeth and talons. Like ravens to carrion, they took to my despair.

They wrapped around my soul so tightly that I felt for the first time the feeling of suffocation. Drowning in their depths, I sank further than I ever thought I could go. For what felt like centuries this went on, falling endlessly through the black mooned night, surrounded only by the pinholed stars and my daemons, my haunting friends. They cooed to me, soothed my aching lungs, filled them with their inky ichor. They drowned one who could not drown, clinging to my soul and fueling from it. Growing, manifesting.

And when I woke, laid out in the snows of the nameless peaks, I was not alone. It was there, it was with me. It had always been there, unseen, forgotten, ignored. No longer, though, would it be so. No longer would it be content to cling to walls and the floors. I rose, and so did it. I walked, and it strode as well. Manifest, it was there, beside me: my shadow. I turned a gaze to it, and it met mine in unison. White eyes piercing jet black, like the stars on a clear night. I looked into them and saw myself; my shadow was me. It was my mind, and my soul, for it had not stolen it, but instead reflected it. I was she, and she was me. I reached out for her, and she held to me, embraced me, comforted me. The pit in my chest, the pain in my heart, it eased itself to solace for just a moment. In that embrace, I was warm among the snows and winds. The blackness did not fade, it enveloped. I embraced death and the shadow embraced life, for we were one in the same, joined forever.

My shadow never leaves me. She lurks, yes, but she waits. She hides until she is needed, and I tell no one of her. They would think me tainted, they would try to kill her. She cannot be killed though, for those who cast light only cause the shadow to grow. She reaches where I cannot. She lends me her power, and I fuel hers. I give my life to her, and to me she gives the power of death.