—
I hate it here.
It's always cold in this room, always gloomy. Just enough light to cast my form against the ruined walls and broken windows. I want nothing more than to leave, but there's something wretched keeping me here.
I wish I knew what it was.
Sometimes I can almost name it, the dread clawing at my head when I step through the doorway, a thousand fragments of some calamity or other fluttering through my mind.
Maybe they buried its name with the rest of the people that used to walk these halls.
In the quiet hours, I can feel their restless shifting in the dust, the ebb and flow of them rippling behind my eyes. I whisper their names like a secret litany, words sharp and foreign on my tongue. I gather up the fragments of their lives like precious treasure and imagine a time long before the sky went dark and the halls were infested with things like me.
I am a shadow cast by their memory, sewn from the scraps they left behind.
Now they live in the gloom I weave into the floorboards and paint along the walls. A tired man with his child cradled in his arms, a sharp-eyed woman with her honor and her declarations of war, the remnants of a girl with long golden hair, who looked up at the stars and dreamt of far away places.
She died not far from where she was born, sucking in ash and cursing god through her tears. In my mind, I wrap my hands gently around her broken fingers, whisk us away from the mud and the ash and the burning clouds. I take her on all the grand adventures neither of us got to have.
When she looks at me, I can see in her eyes that she loves me, for I'm cut from the same fabric as the night sky in her dreams.
-
I wonder if the other shadows dream of the past too, or if they even know there was ever anything else. I wonder if that's what's wrong with me.
There's a lot of us haunting this building. They wander the halls, slip in and out of doorways and long cracks in the walls. I envy how they move around so freely. What makes them so special?
I've tried to follow once or twice, poked my head out in the hall just long enough to feel the icy fingers of dread creeping up my back, long enough to catch a nervous glance from the others before they skitter away into the darkness. They never have much to say.
I think they’re afraid of me. Or maybe it's what I've brought to our doorstep. There's things out there much worse than shadows, and only a fool or madman would call to them willingly.
I am no madman, so it stands to reason I must be a fool.
–
I used to count the days by his visits.
He belongs to the nameless things crawling through the gloom beyond the walls, a servant passing through to whatever grisly task they'd set him on.
They're making him into some kind of monster, but they haven't quite beaten the person out of him yet. I can tell from the marks that they're trying. I can see it in his slumped shoulders and hollowed-out eyes, how his claws are a little longer each time, his teeth a little sharper. They're emptying him out, piece by piece, and filling him back up with violence.
It's a little sad, really. He might have been a good man, once. Then again, no good man gives himself over to them willingly, takes the marks of their blessing upon his body. Sometimes I run my fingers along the silvery lines they etch into his skin and watch him shiver against my touch.
He could kill me with a thought.
I'm no lovesick fool, so perhaps I'm a madman after all.
–
I can tell he doesn't quite know if I'm a person, and it bothers him. I can see it in the way he hesitates in the doorway, eyes flickering to the side like he knows he's doing something wrong.
And he is.
They think of us as scenery, some kind of strange plant, or vermin. He isn't so sure, but he does what he wants all the same.
When he pulls his fingers through the dark tendrils of my body, I can tell he's thinking about someone long gone and far away. And when he runs his teeth down my neck, it's not my skin he's tasting. Some part of me thinks I should hate him for it, but I don't. It's a little sad, the both of us. A little pathetic.
When he's done, he wipes the tears from his eyes and sets his face into a kind of stony nonchalance.
I wonder when he'll finally kill me. I wonder what that means for something like me.
I think one day he'll just never come back, and maybe that's worse. I'm no lovesick fool, but the thought of being alone again is unbearable.
It's a little sad, really. Someday he'll be as hollow as the rest of them, just another nameless, faceless thing crawling through the gloom and perhaps the only one who'll mourn for him is a shadow.