Kara
Grim’s woods often felt like a prison. The castle was the bars I lived behind. My family were the enforcers. Alone in my room, I could almost ignore the chaos surrounding the Reapers. No matter how long I sat on the same white loveseat, the human world was dying. No matter how many times my room was rebuilt after a dragon attack… No matter how unchanged it looked… The outside world was shifting, and so were the Reapers.
The era of Reapers might be ending, and I had never lived beyond Grim’s woods.
Movement caught the corner of my eye. I turned toward the floor lamp on the right, then to the left, where the light faded into darkness. Darkness meant night, right? When the sun left the human world, night came, and people called it dark. There was nothing terrifying about the night. Not unless you met something that wanted to make you… its prey.
Yeah, the dark meant something different for me. My darkness was an entity of its own, and I called it Shadow—because that was all it was. And it never came out unless I was alone. The family thought I was crazy as a child when I talked about it, so I learned to stop talking. Shadow preferred that, too.
From the darkened corner, the blackness suddenly stretched out. I bit into my Slim Jim as a gangly, smoky arm morphed from the shadows, then another, until a scrawny figure slipped free. The tall shape stalked closer until it stood before me.
I didn’t have the heart to smile that day. Usually, I teased the thing, but every time I left my room I saw my father, and how his body had started to fade in places. My stomach cramped, and I shook my head as if that could erase the image of his sunken eyes.
An icy feeling hit my arm as Shadow tapped it. When I shrugged away from its touch, it moved to my nightstand, where I kept a pen and notebook for it to use. A minute later, Shadow tossed the notebook in my lap.
On the page, it wrote:
“You don’t acknowledge me?”
I snorted. While it might be a skinny male figure with no features, it was tall and imposing.
“This is my room. You’re a puff of smoke. How about you greet me instead of standing there like a thundercloud?”
Shadow’s form rippled like a black ocean wave standing upright. For a few seconds, its figure became erratic—no longer resembling anything human. That was when I’d triggered some kind of emotion, probably anger. Shadow snatched the notebook from my lap, then tossed it back a minute later.
It wrote:
“When was the last time you ate anything besides Slim Jims?”
I thought about his question and realized it might have been more than a day. Although gluttony was my curse, the sin didn’t care what I consumed—as long as it was something every couple of minutes.
“Yesterday, I think,” I admitted.
Inside the notebook, it wrote:
“Go eat.”
I scrunched my nose. “I don’t feel like going out there right now.”
Shadow rippled again before it wrote:
“Nothing will change, no matter how much you stay in this room. You might as well embrace what’s coming. You won’t be able to hide forever.”
Shadow sure knew how to strike a nerve when it wanted to. That was the problem. The thing knew me after sticking by my side for years. Not forever, though. It abandoned me for many decades, and I never let it forget.
I scoffed and turned my head away. “What am I hiding from?”
I dreaded reading the notebook again when it landed in my lap. Hesitantly, I glanced at the paper.
“Your father’s fate…. And yours.”
The sinking feeling in my stomach worsened. I stood, and the notebook slid to the floor. “You have so little faith in my family.”
Shadow flowed in front of the door, blocking my way.
I arched a brow. “You said I should eat. Well, move.”
Shadow pressed his hand to my throat. I felt a slight pressure, then the cold sweep of his touch drift over my face before movingaside. Goosebumps pebbled my skin, but my stomach heated. I hated when it touched me in certain ways, reminding me why I stopped calling it a male and started referring to it as a thing instead. All I could think about was the short period it spoke to me so long ago… and how quickly I was abandoned after those few days.
