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She didn’t know where her spear had fallen, nor how long ago. For a time, all she had was darkness, and the awful feeling of claws tearing her skin. They’d ripped and shredded at her for so long, she wasn’t sure she still had a body any longer, but she was still there, somehow, somewhat. She could feel the tightness in her chest, the knot in her throat. She could hear their voices.
How did they all know to say the same thing? Like a hive mind, their raspy, cold shrills sounded again and again, a metronome, in time and in sync. Uncanny and prying their way into her mind - a conquest of thoughts she hadn’t thought and feelings she hadn’t felt. They told her what she was, where she was, and she, like a lunatic even among beasts, needed to see it for herself.
She let out a cry. A banshee, screaming into eternal darkness, eyes snapped open towards a black sky. Her throat gurgled with black ichor, pouring out of the corners of her mouth and down her… nothing. The steady drips of tar simply dropped to the cracked cobblestones as she urged what remained of her body to cooperate.
The remnants of a leg stepped forward, heavy, uncoordinated, and she watched her flesh decay, pulled off her bone as though by ravenous rats. What remained was a fraying mass of nothing, and when she forced her hand to her chest, she only felt the cold touch of death, like poking her fingers through rotten wood. She only saw out of her left eye, and even then, there was nothing to see. Darkness. Despair. Loneliness. There were others like her, voices, creatures, vices, laments.
The Shadow Curse turned everyone into mindless beasts, which she’d thought were driven by pure rage. She had been wrong.
All she could feel was sorrow.
Guilt.
Pain.
She should have stopped it. But what could she have done? What was she doing? Where had she been…? Who had she been…?
She clawed at her own head, trying to drown out the voices of the others, curling in on herself as though she could escape the shadows when she was the shadow. All she heard was mourning. Names she did not recognise, people she had not met. Perhaps she would have wept for them, had she been able.
“I have you now.”
She echoed in her mind, endless, everywhere.
“Useless, pathetic cleric. Bringing light to my realm.”
She did not just hear her, but felt her. Anger seeped through the air around her, encircling her, flowing through her, for she was the Shadow Curse now. Tethered to its darkness, a vessel for its sickness.
“My plaything. Abandoned by your vapid goddess. Recite to me her litany. Amuse me.”
Isobel grit her teeth, now a series of blackened canines dripping venomous disease. She growled, slashing the air to rid herself of the awful voice, but it was omnipresent, plaguing her. Worse of all, she did not even know what she meant. What litany…?
“Your memory of your goddess is as fleeting as was her spawn! If you must know, before you forget, her divine blood spilt like any other’s. She was nothing special.”
Isobel ran, slinking away into the shadows instinctively, leaving what remained of some inn she'd never seen before for the comfort of the trees, whose thick trunks and branches cast even more darkness on the barren ground. She tumbled from place to place, spluttering black pus and tearing her arm further as she squeezed between shrubs to escape. It was fruitless. She could only go where the shadows reached.
Blood.
But whose?
Goddess.
Spawn.
Who?!
Isobel felt the voices of the other shadows encroaching in her mind, their words perfectly aligned. She almost repeated them, lamenting the memories of people none of them could picture. A cruel joke from the goddess of loss.
Blood.
Whose blood? Why won’t the thought leave her?
Her one good eye scanned her surroundings. So dark. So desolate.
She grieved. Grieved for something - someone - she did not know. Felt the heavy absence in her chest, in her heart, but could not fill it with even one happy memory. All she had was grim, grey sorrow, where she was certain something else had once existed. The voices mocked her for it.
But the wretched goddess of loss had thrown her a bone that she did not yet realise. She had turned her into a villainous, inhumane beast, then had the gall to mention it so casually.
Divine blood.
She would find it. Stalk it like the monster she’d made her, and all it would take was a way out - a body. Something not bound to the shadows. So she waited, made herself small in the brambles of a berry bush, tearing more black ichor out of her decaying mass, but it did not matter, since it would all be gone regardless.
Her victim was a flailing mass of real flesh, of real breaths, of a heart that beat fast as it scrambled out of the Shadow Curse. But not without her.
She lunged like an animal, clawing into its living back, ripping open its bleeding skin so she may wear it, and, for a brief second, her senses returned enough to say Harper, but she did not understand what that meant. She did not know what a harper was. She only wore its living body, poking her head into its cranium and slithering through its pulsing veins, displacing whatever poor host it once had.
Thick ooze poured out of the flesh suit’s mouth and ears, and she felt the weight of what she’d done, the guilt she would never undo. Had she taken a life? It was all too hazy, her perception too clouded, even with the overwhelming remorse. And when she stepped out of the Shadow Curse, she’d forgotten it again, her mind a chamber of echoes, in a voice she no longer recognised as her own.
Where is her blood? Perhaps I would remember her then…
Her vessel was ill-fitted, or perhaps she was the one destroying it. The necrosis she carried spread into its flesh, loosening its clothing and dropping its equipment. She walked, but she could tell she was limping, and it would not be long before a passerby would strike her new form dead. Sunlight blared overhead, and she could not afford to lose her borrowed body.
The day was blinding, and she could only see in shadows, following the small, thin cracks of a road at her feet. The voices of the Shadow Fell were long behind her, but the torment had not ceased. She muttered to herself, if only to keep her mind on task, because every moment it felt like another piece of her was lost. Or was everything already lost?
Something large approached, big enough to leave a penumbra under its mass. Wheels. The clicking of hooves.
What was it?
Victims to share your sorrow with.
No. She groaned, muffled, and choking on the rot in the back of her victim’s throat. The horrid undeath that coiled around her soul screamed at her to take another with her, as if the darkness could always do with more bodies. But that would not help her plan.
She felt a living mass approach. Two of them, walking cautiously in her range. She could lunge now, claw at their eyes so they could understand how freeing darkness is… Or she could make her getaway. The latter was harder to set in motion.
The vessel would not carry her any further, and, just as the living creatures had struck it in fear, she slinked down, writhing out of its flesh and disappearing into the shadow of the horse and cart. The dead body she shed fell on the cobblestones, the Harper’s soul finally freed, and the living creatures were none the wiser. She would live in their shadow until nightfall.
Waiting. Prowling in their movements, using them for her benefit.
There was a time she would have felt sick at what she’d done, at what she’d become.
When was that time?
Nightfall meant she was free. To a degree.
She had no way of telling where she was, where the travellers’ shadows had taken her, but she crawled in the comfort of the dark, unseen and unheard. Her thoughts were becoming more scattered, and she was convinced the voices were back (how?! She was miles from the Shadow Fell! They must have followed her… tracked her… or perhaps they were part of her all along), so she covered her ears as though that would help. Or what should have been her ears. Her form was a contorted mess of forgotten proportions.
They laughed at her. Mocked her. They were convinced she would not keep up her farce and would succumb to their grief afterall, that she would drag the living with her as they’d intended. But had she not already done that once?
Succumb to grief. She scoffed. She was already suffocating under it, but unlike them, she saw her way out. A way to remember.
The living walked around her, unaware. They were cautious around shadows, treading hesitantly where the darkness was too thick - and perhaps too inviting. Did they feel the temptation too? Or should she drag them with her so they could see?
She grit her aching teeth, like shards of curse jutting out of her gums. Slinking further into the shadows, undulating around a never-sleeping city, she stalked her true prey. She could not envision what she was looking for, but, as instinct came so plainly and strongly in this form, she would know when she had it.
She was hunting someone in particular. The sorrow in her decayed heart did not just lament, but also screamed for revenge. She felt their footsteps, like it was someone she once knew. It was no use trying to remember.
They hid in the shadows, thinking themselves unseen, untraceable. Did it not know she was the shadows?
When her body yearned to pounce, she did not resist. She emerged from the darkness with an agonising shriek, latching onto her victim. Her one good eye snapped open, wide and desperate, catching the semblance of a countenance, for they, too, were shrouded in shadow. They bore a mask, at which she clawed, her screams spluttering black plague atop it.
The victim thrashed, pushed back against her, but her physical form was merely a silhouette of rot, and their arms pierced through her. They held the vial of divine blood she hunted, their nefarious plans gone to Hell, and they dropped it in the struggle. The glass shattered, and silver poured over the stone floor.
Silver.
That should have meant something.
Her victim - not just any, for they were strong, and understood the shadows enough to hurl Isobel back into them - made a desperate grab towards their spear. Even the tip of it was stained silver.
She’d wielded a spear, too, once. It hadn’t helped her.
The weapon cut the air towards her, but she did not even need parry. She coiled around it, slithering up the wooden shaft. A snake, grotesque and venomous, she reared her head and drove her fangs into their arm. Blood oozed into her mouth, and she reached an arm out of her form to grasp their throat. Her one, glowing eye wanted desperately to see behind the mask.
A justiciar’s mask.
That’s what it was.
What did that mean? Where had she learnt that term?
The justiciar screamed, necrosis taking root in their shoulder. Then, they lifted their free hand, and radiant light blinded Isobel, enough to slink back into the shadows, her body aflame. She darted around them and, though the justiciar had summoned a vortex of radiant energy to orbit their sorry frame, Isobel did not wish to drag a needless fight on.
She lunged, uncaring if her body burned and disintegrated as she passed through the radiance, claws grasping and digging into the justiciar’s jaw from behind. She brought them down with her, crashing onto the ground, smearing the puddle of silver as they tumbled.
Silver.
That should have meant something.
But all it did was burn.
Isobel shrieked, her undead form searing more from the discarded silver than from the justiciar’s spells. It writhed up her formless figure, framing her forearm in the shape of the veins she once had. Her voice, completely unrecognisable, drew out into a long cry. She was once alive. She was once Isobel.
The pain quietened the cacophony of voices in her mind, and she pushed through it enough to look down. The justiciar’s mask had slid off, rolled somewhere on the stone floor, and the face that glared up at her was one she’d known, once. A deep scar across her nose, the troubled look in her eyes…A terrier came to mind.
Maybe the silver blood had seeped into her skin too, for her expression seized, and her brows raised, as if she recognised her just as well. They had met, once, though it felt like in another life. A memory that they should not have had back.
Isobel, in all her pain and torture, could kill her, right now. Necrosis and disease oozed out of her poisoned teeth and she could clamp them down on her carotid before she had the chance to mutter another spell. She would deserve it too, for bringing her all this sorrow, and for dooming many more to a similar fate. But none of that would bring back Aylin.
Aylin.
Aylin!
That had been her name… It was a beautiful name, and it brought joy to think of it. She’d met her in the first week of spring, down by the brook… she’d healed her broken wing. Her feathers were indescribably soft, gleaming with the faint light of the moon. In her eyes, she’d seen her future.
But her future was now this. A horrid abomination, clawing at another living being.
What would Aylin think?
She recoiled at once, letting go of the justiciar. This was Shadowheart’s chance to kill her, but even she just scrambled backwards, eyes wide. They stared at each other in shock, for what seemed like aeons, the unspoken laying thick in the air and drowning them. Familiarity. Rage. Sadness. The crushing disappointment of how could you?
Shadowheart's hand was shaking as she grabbed her spear and, with one last look back at whatever remained of Isobel, she fled, leaving her all alone. Alone again.
Alone with nothing but spilt silver blood. Aylin’s blood. All that remained of her.
She wept, finally. Wept for all she’d lost, and all that would never be. Promises left hanging, goodbyes never said. Even wept for what she’d done, for the absolution that would never come for her, not in this form, not with these sins.
She tread through the shadows, leaning crooked against the pillar of the temple she found herself outside of. Her undoing would be daybreak, when the light of dawn would burn what remained of her, and she would be put to rest, for good. What awaited a wretched being like her beyond death, who could know? But she would at least die with her name on her mind. Aylin.
She looked down at the vague form of her hand. It was still stained silver, somehow. She followed the undulating streams of it, taking note of the way it gleamed in the light one last time.
Light.
But she should not see light.
Looking up, in the pitch dark night sky, there was a thin, silver crescent, barely past a new moon. A hazy, clouded bit of light that she could somehow see. Strange. Stranger still was that she spoke to it.
“When I die, then you shall judge me as you see fit,” she croaked, her voice raspy and cackling in the back of her throat.
But the moon did not respond, as motionless as ever. It shone down on her, as always, reflected in the tears welling in her eye.
She was a shadow, nothing more. Why could she still see it?