Signs of the Shadow

Kiran no longer slept.

Not in the way mortals did.

When he closed his eyes, the darkness did not welcome him—it examined him. Judged him. Sometimes it whispered his name in a hundred variations. Sometimes it peeled back his memories, dissecting them with surgical cruelty. But most nights, it simply watched.

Tonight, something changed.

He woke not with a scream, but with a soundless gasp, drenched in sweat. The inn's room around him was quiet. Too quiet. No wind. No wood creaking. No Beast howls in the distance.

He turned.

And saw the shadow standing at the edge of the room.

Not moving.

Not breathing.

A shape darker than the darkness around it.

He blinked—and it was gone.

But the air remained heavy. Unnatural.

Something had looked at him while he slept. Something ancient and unfinished.

The mark on his chest burned.

Not like a wound.

Like a memory trying to surface.

He tore off his shirt and looked at it in the mirror: the glyph pulsed faintly, black veins spiderwebbing from its edges, twitching beneath the skin like larvae. He touched it—and for a second, the mirror refused to reflect him.

The glass rippled like water.

He stepped back.

The mirror did not.

Shadows had changed.

Everywhere he walked, they lingered a moment too long. Refused to align properly with their sources. He saw figures out of the corner of his eye—mimicking him, but not perfectly.

At one point, he passed an abandoned window and saw his reflection reach up and claw at the inside of the glass, silent and frantic, before being yanked into blackness.

This world no longer recognized him.

Or it had started to see what he really was.

The people in Veridian grew more afraid.

Some fled when he approached. Others made signs with their hands, old wards meant to repel cursed Beasts. Even the innkeeper—who had once shown him gruff indifference—now looked at him with pity and kept a silver blade beneath the bar.

Only Leon remained unchanged. He did not look at Kiran with fear.

He looked at him like a puzzle.

"You're becoming something," Leon said one night. "Not human. Not Beast. Not part of the thread."

Kiran said nothing.

"I should kill you," Leon said. "But I want to see what you become first."

That night, Kiran tried to sleep again.

He drank a sedative from the old apothecary who sold poison as medicine and incense that reeked of dried tongue.

The dreams came fast.

This time, he stood in a city made of bone. Towers of femurs. Streets paved with skulls. Beasts walked upside-down on the sky, drooling ink onto the buildings below.

And beneath him, under the surface of it all, he felt something huge breathing.

Not a creature.

Not a god.

A sentence.

The world's script.

Trying to reject him like a foreign body.

But he was too deep now.

He awoke to screams.

Real ones.

From outside the inn.

He rushed out—shirtless, barefoot, the glyph on his chest glowing dimly.

In the street, people circled a crumpled figure.

A young boy.

His Beast—what looked like a small moth-like creature—lay beside him, twitching, broken. The boy was sobbing, his eyes wide with horror.

"He touched it," the boy's mother whispered. "He touched the shadow."

Kiran felt the cold weight in the air.

The streetlamp's shadow beneath them did not move with the flame's flicker.

It moved with him.

As if drawn.

He turned—and saw himself again.

Across the street. In the alley.

The mirror-shadow.

It raised a hand.

And his hand moved with it.

They were syncing.

Kiran ran.

He didn't know where. Through alleys, across rooftops slick with frost, past gutters filled with fetid run-off and dead vermin. The world narrowed around him. The sky cracked like old glass.

He fell to his knees in a ruined courtyard, coughing black. His veins glowed faintly in the night.

The glyph on his chest pulsed like a heart.

And something deep beneath Veridian stirred in response.

That was when the shadows spoke.

Not in words. In feeling.

Hunger.

Not for flesh.

For presence.

Kiran dropped to all fours. His fingers lengthened briefly, cracked with bone. His teeth ached as they shifted. Something inside him wanted out.

He vomited black bile into the snow. It hissed. Burned through the ice. Steamed upward in the shape of a grinning face.

He screamed.

And then it was morning.

Kiran stood in the town square.

Naked. Cold. Covered in ash.

People ringed the edges of the plaza, silent. Distant. Terrified.

A priest from the local temple walked forward.

He held a mirror.

Kiran looked into it.

There was nothing there.

No reflection.

Just a pulsing black void.

And somewhere inside that void… he saw the flayed Leon again. Smiling.

Then the mirror shattered.

And all the shadows in Veridian turned to look at him.