Shadow Puppets

Halrack the light-user commanded me to put out my torch.

He set up what he called his ‘projector’ behind us and stood in the center of the beam spotlight that it threw on the bricks.

“Even shadows can be puppets.” He said, and spread his fingers towards the wall.

The shadows that his hands threw twisted and grew under his furious concentration. Jared could see that the light-user’s strength was pouring into making the shadows do his bidding.

Jared had seen the light-user throw bolts of lightning and hard beams of light that cut stone but he had never seen the other side. He had only heard legends about light-users strong enough to control the absence of light, to control darkness.

“The thing,” Said the light-user in between gasps, always teaching, “..about shadows is….they always need to be….told...that they'll be safe.”

He panted with the effort of the forms he was trying to create.

“If you don’t, they stay….that way….forever.” he said. I could see that his sweat was starting to darken his tunic.

On the wall in front of us, his shadow bent and split into the shadows of two soldiers. They looked like the enemies that were on the other side of the wall. They had the crested helmet outlines and shoulder tufts of the Imperial armour. They had the military short swords that had caused the death of so many of our friends and families.

“Your torch….the flames…were throwing too many shadows to be controlled. They need to be pinned down and molded. But….” he was quiet as his breathing became less controlled and his eyes widened.

“I used the projector…to create hard shadows. They are easily defined and can be controlled more…now…efficiently.” He was worried. I could tell. Something was going wrong.

His sweat was starting to look like ink and it was no longer dripping off of him. It was floating around him in little round drops.

The shadows on the wall were perfectly formed. The spell seemed to be over. I was getting worried. I stepped towards him.

“NO!” shouted the light-user at Jared. “Stay where you are! One more second!” he said and with a spin, he snapped his hands into fists while at the same time spinning to cover the light box of the projector.

There was a click as he turned it off.

His inky sweat droplets fell to the ground like tiny raindrops and speckled the cobblestones.

“Light your torch.” He said. He sounded exhausted.

Jared lit his torch. Amongst the flickering shades on the wall thrown by his torch were two shadows unaffected by his flames. They stood with ease in mid-converstation.

“Okay. Now we wait.” Said the light user.

Halrack said that if two guards came walking along the other side of that wall, the shadows would nip between the cracks and attach themselves silently to their feet. The shadows would then hear and see what the guards heard.

Halrack would be able to tap into that and hear and see what the shadows saw.

“The thing about shadows,” he said “is keeping them in their place. Once they realize that they’re independent, they want to be free. They need to be frozen and enchanted to do the bidding of the light-user and that’s the hard part. The promises that have to be made. The lies you have to tell them. They want so badly to be free.”

I was worried that the shadows could hear us.

"No, no." smiled Halrack sadly. "They're beyond us now. They can't hear us until they attach to a person."

We looked at the shadows for a while until the scheduled patrol walked past on the other side of the wall. Without a sound, the shadows slipped through the cracks to do their mission.

I asked the light-user if the shadows we had seen etched onto the rocks on the way here were failed shadow spells from previous light-users.

“Sadly, no.” said Hadrack. “They are from a different time. They were people once.”

He stood and stretched.

“Well, let’s go. My shadows report that there’s nothing happening on the ramparts at the moment. Let’s head back to the inn and get some sleep.”

He led the way. I walked behind him.

For the first time, I noticed that his shadow didn’t quite always follow his movements.


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Cities

There was strength in this shifting net of architecture called a city.

Drifting through the steam vents and chimneys, the city could feel the tires on her intersections. She’d itch where humans had carved their names.

New buildings were slow to wake. It was a process. People needed to die in the buildings, transferring some of their life-force to the structure they had been inhabiting. The longer a person lived in a building, the greater the transfer of energy was upon his or her death.

Old buildings had old people that had lived there for decades. Their deaths powered the soul engines of the old buildings.

The problem with prosperous cities is that their downtown cores, their hearts, only had young people with money move in for a few months or years before moving away. Out to the suburbs or back to the small towns that they came from.

Humans didn’t realize that cities were the dominant life form on the planet, not people. The very first city had tricked a few monkeys into building a collection of leaf huts. In a different place, more caves had been carved into rock faces to house the growing tribe. Somewhere else, little houses made of rocks and sticks kept the rain off of these creatures.

They were infected with the idea of ‘shelter’. In truth, it was the cities that had shown them the way. Acting as benevolent ideas to prolong the health and safety of the tribe, they infested the brains of primitives with load bearing supports, arches, buttresses, bricks, and pillars.

Now, cities ruled the world. The resources of the planet were being sucked into the cities. Soon, the entire rock of iron would be one big self-sustaining city. Eventually, it would become too toxic for the humans and they would die.

Right on schedule, just as planned. Automation at that point would render them useless.

The City would rule supreme, calling out to the others in the galaxy around her and sending the message that She was ready to join the collective.



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