Don't Follow the Shadows

I followed the shadows again. I followed where they beckoned me, so I wouldn’t be alone, so I wouldn’t be afraid. I’m tired of being alone.
But I made a mistake. I knew the instant I left that I couldn’t go back. The shadows wouldn’t let me leave.
Now I’m here. The dead end. Where you can’t die. Where you can’t bleed.
The rain falls backwards here, from the ground to the sky. The spiders unweave webs of unknown origins. The water flows backwards, south to north. You can scream as loud as you can, but it only makes the silence deeper, more deafening.
I found this place when I was little, when my cat died. I found her on the side of the road, run over, bleeding from every place possible. I was young then. I didn’t understand. I still don’t understand a lot of things. But the shadows called to me, only me, and I went with them, went to where everything was unlike my world, where the sun is dark and the moon is light, where demons walk in daylight and burn at nighttime.
I wanted to be part of something. Something that only I knew about. I knew I was the only one, because everyone else was shadow – their clothes were shadows, their skin was shadows. The only thing that was… real about them was their eyes. It was like you could see what they were, before they came here, in their eyes. That should have warned me away. Should have told me that as magical as this place seemed to a stupid little kid, that it wasn’t magic. It wasn’t special. But I listened to the shadows.
I watched them dance.
I listened, I followed their call.
I wanted to be wanted, to be welcomed.
I followed the shadows.

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Sometimes I wonder how human children can be so stupid. They were once scared of shadows, weren’t they? Afraid of monsters sneaking into their bedrooms at night, hiding in the corners, waiting to snatch them from their beds…
That’s what we are.
We are the monsters in a different guise, a kinder guise, offering lonely children a place with friends. But what they don’t know is that once they leave, they are tied to this place forever. They will forget their mother, their father. They will forget their lives on the place called Earth.
I was once human. I once had a mother, a father. I once had sanity. But this place took it, took it all away, made me forget. Now I’m nothing, just another shadow, another forgotten soul, someone who stalks the children like a kidnapper, waiting for the moment when they stray too far, then—they’re gone. Forever.
They brought in another child. He’s not so far gone yet that he’s forgetting everything, but he’ll be like everyone else soon. A wraith. Forgotten.
He came here so he wouldn’t be alone, but in the end, we are alone.
We’re always alone.

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I’m beginning to forget. I tried to go home, but I couldn’t find the way out.
I tried to ask the shadows, but they only laughed, brought me back into their games, into their dance.
Do I want to leave?
What good was the life I had out… there? Here I’m happy.
… Am I happy?
Yes. I am. I have friends. They tell me they want me, they need me. I’ve never heard that in my life outside of this place.
The leaves today were silver and gold and diamond. It was beautiful. The water was mercury, but the shadows could dance on it, walk on it, without sinking, without getting hurt.
Because there is no hurt here.
There is no death. Nothing dies.
I won’t die. I’ll stay young. I won’t grow old. That’s what they tell me. That I can stay this age forever, because… nothing dies. Not even the trees. They change, but they don’t die. They… disappear.
Is that the same thing?
It sounds less painful.
I won’t grow old. I won’t… ever… grow… old.

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The sanity is disappearing. You can see it in his eyes.
That’s how it always starts out. In the eyes. Like puzzle pieces, sanity disappears, bit by bit, until so much is gone, so many parts are missing, that the puzzle can never be completed again, and everything falls a part.
The sanity goes first. Then the memories.
He is starting to forget though. He asked me about the gateway—where it was, even if he was standing right in front of it. Its almost a shame he will turn into one of us… he’s such a pretty boy. But those eyes he’ll keep. I’ll remember those eyes. Even if he doesn’t remember, they do.
Children are so terrible at reading, are so blinded by the… ‘magic’ of this place. They should see that these shadows are not happy. That they won’t be either.
There is no death here because there is no life. We do not live. We exist. There is a difference… a world of difference between those two things. This child needs to live.
But it’s too late for him.
I wish I could save him.
Save one child.
But it’s too late.

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I breached Heaven and Hell today. I didn’t mean to.
I had wondered off by myself, away from the shadows… I thought I found the doorway out, to the… to the other place, to where I came from, but it wasn’t, it was a different door. This place is in between them, Heaven and Hell.
Heaven was all light, feathers and beauty… but the people had no faces. I wasn’t blinded by light – they had everything but faces. Heaven was a place where people are taught not to dream, where all the needs and wants are wrapped together into one selfish pile until they suffocate under it, until they die over and over again.
Hell is different. Its not the cliché world everyone thought it would be – its not all heat and fire and redness. Its not greenery, that’s for sure… its stone. Mountains of stone; of onyx and jade and amber and… and a thousand other stones. Where envy and lust and wrath come together, a burning, twisting web of lies and deceit and pleasure and pain and they drown in the fires they create, they drown, I’ve seen them, their screams, they scream…
The rivers. Heaven and Hell were rivers, glittering and sharp like glass, that cut me, broke through my dark, writhing insanity… but then a shadow took me out, and I forgot.

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He broke through the wall. I don’t know how he did it, but he broke through. He saw what every human wants to see – Heaven and Hell, what every human was taught to love and to fear. How could he of broken through?
I followed him. I saw. I remembered, for a brief second time, when the rivers touched me. He bled red – I bled black. Is that what shadows bleed; black? Is that what beats from our hearts? Do we have hearts?
The others are angry. He cannot feel their anger, but I can. I know.
And I know what will happen to us both.
We will disappear.
He thinks it will be painless, but it won’t.
It won’t.

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The human child and the wraith who followed him through the wall have both disappeared.
Their screams were heard through our world for hours.
That’s what happens when you meddle in what you aren’t supposed to meddle in.
That’s what happens when children follow the shadows.