1 Chapter 1: The Genesis of Shadows

It was a warm Friday night and I could feel the last hints of winter leaving the spring air. Summer was coming eventually but I had to focus on right now, and right now everything sucked. Being an eighth grader with a little sister is no easy task. I had more homework than I could deal with and getting picked on by the average school bullies never helped and I swore those teachers were out to get me and, to top it all off, taking care of my sister Wendy until our parents came back at the end of the summer. Though, this week in particular was actually decent.

I stood on the balcony of my apartment and took in the night air, listened to the leaves rustling in the wind and looked at the stars, one of which looked particularly bright that night. I left out a breath and went inside to check on Wendy who was sleeping in her pink bed with a teddy bear cuddled under her arm.

Can't believe she still has that thing, I thought to myself as I slowly closed the door behind me.

I went to the kitchen to find a midnight snack I’d hidden from Wendy. It was a chocolate bar Samantha had given me earlier in the week so I was really psyched to eat it now, but just as my luck would have it, my little sister already attacked it. I didn’t get to regret it too much though, because a bright flash of light passed through the windows and almost blinded me. There was a strong impact and the entire building was shaking violently. I ran to Wendy’s room to check if she was alright and there she was, still sound asleep like nothing had happened.

Daniel, my best friend and next door neighbour, had the opposite reaction. He came to my door, fully dressed and panting like he’d just ran a marathon.

“Yo Will,” He pointed towards the source of the light and the shaking. “We gotta check that out!”

I was dumbfounded. There were sirens and red and blue lights breaking the silence of the night and the heat from whatever it was peppered the air.

“There was absolutely, positively, definitely, precisely no way I was going near that thing.” I almost slammed the door.

“Samantha would be impressed if you told her you touched a meteorite,” Danny smiled cheekily at me.

I thought about it for a second. I bounced the risks and the rewards in my head and came to the conclusion that, at the very least, it couldn’t be boring. Plus I’d get to tell Samantha about how cool it was being the first one to touch a real meteorite.

“Whatever,” I turned around to grab my clothes. “Gimme a sec and I’ll be right there.”

“Sweet!” Danny responded, almost popping with excitement.

I grabbed my jeans and a t-shirt and a cap that had “96” on it and set off with Danny to investigate the scene.

The meteorite had landed in the park next to our apartment complex so we were really lucky to be alive. Danny was almost running and I was already really skeptical of this whole ordeal but we were already this far. I looked back at the apartment and I thought I could see faces in the windows, scared faces. I was beginning to rethink this.

“Danny I don’t know about-”

“Look! Will!” He interrupted me. “I can see it! And it’s glowing!”

He grabbed my arm and took off with me to get closer to the meteorite. I almost tripped on the mound of dirt caused by the impact of the huge rock. Daniel’s jaw dropped and he seemed to just float towards the meteorite. I followed behind him and when we got close enough he started reaching out toward it. I followed his action and it hit me that we were doing something really, really stupid. The sirens were almost behind us and what were we going to tell the police when they showed up? I didn’t even have time to think about that because my hand was already touching the meteorite and my mind was going blank and when Daniel touched it we were blasted away by some force.

We laid in the dirt and stared at the night sky. I could feel my consciousness slipping away but with the remaining energy I had left, I lifted my hand toward the meteorite. My hand glowed with… darkness? It spread through my body until it disappeared while the same thing was happening with Danny but rather than darkness his body vibrated like ripples in a pond. The last thing I heard was the sirens getting closer and then stopping before I blacked out.

It was dark and cold and… wet? I looked around myself and saw nothing except a few rays of light surfacing the bottom of an endless, shallow sea. The only thing I heard was the liquid splashing under my feet as I walked aimlessly through the expanse. Was this a dream? Or, more accurately, a nightmare? If so, then why was it so vivid? What were those rays of light? and, more importantly, where the heck was I?

A calm, disembodied yet clearly feminine voice spoke to me from the darkness, “This is the beginning, Shade, where it all starts: The Genesis of Shadows.”

I wanted to call out to whoever that voice belonged to, but I didn’t have a voice in this place. It started to feel like I was suffocating, but I calmed myself by taking long, deep breaths and kept looking around.

The air was still and there was no scent of anything except the sweat trickling down the sides of my face. My mind thought back to what happened and I remembered Danny, but the minute I began to think about him, there he was in front of me. But this wasn’t Danny, no, this was Danny’s form made out of something intangible, invisible without the rays of light in the background, it was… a shadow? It seemed as if anything I thought about would be created using the darkness surrounding me.

I needed to get out of there. I could only think about how long I’d been under there creating things and staring into puddles of light. I couldn’t see any way out of this “Genesis of Shadows”

“Shade,” The voice called to me again. “The Genesis of Shadows is where all shadows are birthed.”

My eyebrow raised subconsciously as she continued.

“This place has not seen very many real... humans,” She seemed to be lost in thought. “In fact, there has only been one other human in this realm, so tell me, how did you end up here?”

I gulped. Even though her voice was so unbelievably calm it still carried the weight of authority you’d get from a school principal or someone even more important. Suddenly, my mind recalled my contact with the meteorite.

“Oh ho ho?” She sounded surprised. “My my, well this is wonderful.”

I could see her taking a shadow form similar to Danny’s earlier. Her only noticeable features were long hair, her height and the way she seemed to float instead of walk.

“Simply. Wonderful.” She bent over to meet my eyes. “Oh Shade, it seems you have acquired a bit of my abilities.”

She floated around me and I tried to keep up with her but it was making me dizzy.

“Well this will be very interesting, very interesting indeed,” She smiled.

At this point the only thing I wanted to do was leave this seemingly cursed shadowy place. In response to my thoughts, the lady smiled and disappeared, leaving only her voice to speak to me again.

“If you wish to leave this place,” She said. “You must submerge yourself in a pool of light.”