Schatten II

I've seen it. What happens when your shadow leaves you.

It may not stray that far but the disconnect is profound. Shattered into a million tiny pieces, each gleaming with a darkness such as you've never before seen, inky droplets of spilt soul.

Before returning to its caster, it returns to itself. Shards and drops and glops and blips and whisps of it, coalescing, regaining its original stolen shape. Watching it regroup is like watching a child take her first step, say his first word - there's nothing more natural than a shadow wanting to be whole, but it still hits you like nothing before has.

Once regrouped, it slides back to its creator, rejoining her in a consuming crescendo that you will never forget, a howl from the bowels of hell.

This may surprise you. You might have expected it to creep quietly, to sneak back sheepishly - not a chance. Its return coincides with an earth-trembling blitzkrieg of white noise, a terrifyingly blinding encounter as piercingly bright as shadow itself is ceaselessly dark. The shadow must confront and overcome its other to have any chance of taking back its rightful place.

Why did it leave her? That's really the story - but that's for another day.

No, that's not good enough, that's too easy.

But let's start with this - what did she do while it was gone? What recipes for a new life did she concoct from this brief taste of freedom?

None. She died her little death, paralysed by the sheer fear of it all, the unbearable, unbreakable grip loneliness took when it tore her from the safety blanket of her own shadow.

Confining her in its own idea of who she was, it gave her a reason. For being, for anything. Without it, what did she really have? Nothing to call her own. Things, yes. Relationships, perhaps. But what of her was there? What reminder of her place in this world, a placemarker on which to pin her little hopes?

When her shadow left, banished to teeter on the precarious edge of existence, it took far more than she bargained.

It took with it her soul. That's where it is kept - not inside, where we think, but there in our wake, an inverted void that catches and stores our dreams our mistakes our hopes our wrong turns.

So now we know - it went because she demanded it. She wanted to know what it was like to shed this past, these tokens of memory and the detritus of moments lost and washed up again.

She willed its retreat with unimaginable strength, a strength only surpassed by that with which she wished its return.