DefiantAllomancer

I wrote yet another short story. I've been working on this one for a while, trying to work out the different details. Thank you so much for the positive feedback in my previous stories! Have a good day, and make sure to watch out for your shadows. You never know when they'll turn on you!  

The Shadow

            Have you ever wondered what would happen if your shadow turned against you? Your shadow reflects your motions, imitates them, yes? Or is it the other way around? And if your shadow did turn against you, how would you defend yourself against something that controls you?

            Dirch was a young boy, eight years old, and he loved ice cream and cake more than anything else. His buttons often popped off because of his round stomach, so his mother, a rather skinny and gaunt woman who always appeared to be starving, replaced all his buttoned coats with zippers, and threw away all his button-down shirts. But the zippers broke too, and the grown-up coats that might have fit him around his stomach were so long they dragged on the floor.

            At first, when his memories started disappearing, he assumed he had just fallen asleep, so there was nothing to remember, but as blank spaces in time where memories should have existed appeared more and more often, his parents became worried and brought him to doctors. Nothing fixed it, and the doctors couldn't find anything wrong with him other than that he ate too much.

            His mother worried and worried, for he was her little child, and her only child. She feared she would never have another, for she had become a widow barely months after the boy was born. and she was afraid that he would lose all his memories and go mad. She kept him within her sight as often as possible, and when he went to school, she put a special watch on him so she could see how he was throughout the day.

            But one day, he didn't come home from school, and so she found the place where his watch said he was, but all she found was the watch itself, crushed and scratched. She called the police, and they looked for him, but he was nowhere t9 be found for the first week. Then, the mother, lying ill in bed, heard a scratching sound outside her window. On the windowsill, her son crouched, eyes like a wild animal's, skinnier than even her, and dragging jagged nails down the glass, with his teeth bared and dripping with frothy saliva.

            She screamed and scrambled further away from the window, to stand in the doorway, illness forgotten. Her rabid son opened the window, slowly, very slowly, and slipped his claw like fingers underneath it. He began to climb into the room, but the mother was paralyzed with fear.

            Then, as he fully entered the room, and the sunlight on his face disappeared, he froze, and gasped, then stumbled and put a hand on the wall to steady himself.

            "Mother." He said, hoarsely. "What's happened to me?" The mother took a step forward, toward him. She couldn't help herself. But he looked afraid, and he stepped back, away, his face coming into the sunlight again, and casting a shadow on the wall. His head jerked to the side, then jerked again, and rolled to look at her, and his eyes widened. Dirch hissed, and reached for the window. She took another step toward him, and he jumped out of the window.

            The mother cried out, and looked, but he had landed nimbly on the ground. Scampering away on all fours, he looked like some kind of humanoid beast, and the mother was frightened of her own son. But she had to help him somehow. Grabbing her phone from the bedside table, she wrapped her blanket around her and dashed down the stairs to chase him. As she ran, she dialed the police again.

            Dirch ran as fast as the wind, his muscles burning. He wanted food, and he wanted to rest. From the moment the sun rose, to the moment it set, he was running from place to place, stealing valuables, and murdering innocent people. He couldn't move a muscle. They moved on their own, of their own accord, and no matter how he struggled, his limbs still jerked away from him. Soon he came to the front of a store, and his reflection in the glass of the windows leered back at him. His lips moved, and his reflection's did the same, and he spoke, but they were not his words.

            "Dirch," hissed the voice that was his, but not his. "You've been very obedient, my young apprentice. One day, you'll be like me. A shadow, or a reflection. Merely something to replicate. But can you, like I have been teaching you, take control of what you're replicating? Why be controlled when you can control? Tell me, would you like to be freed to go be a shadow?" His head jerked to the side, to look at his shadow. "Let him speak."

            The pressure in Dirch's throat disappeared, and he panted, finally able to breathe properly again. "I... I don't know." The pressure reappeared. "Remember, that is the only way you'll be freed from your own shadow; to become another's."

            The pressure lifted. "I'll become a shadow." "Choose," said the reflection. "Choose and take." At that moment, Dirch's mother rounded the corner, limping, but quick all the same. "Dirch!" She bellowed, throwing herself at him. For a second, he looked at her with empty eyes. Hunger growled in his stomach, and exhaustion pounded his body, but he didn't notice, as he looked down at his mother, frozen mid leap. "I have chosen."

            The world around him shrunk, then swelled, and bended. He looked up, at his mother's shocked and pained face as she lay on the ground, arms outstretched. Slowly, she pushed herself to her feet and stumbled to the wall of the store, looking around. As she turned to look at the store, he saw the reflection of his physical body, still there, even though he was tpgine, now his mother's shadow. It grinned at him, and he seized the power in the back of his mind, a mental image of his mother. With a last look at his fading reflection, and the shadow of a non existing person on the ground, he turned his mother, and together, they dashed away.

The End.