Thoughts from the Darkness. Star's Musings.

[Katebush]

((Entirely OOC of course, Star can write quite well, in three languages, but she'd never keep a journal or write this stuff down ))

There were three kinds of shadow. Star knew this to be true in the same way she knew the right angle to fire an arrow to arc into a target a hundred metres away. There was no thought involved in it, it was training and instinct and built into her wiring.

There were three kinds of shadow. Kind of like Llach’s three gates. Well, nothing like Llach’s three gates, except that there were three of them. Star needed to do something special for Lilin. A proper thank you. But that would take some thinking about since there wasn’t much Lilin needed as long as Cike was close by.

If you asked anyone else about it they’d have told you, probably, that there were two types, maybe even one type if they were less wide thinking. The first type was easy, the first one everyone thought of, the shadows light made. The sun rises and everyone sees them. Sometimes strong, sometimes weak. Mostly these shadows were finite, bounded, created by the brightest light available. In sunlight, one shadow, short and black near noon, long and grey near dusk and dawn. In the torch and firelight of camp many shadows, one for each fire, darker for larger fires. She’d watched them all of course.

For her entire life her survival and lack of pain had relied on shadows of two types. The easiest and the hardest. From the age of three she had been used, abused so she was told now, by her father. He played cards and drank with Gaje. She moved around the houses he played in collecting the shinies, never being seen. Enough shinies and he would spare her a beating, a whipping. Of course that was the promise. She never collected enough. She was older now, perhaps a little wiser. She knew now that the drinking that went with the card games made Da’s perception of how many shinies was enough get bigger and bigger. Or maybe just made him like beating her more. She didn’t know then and she didn’t know now.

The Third kind of Shadow was the kind that had fascinated her recently. She didn’t know if she’d ever understand them. The place they came from or how they did what they did. She’d seen goblin shaman summon man shaped ones with little power, but it was the Dragon that filled her thoughts. A dragon linked to her somehow. Since it bit her she had heard it’s voice in her head on occasion. Promising her death, no escape from it. She knew it wanted her to be scared, and when it came she was. But when it’s terror was not affecting her directly she was instead drawn to watch. Something so big able to hide in the blink of an eye even from her sharp eyes. To prevent pain you hid better than the people looking for you. The people who owned the shinies, be they gems or blades made to kill you. The mercenary had found out just how good she had become. But that was using the Second type. Linah had told her that to learn of the Third type, to understand it properly was Pain, and would change her. Star wasn’t sure she understood, but she was certainly not afraid. Not yet anyway.

Everyone understood the First type. Mages and Bards and book readers and adventurers all knew about the Third type. The creatures of the Shadow Plane. Her own shadow was itching again. She’d tried scratching it once, but felt very foolish as she just got soil under her nails. It had itched since the dragon bite. Not always, just now and then. She didn’t know what started it off, or even what stopped it. She had tried moving into darkness and that soothed it most. The itching itself niggled more because she couldn’t scratch it than a normal itch of the same strength she could scratch would.

It was the Second type of Shadow she had been working to perfect the use of. The one most people couldn’t explain unless you told them what you meant first. Then they’d smile and nod and say how they knew about it but that they’d never thought of it that way before. Of course, if they’d truly known about it, properly, then they’d be able to hide as well as she did. The First Type, the shadows Light makes, the Third Type, the Shadows the shadow plane is made of. The Second Type, the shadows eyes make, the shadows the mind makes. Someone had once told her she could hide in the shadow of her own thumb if she wanted. They were wrong. To hide from someone in the shadow of your own thumb you’d need to be very clever and quite a long way from them. At it’s simplest the second type was a Wall. You hidden on one side, their eyes on the other. So obvious you never thought of it. Well. Star did, but then hiding and shadows, and making things out of wood, and Llach and sometimes Linus and… nevermind. Star thought about lots of things, but –mostly- about hiding and shadows. Anyone could hide in the Shadow a wall made with the Eyes. Imagine the eyes as Torches, everywhere they look they cast Light, and beyond what the light strikes there is Shadow. That was where Star dwelt. But there was an even more complex layer to it than that. The shadows of the Eyes were also part of the Shadows of the mind. Imagine, instead of the eyes, the Expectation of the Mind. It casts a light outwards of what a person knows to be true, suspects to be true, hopes to be true and believes to be true. Where this light strikes objects and ideas and other people Shadows are cast. Shadows of believability and unbelievability. It was there also that Star dwelt. A man looking across a field of knee high grass drifing in the wind knows there is nothing bigger than a mouse moving out there. Believes he would see it if there were. Hopes nothing bigger is there. His mind makes of what he sees a Truth that is not true, and a shadow is cast. A shadow Star moves through, low in the grass, the winds movement causing no more and no less a stir than she does. That’s important. The complicated types of Second Shadow were easily broken, it was all too easy to have the mind stop fooling itself. An area of too still grass was as bad as an area that moved too much.

She moved closer, First and Second shadows meaning the man would never know she’d been there. Of course, that was what she wanted. If they can’t find you they can’t hurt you. But then Llach didn’t, he made her happy. And her new families didn’t. Mother, and new Da, and the Wolves and the Sisters and the Union and the Druids. But hiding became a habit when you spent six years alone in the deep forest. People feared the spiders. But then most of them didn’t know what lived deeper. The spiders, they were nothing. So was the man. He didn’t know it yet but he was already dead. Unless she got close enough. The goblin assassin was an amateur. But good enough at the First and Second shadows to get to the man unless she got to the goblin first. Code of the Wolves, protect the traveller who travels in harmony with nature.
So she did.