Darkness once again found itself in a closed world. This time it wasn’t a cave, but a thin film of fabric that held it back from the outside, protection from the burning light. And yet that same protection was a cage, inescapable and oppressive. The only knowledge that he knew of the outside world was from listening to others talk, and the occasional flicker of light that burned him. To Darkness, it was a life of dread and danger.
But all of that was okay because it was with Boggy. A friend, its only friend, someone who it knew with absolute certainty would help him no matter the situation. As long as they were together, Darkness would surely live to see some color eventually. And so Darkness stayed in the cape, through pain and flame, through all of the trials and tribulations that they’d gone through to finally see color.
Karla had the colorful artifacts. But she refused to share them with Darkness for some reason. The idea had boggled its mind as she flew away, but the longer that it dwelled on Karla’s words, the more they made sense.
What had Darkness done on this journey? It had caused a fuss during the most important moment of its life, just as they were about to receive the magical items. Aside from that? Nothing but hide in a cape the entire time.
Darkness was a burden. The idea hit the being like a beam of light, burning his soul, if not its physical form. Not to mention, the only reason that they had even ventured outside of the Grove was because of its desire to see color. It wasn’t a stretch to say that everything was Darkness’ fault. In fact, that was the closest to the truth that one could get.
These thoughts swirled through Darkness’ mind, echoing the same words over and over, etching themselves into its conscience. Darkness wasn’t Boggy’s friend. It was just a piece of luggage, something that Boggy took upon himself to help. Darkness was nothing to him but bad luck.
“Darkness, are you okay?” Edie’s voice trembled, though Darkness didn’t know whether it was from panic or anger. In a way, wasn’t that its fault too? “None of the things that Karla said are true. We’ll make her give them back to you.”
Darkness’ voice was soft and defeated. “There’s no need. She’s right.”
A pause. “What do you mean?” Her words were paced and restrained, devoid of any emotion.
“I mean that I don’t deserve to be here. I’m just bringing you down. All of you.”
There was a small thwack on the outside of the cloaked bundle. Darkness guessed that Edie had hit it with her fin. “Don’t you dare say that. If you’re not here, then what are we going to do?”
“Whatever you want to. Just like you should have from the beginning. I’ll never be able to see color.” The words were simple to utter, but a devastating admission. For some reason, however, it felt like a weight had been lifted off of Darkness’ shoulders. It didn’t have to stay here with Boggy and bring him down anymore. There was a tremendous freedom in giving up.
Darkness braced itself, and then poked a little tendril of its essence outside of the cloak. Its essence did burn, but just barely. The light seemed to be a little bit cooler outside, shadows covering the place that the group was sitting.
Apparently Edie saw the tendril. It took her a second to realize what it meant. “No. No, no, no. You can’t do this.” The panic was clear in her voice. “Boggy needs you. You can’t just leave us here!”
“I have to.” That was all Darkness had to say on the matter. With a push, it opened the cloak and slithered out, into the open.
The pain came instantly, but Darkness was prepared for it. It was nothing compared to the dreadful burn that the sun had given it at the Market. In the air, a different orb floated in the sky, smaller and somewhat dimmer. Darkness supposed that it was the moon that he had heard of. Not that it was immediately important.
As fast as possible, Darkness dived into a small crack that lay between the corner of a building and the ground. The pain vanished as quickly as it had come on, and soon Darkness was bathed in soothing shade. Plain, boring, useless darkness.
The crack went deeper than Darkness had expected. First, he delved a couple of feet in, and then a couple more, and soon he found himself deeper into the earth than his cave had been.
The passage stopped narrowing and began to expand. It grew larger and larger, until it reached another tunnel. This one was clearly man-made, a long, perfect cylinder that extended into the horizon. There was a river of liquid floating along the bottom. Darkness couldn’t quite tell the difference between water and other substances, but given the chunkiness of this river, it was pretty sure that it wasn’t water.
Darkness was a little confused. It hadn’t been expecting to find anything down here, yet here it was, in the bowels of Intigo. A pleasant surprise at least. There was something to explore, something to keep its mind off of the more dreary things that had happened.
With a heavy heart, Darkness began to float through the tunnels, making no effort to mark which way that it had come, or how it would come back. In a way, this was the final step in separating from Boggy. There was no going back.
Time seemed to lose its meaning as Darkness wandered throughout the tunnels. A minute could have been an hour, a day could have been a second. It was strangely nostalgic, the same kind of time-altered sensation that it used to have before it met Boggy. When it did nothing but sit at the bottom of a cave for its entire life.
Was that Darkness’s life from now on? To be nothing but a specter in an uninhabited cave? At least in the Grove, there had been witches who had known of its existence. Here, nobody would come looking. Not the humans, not Boggy, not if they knew what was good for them.
A part of Darkness missed the adventure that it had had. It had been an adventure of proxy, not one that it had been directly part of, but one that it had been near, at least. It had heard the stories of what just happened from Edie, listened to the oddities of the humans.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
There were no stories to be heard down here. Nothing to see, nothing to hear. Nothing to do. The thought that Darkness would never again hear its friends’ voices again was too painful. With a little effort, it turned its mind off, and began to wander throughout the tunnels once more.
Time passed. And then more, and probably more. It became a blur, nothing but a blend of walls and turns. All of them black. Occasionally Darkness sketched something on the wall, nothing particularly good. There were some interestingly shaped lumps that floated down the river, but it wasn’t that bored. Yet.
But then Darkness felt something. An incredibly familiar burning sensation. This was the feeling of… light?
It came from behind. Shifting its awareness, Darkness noticed that there was a speck of light in the distance. It floated in the air, a tiny ember, barely a speck in the surrounding murk. It was there, however, and that was enough to pique Darkness’ curiosity.
Darkness drifted a little bit closer to the light, ignoring the pain. It was nothing compared to what the outside had to offer. Interestingly, the light seemed to be connected to a human’s hand. Not directly; it floated right above the human’s hand, as though fueled by some kind of essence from the palm.
The human itself was rather boring. As far as Darkness could tell, it was a man, and about as bog-standard as they get. About average height, wearing darkish robes, no interesting facial features. The only fascinating part was how he got the flame to float.
Mildly intrigued by this mystery, Darkness continued to follow the human. It was better entertainment than looking at weird lumps, anyways. The man walked down the tunnel at a relatively fast pace, as though he was trying to escape from something. His robes were drenched down to hips, as though he’d been wading through the river.
The human continued to walk, and walk, and walk. He walked so long that it even grew boring to Darkness, a being that did nothing for a large portion of its life. But, almost suddenly, he ran into another human. The new human, a woman, was standing in front of a large wooden door, tapping her foot impatiently.
Now, this was a surprise. What were humans doing down here? It definitely wasn’t the sort of place that Darkness expected to see them. From what it knew about the creatures, they preferred well-lit places. Places that they could see color.
Darkness put its depression aside and focused on what they were saying. To its surprise, it could understand more than it had expected. It had a good ear for language, as it just so happened, and it could figure out the words that it didn’t know from context.
The first human spoke in a hushed whisper. Darkness thought the secrecy was rather dramatic, considering they were in a tunnel hundreds of feet underground. Then again, it was listening in on them, so it wasn’t completely unreasonable.
“Have you seen the Master today? He seems to be in a very bad mood.” The man gestured to his robes.
The woman nodded with a sympathetic expression. “He pushed you in again? That makes the third time this week.”
“Yes, it does.” The man spoke through gritted teeth. “And he hasn’t given us a lesson in weeks. Months, even!” The charade of confidentiality was dropped as the man began to complain loudly. “How does he expect us to do anything against the Empire if we barely even know how to use magic?”
“Well, there’s not much we can do without him. Besides, this job is too easy to complain about. All you have to do is pump a little bit of mana into that invention of his.”
“A little bit!?” The man’s eyes bulged out of his skull. “You don’t know how much life that thing sucks out of you. Just touching it for a minute drains you of all energy for a day. And the Master still yells at us for being too weak!”
Any sympathy that the woman had had clearly evaporated by now. “Oh no, you have to touch an orb for a minute a day. What a difficult task. How do you survive under such a heavy workload?”
The man frowned. “You know, sarcasm is the lowest form of comedy.”
“Nothing I say will ever be as funny as the joke that is your existence.” That was enough to shut the man up, besides a couple of grumbles beneath his breath. “Anyways, let’s be quiet. Our guard shift’s started.”
“I don’t know why the Master forces us to do this. Nobody ever comes down here.”
“If you’re going to be complaining this entire shift, I’ll push you into the sewage again.”
“But it’s a valid complaint!” The man argued. “The Empire is never going to think to check down here. Even if they do, it’s not like they’re going to get into the room with the orb in--” His statement was interrupted by a loud splash and a desperate gurgle.
Darkness ignored the bickering that followed, instead shifting its awareness more towards the door. It was in the same greyscale that it saw everything in, but this one was just a little bit different. Unsure of what that was, Darkness inspected it a little closer.
It was a nice door. That was all the insight that its inspection provided, given that it had never been much of a door connoisseur. But the door had a feeling of power behind it. Darkness, more than a little curious about what that meant, looked for a way of getting around it.
It found a crack in the side. Small, almost a splinter, but a vulnerability that it could exploit. Slowly, very slowly, it started sending its essence through the door, until it had its entire body on the other side.
The room inside would have been considered ordinary and plain had it not been for the large spherical object that sat in the middle. Darkness stared at it with awe. It was so tall that the top touched the ceiling, and it took up a large amount of space. Script scrolled across the surface quickly, giving the appearance of a hive of bees swarming in a strange formation.
But all of that was secondary information to Darkness. After all, this strange gigantic orb was a magical artifact.
And it was also the first time that Darkness saw the color blue.
###
Boggy’s eyes opened, but he didn’t feel awake. Everything in front of him felt like a dream, and his body felt surprisingly heavy. It sank to the ground, resisting movement. Every bone in his body told him to stay on the ground, to rest for a little bit longer.
Then he remembered what had happened, and he jumped to his feet. Darkness had been burned! He had to make sure that his friend was alright; that was more important than any kind of soreness or tiredness that Boggy felt.
“Boggy!” Edie cried out. “I’m so sorry… I didn’t want it to… but…” Her voice cracked with desperation, and her words were unintelligible between sobs.
Surprised, Boggy turned around, almost falling back down. “What? What happened?”
There was no answer. He swiveled his head around, searching for the cloak-turned-into-bag that Darkness was in.
He found the cloak on the ground, burst into smaller pieces, as though it were torn apart. For a couple of seconds, he just stared at it, trying to process what it meant. Clearly his brain wasn’t working well, though, since none of the ideas that he was getting were ones that he wanted to consider.
With a devastated look, he asked Edie, “What did I miss?”