Truth blinked in confusion. He looked down at the dog. The dog wheezed heavily through his nose, but made no further explanation. He then opted to look inquisitively at his rough patron, who rolled his eyes and explained.
“One angel, but he has been recorded and classified under two names and with two natures by the humans on your rock. His rock. Whatever.”
The big man pointed back towards the shadow. “Looks like a duck, but it’s actually a dog. Looks like a protective spirit, one suitable to invoke before battle, but also has a thing for raping human women.”
“Does what now?!”
“Shadow on the rock, remember?”
“Ah. People think he’s that, but he’s not.” Truth nodded. It was a nice night, wherever they were. Hot, humid, but in that way that lends a soft feeling to the air. Every stir of wind felt like being brushed with velvet.
“He isn’t either of those things, exactly. Nor is he both those things… exactly.”
“He is, however, the origin of my planet’s suffering.”
“No, you guys are the origin of your suffering.” The rough patron shook his head. “He is trying to persuade you to stop fucking up. And limiting the means you have for fucking up. Think of it as a fever. The body is trying to do away with the disease. But again, that’s a pretty limited perspective on things.”
Truth nodded again. Slowly. “If I kill Starbrite, will he stop the apocalypse?”
“Almost certainly not.” The Rough Patron gave the dog a friendly pat. “Sariel is an angel. Looks like he decided the “right answer” is, if he must have humans on his planet, they will be his descendants. Which, since they are also my descendants, I don’t really object to either.”
“Wait, the human women-”
“Were pretty exclusively from my line, yeah.”
“You are a human?!” It was like finding out that a mountain used to be a drop of water.
“Ish.” The grin wasn’t anything nice to look at. “You can say that we were all still figuring out how to live as shadows at that point. Mom and Dad never really got there. Me and my siblings kinda-sorta did, some of us more than others, and our descendants were more or less human. It all shook out eventually.”
“But how does all that-”
Truth’s body was forcefully wrenched around, his face pushed next to the stone. New shadows appeared, a small apartment, first one child, then two, then three, then four. Details became clearer. The armchair, the bottles, the endless piles of trash and rotting filth. A big shadow swung it’s arm, one of the little shadows went flying into the corner and didn’t get up for a few seconds, a few minutes. And it didn’t stop. Over and over and over. He could smell it. He could hear every word.
“STOP!”
There were other details now, the water talismans becoming a source of fear as well as water. Soap, shoes, belts, bottles, the flat of a hand or the cut of a tongue. No peace anywhere. Nowhere to hide.
“I said STOP THIS!”
He tried to fight, tried to wrench his head away from what he was seeing. There was no peace here, no peace. He was right back in it, watching the shadows.
“Why do you care? They are only shadows.”
“That’s me! You know damn well that’s me and my sibs!”
“No it isn’t. It’s shadows. Your memories are shadows of shadows. What they are suffering now is a shadow’s dream of pain. None of it is real. It’s all a Hell of your own creation.”
He watched Mom drag Har towards the sink. Tried to look away. Tried to look away when Dad slapped Sophia and spat on her. When Vig lost one of his baby teeth when Mom punched him for asking when dinner was. Tried to look away when he killed his first rat and tried to cook it in the hot box and the sheer smell of it was enough to make him puke, and that was when he decided to steal food and he wasn’t even ten, wasn’t even ten, and this was his life. He lived every minute of this. It was etched into his bones and blinding his eyes and deafening his ears.
“How dare you. How dare you! It’s real! It’s all real because I lived it! Just because there is more beyond the stars doesn’t make this meaningless!”
“You didn’t have to live it. Didn’t have to suffer. You could always have just turned around. Seen the real.”
“Could I? Fucking could I have? Bullshit! Nobody just wakes up able to do that. Nobody just says “You know what? This isn’t real. I’m not really hungry. I’m not really cold. It’s all just an illusion!” The only people who might are crazy people, and not even all of them!”
There was no peace in his life. He had known that for a long time, but he was having his nose rubbed in it now. There was no peace in the slums. You were always in danger. Always scurrying from shadow to shadow. And he declared the whole world was a slum. That everyone scurried from shadow to shadow. Never feeling really safe. Never sure about that next meal.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Ah, that takes me back. Not to my own childhood, my parents literally could not dream of hitting us, or starving us. But from my generation on? That cycle of violence never stopped turning. Even my so-called ‘good’ brother. His kids were complete assholes. All of them.”
But now he was thinking he had seen through the slum, had seen the world beyond, or at least a glimpse of it. So why couldn’t he turn around? Why couldn’t he point other people to it? And did the ‘real’ make the ‘not-real’ not real? Was his life, his sufferings, his dreams, hobbies, loves, hates, all just a hallucination?
Was he a hallucination? Whose hallucination? Was there even someone looking at the shadows, or was he the shadows, dreaming of someone looking at him? Did anything mean anything? Or were the only things that meant anything the things beyond the shadow’s perception? Was meaning reserved for those who could turn around? He recoiled, wanting to shove away from the rock, to not see this, but he couldn’t look away. It was his life. It was his ‘real’.
“You know you can just turn around right? I’m not even holding you there.”
“Yes, you goddamn-”
“No. I’m not. I was before, but I haven’t for a minute now. You can just acknowledge the illusion and come see the real. That’s your privilege, for having at least looked up.”
Truth watched himself forcing the sibs to sit down in hidden corners and do their homework. Carefully judging when the parents were away to get them to read, try to keep their morale up with encouragement and tiny treats. Trying to show them he wasn’t quitting, so they couldn’t quit either. It was hard. It was so damn hard. Looking back on it, it was the hardest single thing he had done in his life.
“If I say it wasn’t real. If I say that none of it really mattered, or even really happened. Then I am saying that, somehow, the life that made me who I am didn’t really happen to me.”
“Did it? Does it?” He could hear the amusement in the ancient’s voice. “Wouldn’t it be better that way? It would hurt a lot less. And really, if you know that all this isn’t ‘real,’ aren’t you just torturing yourself?”
“What is ‘real’ then? Huh? It felt pretty real starving! Those beatings felt plenty real! Knowing that there is a greater world out there, that there are greater truths, that we don’t have to live this way, how does that make any of this less true? Less real?”
He watched himself hide under a dumpster, the unknowable chemical horrors that dripped from the collective trash heap and puddled under him burning his skin, staining it reds and purples for months. Kids ragged on him for it. Not to his face, because even then he wasn’t afraid to catch someone on the way home, but the looks and whispers were constant.
“Is that really the only option?”
Truth bit back his retort. This… unimaginably powerful alleged former human was doing this for a reason, and apparently he wasn’t mad at him. So it probably wasn’t a nefarious reason. He took a few deep breaths. The shadows were showing him running for some gangsters. He remembered this time- they were the kind that not only wouldn’t take no for an answer, they didn’t even ask the question.
Turn around. See the unreal for what it was. Except it wasn’t ‘unreal,’ was it? You could call it an illusion, all the invisible walls we build for ourselves and treat like they were holding us prisoner, but that lived experience was still as real as anything. And the ducks might be more real than the water they were swimming through, but didn’t they still float? The water was real enough to hold them up.
“We are seeing the shadows. We are the shadows. Our lives are the shaped by forces we cannot perceive, and because of that, our whole understanding of the world is built on shaky facts.” He started nodding to himself. “And because of that we decide what is and isn’t possible, what is and isn’t moral. Or fair. Or our fault. I’m guessing God is the fire in this metaphor?”
“For once, no. Wisdom.”
“Ah. Well. Nobody ever accused me of having too much of that.”
“For a clay doll, you’re doing fine.”
Truth smiled a little and ducked his head. The rough man ran his dirty fingers over the dog. The dog seemed quite happy about this, and rolled onto his side. More pets were, apparently, required.
“So What I think is real is the shadows on the wall, and what’s actually real is what I see when I turn around, but since I’m seeing my own shadow on the wall, the me that thinks it’s all real isn’t the real me either. The real me is the me watching my shadow. Which would be true for everyone, I’m guessing. So. You know. Awkward question incoming.”
“Oh?”
“Senior… what is a human?”
The big man looked up from the dog, and the world went quiet. The crickets stopped chirping in the grass. The wind stopped blowing. The fire stopped its crackling. He couldn’t even hear the beating of his own heart.
“That is a very dangerous question. In this place, at this time, it is really, truly dangerous. And you are immensely unprepared for the answer. Keep asking the question. Ask other people. Ask yourself. Keep furiously poking at the world and demanding an answer to why things are the way they are. You might be trying to sort through shadows, but you can teach yourself to turn around. To see through the walls. To be-”
The air started to vibrate. Truth could feel himself starting to vibrate, as though some terrible beast was roaring with fury and outrage.
“A lover of wisdom.”
It all went black.
Truth woke up, slumped against the street lamp. He let the strangeness of the moment wash over him. Didn’t try to make sense of anything, or try to sort the real from the fake. Just… let himself experience the world. Appreciating the shadows for what they were.
There really wasn’t any stopping the apocalypse. On some level, he had faintly hoped it could be stopped, or at least delayed. Wouldn’t that be the perfect storybook ending? The hero kills the bad guy and saves the world. Not this world. Not this hero. The clock would keep ticking, and in just a few moments, it would be last call for civilization.
Assuming it got that far. He never got any useful information about the plague engines or… any of that. His rough patron didn’t seem interested in any of it. Like it didn’t matter, because it wasn’t real. The shadows couldn’t even turn around and see the light, let alone the dog casting the shadow.
So what to do? He watched the worried people running around, trying to get through their days. Trying to keep on keeping on, in spite of everything. Truth thought back to the hospital, and being Bone-Bro. He had enjoyed it. It was a wild con, of course. He couldn’t keep doing it. But he had liked doing it. Being part of the problem.
Oh. OH!
He started laughing, rising up and laughing, wild and free. “Alright, alright, alright! I have all these multiple destinies! Let’s lean into it! Let’s play the fool! I don’t have to solve everything. I don’t have to solve anything! I’ll set my nets for the right sized fish and pet every damn dog I please.” He sniggered. He had to wait for the earth demon’s report, but then? He’d see the Internal Security colonel, then he’d just have a quick word with Niles. Time for Megashroom to grow.