From then-on, Mother never let him leave her side. They were together for every moment of every hour. She sealed the laboratory. He could hardly remember seeing his mother cry, but now she cried often as she held him close. He knew something terrible had happened, but she never told him what.

Her magelights followed them everywhere. Even in bed. Even at night. When they had cuddled together to sleep for the first night, he said, “I can’t sleep. It’s too bright.”

“I know it is bright,” she said. “But we must sleep. Just close your eyes.”

Corvo frowned and did as he was told, but it didn’t work. White shone even through his eyelids. So he pulled the covers up over his head.

“No!” Mother shouted. She pulled the covers down again. “Do not cover your head! Keep the blanket against you, like I have. See? Corvo. You must do as I say.”

He felt horrible for making such a mistake, and even worse for not knowing what the mistake was. He wrapped his arms around her waist and closed his eyes instead.

Luckily, after long enough, he still could sleep. But Mother could not. She was always awake, and bags formed beneath her eyes. She became slow and imprecise.

On the second day, she brought Corvo back up to the library. She made him sit directly in the sunlight, and she placed three magic lights around him while he did. Then she gave him his wooden toy and instructed him to play.

Meanwhile, she retrieved the book with the strange symbol on its cover. She placed it on the desk and opened it with a gesture of her hand. She was careful to never touch it. She pulled other books from the walls and left them open on their spines throughout the library, on the desk and on the floor, and she retrieved several more from the luggage she had brought with them from Verarszag.

Every ten seconds she looked to make sure Corvo was still there. He always was.

As night fell on the second day after Corvo had read from the book, Mother looked to him with tired eyes. She brought him with her into the laboratory. It was bright there and felt safe. A glass vial held a bluish substance atop a table. But she paid it no mind, and instead grabbed a sword leaned against the wall.

It was almost as tall as he was and sealed within a silver sheath. The quillons were simple, but the pommel was carved in the shape of a crow’s head, its beak in line with the front edge. For all his life, Mother had brought that sword with them, wherever they went.

He knew it was his father’s sword. Sometimes she let him hold it, but she never took it from its sheath.

Now she did. She ushered Corvo back to the library and drew it in a single fluid motion, metal scraping against metal.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

“There is something I must see,” she said softly. “Do not be afraid. Stand very still.”

The three bright lights had followed him everywhere for days. Now, suddenly, they went out.

He and Mother were left in total darkness.

She held the sword out in her arm and tossed the scabbard to the ground.

“You will not harm my son,” she said. “Your master made a terrible mistake sparing your life. I will not do the same. Come out!”

She walked around Corvo in circles. It was a very dark night, cloudy and moonless, but Mother seemed to see clearly anyway. Her footsteps rotated around him.

“If you think you suffered before, you do not know the beginning of pain. Your loneliness was just the beginning. I will burn every part of you from this tower. You will not survive this ordeal. Come out!”

Corvo wrapped his arms around himself and waited for something to happen. He waited to see the Shadow Man again.

Mother stopped.

“Come out!” she screamed.

But the Shadow Man never came.

Mother snapped her fingers. A small fire lit atop her left thumb, giving off just barely enough light to see. She lifted her hand up high; the fire grew brighter, until it was many feet above Corvo.

She looked past him. Over his head. At the space behind where he stood.

At his shadow.

She gasped.

He turned around.

His shadow was not his shadow. It was too tall. Too thin. His messy hair and clothes seemed to block no light at all; and while he stood completely still, the shadow’s arms began to move.

“You found me,” the Shadow Man’s voice hissed.

Mother grabbed Corvo and pulled him backward. The flame on her finger went out, and Corvo was left in darkness again. He pressed his back to Mother’s legs as she lunged forward with the blade. The noise of wind splitting beneath the edge poured into his ears, and at his feet there came the sound of steel impacting the floor.

She breathed heavily. Standing still. Corvo grabbed her and held on tight.

She lit the flame on her finger again.

Corvo’s shadow ballooned outward. It grew and expanded toward the dark outside the flame’s reach, until it was the height of the Shadow Man itself.

“Corvo is mine now,” said its voice, and it echoed from all the dark around them, like the chorus of a thousand whisperers hiding in the library’s walls. “You abandon him. You don’t love him. But I do. I would never leave him. I stay with him, wherever he goes. You cannot get rid of me.”

Mother pulled Corvo back. She extended her hand, and sparks flew from her fingertips. Her fist went up in flames, and a steam of green fire shot at the shadow, wiping it away, brightening the whole of the library. Corvo ducked away behind her leg as the heat assaulted his skin.

“You cannot have him!” she roared. Then she turned, and keeping Corvo behind her, she swept the flame across the whole of the library.

The books along the walls went up in smoke. The desk charred and crumbled. Gob had been nearby, at the stairs, and had to stumble to avoid being incinerated.

Smoke flooded the air.

The flame disappeared. Around her head, the three lights relit, and all shadow was banished. Mother reached down to Corvo and heaved him up into her arms, dropping the sword, and she ran with him down the stairs, out into the cool and humid forest. It might have been day for how bright it was when she set him down and looked back at the tower.

She led him to the largest tree nearby. There she sat down in the grass, her back to the trunk, and pulled him into her lap. Stones across the forest floor pulled from their resting places and into a circle at their feet, and a moment later a fire burst to life within its center.

There was no kindling. No wood to burn. Yet it burned, bright and hot and red as any flame, with no smoke.

She did not let him go until morning.

That was the longest and most terrifying night of Corvo’s life. He didn’t sleep at all. But it was really just the beginning of many worse nights yet to come.