Casek took the path back the way he came at a far more leisurely pace. His new weapon had not made him feel totally secure, but he was a damn sight more confident walking through the barren hallways with it clipped to his wrist than without.

The hollow scratching on limb and claw hadn’t ceased entirely, however. Every so often, he caught a soft chitter, as whatever had been lurking in the shadows skittered away before he got too close. It was refreshing; the shoe being on the other foot. The hunter, instead of the hunted. Casek didn’t allow himself to get carried away with the feeling. It only took one moment of carelessness for that to change.

Still, the silence was bothering him. Left him far too much time to dwell on his lost memories.

“So—Tauph, was it?” he said airily, eyes ceaselessly scanning the murky darkness of the corridors ahead. “What was this place?”

It was a research facility. The people here were looking for a way to stop the Shadow—or at least fight back.

“You told me they were working on my injuries here when it was attacked. Seems an odd thing for a research station to do.”

Things were bad, Casek. Any place close to the front lines doubled as a place to help the wounded.

Casek narrowed his eyes at the answer, but said nothing. Tauph was being too vague, too broad. He hated secrets.

“I’m guessing by this thing strapped to my wrist that they succeeded.”

If there are any humans left at all, it is because of the foci this place made. They are the only way the people of this world have to harm anything of the Shadow.

“Why is that?” Casek asked. “What is it about those creatures that make them impossible to kill without a foci?”

There was a long pause before Tauph’s voice came again. Have you ever looked at a still lake on a clear night and thought that if you just reached out far enough, you could pluck the moon right off its surface? Only, if you were to try, your hand would only pass right through and into the water.

The Shadow are beings that exist like that reflection. Everything in our reality has a reflection in another—a mirror reality. The Shadow are creatures that straddle the line, existing simultaneously in both. This is what makes them so dangerous. They can affect our reality, whilst their true selves remain safe in the Other.

“And the foci gets around that?”

The Other is a reality made up of sorcery. The power you felt was from the ‘you’ that is reflected in the Other. Humans normally cannot reach across the divide to access their magic, but the foci allows you to do so. Magic, just like the Shadow itself, is from the Other, and so weapons made from it can harm them.

Casek whistled at the explanation. Hard as talk of other realities was to take, he had just woken from a thousand year sleep and been attacked by demons—the lines between what he knew was possible and what wasn’t had been well and truly shattered.

“I couldn’t help but notice,” he said, voice tentative. “You did a lot of referring to ‘humans’ just now. Almost as if you weren’t one. I had initially assumed you were a just a sign of my own madness, or maybe a part of my subconscious that remembers things from before I slept—but now I’m not so sure.”

I’m not your subconscious, and you’re certainly not mad. I was here with you before you slept.

“Then what are you?”

I… I don’t truly know. I am not human. But I’m also not of the Shadow. I’m…. Something else.

“You are lying,” Casek said, stopping dead in the hallway. “And not for the first time, either.”

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There are things I do not wish to tell you, yes. Some are my secrets to keep, some you will find out when the time is right.

“Whatever this is—however it is you’re in my mind—it cannot continue if you refuse to be honest with me.”

A hint of steel entered Tauph’s voice and Casek felt a strange pressure suddenly weighing down on him over his entire body.

You have very little choice in the matter, Casek. You are welcome to hate me for it, but we are bound, you and I. By your choice, I might add. Not mine.

Casek’s fists tightened. “I have no way of remembering if that is true or not.”

I understand your frustration. But that doesn’t change things. I cannot give you the answers you seek. Not yet.

“Cannot, or will not?”

Both! There was a pause then, and Casek felt, rather than heard, the presence in his mind sigh. I know this is hard, especially when you have woken in the way you have. All I can do for now is to swear to you I am here to help you survive, and if I am keeping secrets, it is to further that aim. The second that keeping them puts you in danger—the moment you need to know the things I do—I promise to tell you what you need to know.

Casek ground his teeth, battling to keep his growing temper in check. There was no amount of ‘it’s for your own good’ that made secret-keeping easier for him to bear, especially when those secrets concerned him.

“I suppose it is like you said—I have very little choice in the matter. You said we were bound. I take it you meant permanently?”

Yes. Our bond is until death. If it helps, if you die, I die right along with you. It’s in my best interest that you stay alive.

“Assuming you’re telling the truth about that, of course,” Casek said, bitterness creeping into his voice.

The voice didn’t answer, and Casek set off again down the long, winding stretches of debris-strewn corridor in silence, quietly stewing both over what Tauph had revealed—and what he had refused to. They walked like that for some time, Tauph only breaking the silence to murmur a muted ‘left’ or ‘right’ to keep them moving in the right direction.

Casek was glad for it. A fight he could handle. He got the impression he was no stranger to them. Now that things were calm, and he had space to think and analyse, he couldn’t help but notice the scars scattered across his arms.

He had woken only in a tattered grey shirt that left his forearms bare, and black, loose-fitting trousers. The boots covering his feet had once been sturdy, but now appeared to be barely holding together, their stitching coming loose, the material beginning to fray.

These problems, too, he could handle. The secrets on the other hand—being kept by a strange voice in his head no less—set his teeth on edge, and made his heart flutter anxiously in his chest. Those, he was not equipped to handle. Not now, waking in ruin in an entirely new world, a thousand years after he’d last closed his eyes.

Casek knew they were close to the exit before Tauph said it. Not just from the way the hallway widened out, and the increase in quality of the now-ruined furniture and decorations. He knew it in the same way he had known his own name, or how to wield a sword.

A shiver ran down his spine. An electric sensation that had the hair on his arms standing on edge. The black blade sprung to life in his hand just as a piercing shriek cut through the silence, rattling the walls and penetrating his heart with a frigid blade of terror. A great crash followed it through the building like an echo, along with the clattering of something falling to the floor in pieces.

No, no, no! Gods, we were so close!

“What was that? I can feel it.”

You’re sensing magic. Shades are probably too weak for someone without practice to sense. This, though? No amount of inexperience could stop you from sensing this from this close. Be ready to run.

Casek took a calming breath and forced himself to move forward again. Whatever awaited him stood between them and the exit. He would have to face it if he wanted to leave.

They passed through another short corridor in uneasy silence until they reached a set of heavy oak doors, studded with black iron. He moved towards it cautiously, breath caught in his throat. Whatever it was padded around on the other side, the sound of its heavy-set footsteps carrying through the silence.

“What exactly is waiting for us on the other side of this door, Tauph?” Casek whispered.

A Drau, almost certainly. Shades do not have corporal bodies, but if one can live long enough—and accumulate enough power through feeding on the living—they can take the body of something else. Control it and twist it to their own purposes. Eventually, whatever poor soul was taken is no more. Only the Drau remains.

“Is that what we are, Tauph? A demon and their unwitting host?”

Casek knew now wasn’t the time, but the question slipped past his teeth, laced with bitterness, before he could help it.

No. The hurt in the voice was undeniable, and Casek winced and dropping his gaze. I am bound to you. Not the other way around. I could not take control of you even if I wanted to.

His brain screamed at him not to fall to the voice’s deception, but his instinct couldn’t help but believe in Tauph. Was that, too, a leftover from what remained of his memories?

“Do I have any chance of taking this thing?”

Of killing it? Unlikely. Depends on what body it inhabits, really.

“Looks like we’ll just have to find out,” Casek muttered, reaching for the door with his left hand, his right holding his blade at the ready.