Why was I out there some might ask. It was for a hike to build my endurance. A state meet was a week away. It was just training. I only wanted to be the best.
It was somewhere in the national park that I got lost. Not a problem really as Da was just a phone call away. Though funnily enough I didn't have a single bar. No problem still, I'll just turn on GPS. Though a problem would arise as I was looking at my damn phone and running on the trail at the same time. I can still feel the world shifting as I tumbled again and again until I hit my head on the way down. Darkness took me.
The second I came too my body had ringing pain all over and all I could do was cry out. After my panic attack, I started crawling on the cold forest ground trying to find my phone, light would be a gift right now. As I huffed and searched on the forest floor I found it after a while, I tapped the screen, there were cracks on it but no light. There was no power, and then it hit me out there in the wilderness. No stars out, No Moon, No bugs chirping in the distance. I looked up slowly into the void within the trees only for it to stare back at me.
As I screamed tendrils of darkness restrained me and pulled me apart. I struggled but I was just too tiny against the massive vanta black appendages made of nothin. I could not escape them. Then it lurched forward from the void, moving without walking past the trees and slowly to my cacoon of shadow as I cried and writhed. The thing would touch me, and I felt something rip from me and something else attach itself to me. Not to my body, but to me as a concept. It hurt so much, a new kind of pain that was deep, a pain that went past my bones far past muscle and flesh. I got lost in the feeling for a long time. I didn't even notice that thing retreat into the void.
The nightmare ended around mid-day. Beams from the first dawn weren't even enough to wake me, but the sun fully out did. It was a restless sleep following my assault, even if it was deep and prolonged. It left me feeling different but not crippled like I was after the fall. I was able to move well enough and that led me to be found by a park ranger. People had looked for me. Thank God, I wasn't going to die for being an idiot.
When asked what happened, by anyone, it was the same story, I fell hit my head, and had a bad dream. However, my parents weren't the first to notice the small things. I barely smiled or talked. If I ever did it was followed by an explosion of emotion, or barely a minuscule whisper. I wasn't normal anymore, and worst of all was the other symptoms. Ma brought it up to Da, on my fifth day back at home. My fifth day trying to move on. I stepped outside to get the mail, and everything had a shadow. Except me.
"OSKA!" She screamed bloody murder. When I turned to face her I barely reacted to her outburst. She screamed at my Da that I was missing a shadow and he pulled me inside. He made me sit down as he got a flood light and pointed it at me inside our dim house. Sure enough. It was like my shadow was replaced by light itself. The realization made me lose my shit and I screamed, wailed, and sobbed into my parents. Asking them over and over if I was dead. I kept mentioning the thing and what it did to me. I never went back to school.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
That was just the first week. I kept changing, and so did my family. We became blanketed with paranoia and agoraphobia. Remote work was the only work Da took but it became about being here with me and Ma became a religious fanatic and made me study the bible. I don't blame her. Eye color changed, physical dexterity changed. My thinking changed. Everything needed a reason or it was pointless. I was broken in so many ways.
I started to watch and read. Studying weapons and ways to fight. I could sense a purpose in this curse that was changing me. I wanted to make that thing pay for what it did to me. Ma gave me the tools to track it down with her religious coping, she made me aware of mythology. Some cultures had to run into this thing, and they had to have yapped about it to someone who wrote down the encounter.
From what I could muster through my initial research was that maybe the creature was some form of deity that was old. Still living long after its final worshipper perished. I had to have been its plaything, maybe it fed on my shadow. My emotions. Like a parasitic vampire or something else entirely. All I knew was if it could touch me we could most definitely touch it back. Da made sure to stock our little lair with plenty of weapons. In case it ever came back. We were American after all.
I had gotten used to the change in attitude and emotional output. I had gotten used to the physical changes as well. Being strong and seeing in the dark were welcomed by me as I figured I could use the being's curse against it.
Though I was young I was plotting revenge spending one particular night researching any website for any mention of a shadow monster. Mostly creepypastas and cryptid sightings without hard evidence. I sat back that night in a chair pissed by the revelation that if that void creature was out there any single monster a person had run into was out there and which monster was the one that changed me might escape my vengeance permanently. I stared into my dark and gloomy room I often spent these days as a forever-changed freak. I felt my emotions spark as I tried to picture the bastard's figure in the darkness. I pictured its lurching tired figure coming through the branches. The darkness of my room became black. I envisioned it lurching forward. Then something did. I shot up to wrap my little hands around its neck then an eye opened in this creature, and then another. They were pink like mine yet, missing the organic features as if drawn on almost like a mockery. These alien eyes were expressive and appeared sorrowful, so I let go. The creature's mood immediately changed and it would float in the void with a less terrified complexion. As my aggression lowered the room seemed to return to its previous state. Illuminated by my laptop and desk lamp. As I gazed into this little void creature. I realized it wasn't just gazing back at me. It was attached to me. It was my shadow.