The shadow at the portal is the shape of a man, and it did not move. It simply stood there, and although I could not see any eyes, I knew that it was watching me... I could feel its eyes in my soul.
It steps from the portal into the hall, and the shadow followed him, and I could see space freeze, and all sound disappeared.
The golden statues began to sag as if they had been heated to the point of melting, as the orbs in their hands went dim. The fox on my shoulder, which had eaten tribulation lightning like candy, goes rigid against my neck and makes no sound at all.
I reached for my lightning, and it did not come. My channels were full, my Anima was burning, but the lightning would not answer. It was as if the shadow had reached into me and silenced the storm.
I look at the shadow of a man walking towards me, and every part of me that knows how to measure a threat was telling me that there is nothing to measure, the way there is nothing to measure about the sky.
Move, I tell my body... but my body does not move.
∞
As the shadow neared me, it said, "Be still," and my heart stopped beating, the Anima in my channels froze, and it became hard for me to even think.
I don’t think this was a spell; I would feel a spell, and this is not that. It was as if the voice of the shadow was a law like gravity, and my body obeyed it, even without asking for the permission of my soul.
Every channel in me, none of it answers me, and I felt like I am a held breath in someone else’s lungs.
I have felt compulsion before. I discovered, an hour and a lifetime ago, that my own crystallized soul could suppress and almost bend a dying Arcanist’s. I remember the wrongness of reaching into another being and deciding for them.
Now I understand that what I did to that dying man was a child pressing his thumb on an ant, and what this thing is doing to me is the same gesture, performed by something that does ants the way the ocean does individual drops of water. I don’t even think the shadow would notice if I fought back.
The shadow stops a few feet in front of me, and it regards me. It has no face I can fix on, the features slide, shift, the way a reflection shifts on disturbed water, but I feel its attention settle on me with the weight of a continent, and when it speaks, its voice is curious, almost warm, like it was a scholar who has found an unexpected specimen.
"What are you?" it says. "You are not in any records I keep, and I keep all of them." A pause, the sliding features tilting. "Let us find out together. I will ask, and you will answer."
And it reaches into a fold of its own shadow and brings out a book.
∞
My soul shuddered in revulsion as this book appeared, as it was wrong in a way I do not have words for.
It is bound in shadow... shadow, the absence a thing casts when it stands between a light and a wall, somehow made solid and bound into pages, and when the shadow-man opens it, I feel my soul turn toward it.
I instantly understood what was happening. This book was made for reading souls, and it would dig into the depths of my being, and like the tribulation, I would not be able to deny its reach.
"Now," the shadow says, as it licks one of its fingers and turns a page that makes no sound. "Are you a Reincarnator? A soul carried whole from a dead world into a new vessel, trailing the memory of another life?"
The question was strange to me, but I did not even have the time to think about it when a compulsion reaches into me for the answer, and I feel my own truth rise toward the book against my will, and the answer is no, I have only ever been Elric Voss, born in this world, dead in this world more times than I can count, and the no writes itself into the shadow-book in letters I cannot read.
"Hmm, interesting. A Transmigrator, then, are you a thing wearing a shape not its own, a borrowed body over a foreign soul?"
No. I am the body I was born in, rebuilt by gates and crystallization, but mine, only ever mine. The book takes the no.
"A Celestial." The shadow says it with more interest, the sliding features leaning in. "The shadow of the Caelith called you a golem. The Jade Oracle called you a miracle. You surely carry their light in your veins; I can smell it from here. Are you a construct of the fallen heaven, a thing they made and left running?"
And here the compulsion strains, because I do not know the answer, I have held it as a question this whole time, Celestial Golem or not, and the book reaches for a truth I have not confirmed even to myself, and what rises toward it is not yes or no but the honest churning uncertainty inside me that does not know what it is.
The shadow-book hesitates over that, the page rippling, and the shadow-man makes a small sound of interest.
"Curious. You do not know either. A Celestial that does not know it is a Celestial. Or a thing wearing a Celestial’s light without being one." It turns another silent page. "I have many more questions, and you have many more answers. Some of these names you will not know, because this world no longer has them, but stranger things have resurrected from the darkness before. The book does not require you to understand the answer, only to give it."
And it asks. Names I have never heard, races and titles and categories from a world that was turning out to be far larger than I could ever imagine... threadwalker, hollow-crowned, the twice-born of the lantern-courts, the unwritten, and to each one the compulsion drags my truth toward the book, no, no, no, I do not even know what that is, no, and the shadow-man reads my soul.
What horrified me was that it was patient, thorough, and it was almost as if it was mildly entertained, filling the pages of a book bound in shadow with the catalogue of what I am not.
And even though I did not wish for it, I knew that the shadow would find the answer it was looking for if it kept going on, and there was no reason for it to stop.