Shadows Chapter III: A Beginning
A man lay amidst an earthly cloud of fluffy white pillows and downy thick blankets. The room in which he lay was suffused with a dim, warm light touched with a hint of daffodil yellow, and pervading the air was a soft, barely perceptible scent of lilac. Silence reigned, punctuated only by the occasional rustle of a curtain in a breeze, and the slow, shallow, rasping breathing of the man.
He was a gaunt man, his dominating features his sunken cheeks, the emaciated protruding bones of his limbs, and the deep grey hollowness of his eyes. Matched by his sparse grey hair, those eyes spoke of a lingering pain that ate at his soul every bit as much as at his corpus. Long and aquiline, his nose reflected his skeletal form.
If one looked closely enough, and few who visited him did, one could just make out the soft scintillation of the air about his body, the outward effects of a healing magic making itself seen. But the spell woven about him in a bid to save his life was losing. The cancer that gnawed at him, that consumed his very flesh, persisted day by day and refused to give ground to the workings of the physicians attending him. And yet, they strove to find some cure, some treatment that would reverse the process and return him to health. Every spell in their repertoire, every technique, no matter how thin its chance of success, no matter how absurd it seemed, was tried.
And yet none of them worked.
They were growing desperate, grabbing at straws, looking for that one last thing to try. But there was one thing they hadn’t attempted. One thing so absurd, no one had thought of it but for one young healer.
Revitalizing magics were usually associated with heat and light, so it was only natural that everything they that been attempted lay within that theme – various applications of warmth and light, techniques that brought with them on or the other.
One young man had a different idea.
It was an extraordinary idea, completely contrary to everything the physicians had been taught, everything they held dear. So remarkable was this proposal, it veritably verged on blasphemy.
And yet now, after everything else had failed, after the well spring of their knowledge and innovation had run dry, and still he lay there dying, finally they were ready to give in to this young healer’s proposal and allow him to make his venture.
And so before the dying man stood their last hope.
Cloaked in robes of deep blue, the physician’s robes, he was an unassuming young man of average height and build, eyes lost in the shadows of his hood and the cascade of long brown hair that fell forward to cover what little of his visage could be seen. He stood there, head bowed, arms folded in front of his chest, a low hum murmuring from the shadows of his lips as he concentrated and focused upon the glamour he intended to weave. Two other similarly robed men stood by the door to the room, hoods back, lines of concern written across their faces.
Slowly, the volume of his droning began to rise and fill the room. The walls began to resound and reverberate with it and the lighting throbbed for a moment before it began to fade away to nothing, leaving the room in deep, dark shadows, the only remaining illumination the feeble glow penetrating the window’s curtains and that barely perceptible shimmering air surrounding the dying man’s body.
Then, just as it began to seem as though the thrumming was becoming oppressive, the darkness too dense, the faint sparkles collapsed with an audible whumpf, pulling in the darkness and shadow all at once, leaving the room, for a moment, in an eerie contrast of stark clarity without light or shadow. This odd vision with neither light nor darkness hung before their eyes for only a brief moment before the room was again aglow with the soft warm ambience that had filled it before the young man began his work.
Only two differences could be noted in the chamber at the completion of the spell.
The first: the dying man’s breath no longer held the rasp of dry straw.
The second, no longer did the air about the ailing man shimmer. Instead, oddly, there appeared a thin, dark shroud, encasing his wracked body, as though no light could touch him, despite the fact that he was clearly visible in all his wan gauntness.
* * *
Shadow is an interesting thing. It is, but it is not. It exists no only in the absence of light, but in its presence, both because of, and despite that same light. It can hide and reveal, be seen and unseen. It is everywhere, in and around everything, while also being nowhere at all. You can feel its touch, and yet never touch it yourself. It takes the shape of whatever casts it, and more closely, and starkly, mimics that shape the closer it is, and yet it can also remain completely formless. Recognizing all this, the young physician reasoned that, if he could just get the other doctor’s healing magics to cast a shadow, as it were, that perhaps, mimicking their forms, filling in the gaps those spells could not, he could craft something that would succeed where they had failed.
And with the change in their patient’s respiration, it sounded as though he just may have done so.
Time would tell.
|
Share
