The Boy Who Walks In Shadow

I met a girl on an airplane, she showed me how the world worked inside her head. I met a girl on an airplane, and spent nights watching the shadows move. I met a girl on an airplane, and tasted the darkness as it rose to greet me.

The Boy Who Walks In Shadow

The Stranger

Shadows crawl
beneath his skin, stitched together with silence and troubled sleep. They shift
like a black tattoo in poor light, a living thing on a living thing. The taste
of dreams too real to be real linger hollow and angry in the back of his
throat.

He walks by
himself along a dark road, going nowhere, headed somewhere. His footfalls make
no sound, nor does the movement of his clothes in the cool of the wind. Silence
aches in the wake of him, a lost thing surrounding a lost thing.

He is no longer
alone.

Up ahead, where
a dark tree yawns over the path, a shape drops from the bows, a stranger on a
strange path. The stranger wades through the shadows, his footsteps heavy in
the thick of the night.

“Hello,” the stranger
says. “Why do you walk alone on such a dark evening?”

The boy stares
at him, the shadows moving beneath his skin, stirring as if by the breeze, as
if they are stretching half-awake.

“Can you not
sleep?” The stranger asks.

The boy looks
up at the moon, a dark shadow stretching between heartbeats.

 “Of course, you cannot,” the stranger sighs.

They stare at
the moon together, watching clouds drip like teardrops down its face. There is
a bitterness to the silence, not built on the brief companionship of two
strangers on a dark road, but etched in the heavy stone that loneliness makes
deep in your chest.

A second shape
approaches in the forlorn light of the waning moon. Silver flashes from his
hand, a curved stretch of metal cutting through the darkness. The stranger
looks towards the approaching figure squinting his eyes into the gloom.

“What luck,”
the bandit cries out, his voice a dagger slipped between ribs. “I thought I
would have to go hungry tonight.”

The strangers
face falls, and he starts to ease the pack from his weary shoulders. His eyes
are used to the simple tragedies of the world, and his hands are tattooed with
faded scars.

“You too boy,”
the bandit says.

The boy shakes
his head, his eyes slow as if watching from behind thick glass.

 “I won’t ask you twice,” the bandit snarls,
raising his blade.

The night is
still, and the boy’s face twists with dark shapes. He steps forward and opens
his mouth. The shadows shiver with glee beneath his skin, surging forward. They
force out of him long, inky fingers that wrap around his jaw.

They swell out
into the night, and in an instant, a darkness deeper than night envelops the bandit.
The shadows pull the bandit closer and closer until he disappears down the
boy’s throat.

The strangers
face twists in horror for but an instant before it deepens into a sadness too
true to be anything but the cut-flower feel of watching someone you love slip
away.

“You do not
sleep, do you?” The stranger hums to himself. “But you dream, oh yes, you
dream.”

The boy looks
out into the dark, and the silence deepens.

“Sometimes,
dreams are the same as nightmares,” the stranger whispers, almost too soft for
even the wind to catch.

The boy faces
the path once more and begins to walk.

“You are going
north?” The stranger asks. “I am as well, to see the lord of dreams get married.
I hear his love’s eyes used to be as dark as the shadows that creep beneath
your skin. Now they are filled with sunlight and warm memories.”

The boy
flinches, staring out into the night. He stops walking for but a moment, and
faded moonlight dances between his shadows.

“One day you
will not have to walk alone in the dark,” the stranger murmurs. “One day.”

The stranger
climbs back into the tree, disappearing into the branches. His voice floats
from the weathered limbs, touching upon silence with soft fingers.

“I though, must
sleep. I will see you again,” the strangers sighs.

Then, all is
silent once more.

The boy turns to face the path, and
alone in the dark, begins to walk.

*                       *                       *

The Town

The world is
dark as it always is, the night breathing in and out with each footfall. The
old fears stir in him, the old shaking terrors. Shapes move in the night,
beyond the pale stone of the path. The nightmares watch him walk, lumbering alongside,
their long arms and lolling jaws swinging.

Among the craggy darkness and
twisting trees, a dark mist coils, drifting around the tombstone boulders of
lost lovers.

The boy can feel the sun try to
raise its head somewhere over the empty dark of the horizon. It struggles for
the barest of moments against the darkness, but the night has too firm a hold
as it drifts along with the boy.

The sun
shudders, stops fighting, and goes back to sleep. A sadness weighs on its
lonely heart. It yearns to pass the moon as they change places in the sky.

The shapes in the night cackle
slyly, howling into the pitch of the shattered land. The sound of it settles
with the shadows woven to his heart, pressing firmly against his chest with
each dismal beat.

The boy shrugs his heavy shoulders
against the press of cold dreams and stifling fear, pushing further into the
dark. His feet make no sound on the tortured stone, his breath drinks in the
heady scent of morning dew that will never see the sun.

The boy walks until he reaches a
town, his feet have long since given up being tired.

The market is set up despite the
dark of the morning hour. People huddle beneath shawls and hoods and cloaks.

Day always deepens to night as the
nightmares draw near. As he draws near.

The townspeople can feel the press
of shadows all around them, feel the terrors of the moving night. Their eyes have
forgotten the taste of them, have left behind the brittle fear of dark moonless
nights huddled fireside, praying for the worst to pass.

The boy steps up beside a young
woman, serving warm bread to townsfolk as they huddle outside of the inn. The
sun was supposed to rise, but the boy has not seen the sun since his heart grew
weary and cold and used.

Nor will he
again until the mountains crumble and the seas turn to ash.

The barmaid
turns to him, shoulders sunken against the weight of a sleepless night.

“Have you seen
the terrors, love? They follow you, they stalk my dreams,” the barmaid
whispers. “Dreams have always touched us, have always crept through our
streets, stolen into our homes. But these nightmares, they have not been here
for a long time. They move like shadows in the corner of my eye.”

Her breath is
the quiet suffocation of being lost in the true dark, no stars or moon to guide
her way home.

The barmaid
shivers, staring hopeless out into the midmorning darkness.

“Our lord of
dreams has not given us nightmares since his lady came to him. He has no cares
for us now that he has his dream lover,” she sobs gently in the night.

The boy looks
at her through eyes that have touched the space between breaths, that have
known the cool of a night without stars. She shivers before him again, and her
spirit breaks. Tears splash down her cheeks, pale and lonely against the white
of her skin.

She trembles,
and behind her back, her shadows writhe in glee.

The men sitting
at the tables hunch over their food, embarrassed about having nothing to offer
the barmaid, scared of their own shadows that stalk them in the dark. The
nightmares cling to storefronts, grasp at fluttering cloaks, slink in the
midnight dark of memories living. They watch their prey with heavy lidded eyes
and lolling jaws.

“How do you
stand it? All of that darkness spinning beneath your skin,” she shudders,
collapsing to her knees, her heart a beating, broken mess.

The boy follows
her there, kneeling in front of her. His silence leaks from him, sliding
beneath creaking tables and wagon wheels not yet true. It settles over the
town, a deep cloak, the stillness of winter’s breath.

He cups the
barmaids face in his hands, his mouth set in a weary line. He is too young to
have seen so much horror.

The boy closes
his eyes, breathes deep, and then opens them again. His face is one of
darkness, a darkness so angry that the world shudders beneath its feet. The
cords in the boy’s throat heave, the shadows revolt beneath his skin.

Above, the moon
burns with venom, burying the town in its terrible glow.

Then, he drinks
in the barmaid’s nightmares. The monstrous things peel themselves from the ground
where her shadows pool. They twist with wretched memories long since turned to
rot, and seep beneath his skin. The nightmares fight and gnash their drooping
jaws, but they cannot escape. He binds them with those beneath his skin in a
silence so vast it leaves a heart aching. He finishes the last stitch with the
dream of someone better left forgotten, then he stands and roars.

But of course,
no sound comes out.

No sound will
ever come out.

Silence is all
that remains. It falls heavy like rain upon a world too full of shadows to know
anything but the night.

In the void
left behind, the nightmares turn to flee. The shadows beneath the boy’s skin
leap to his terrible bidding, grabbing at them with hands that worship the
secret fears of brave men. The shadows whip the nightmares with half-forgotten
memories of days spent tired and alone, of moments nestled under evergreen
boughs, of moments in the sun.

Some escape,
howling off into the night, back to a master that left them behind. Silence
drains from the town and back into the boy.

The people
watch him, lungs choking with pity.

He begins to
walk away, feet dragging and heavy with the weight of a hundred new secrets, a
thousand new dreams long since soured. The barmaid reaches out a trembling hand
to grab at his sleeve.

She sets in his
weary palm a warm loaf of bread and a jar of honey still lingering with the
smell of the sun he can no longer see.

Tucking the
gifts into his pockets, he starts out of town again.

The barmaid
calls after him, her voice soft and heavy with words better left locked behind
closed lips, better left burned with the mornings baking.

“You have no
one left but the moon to keep away your shadow, and even she grows weary.”

The boy almost
misses a step, but not quite. His heart is already heavy, heavier than a
secret, than a great river smooth stone, than a lifetime of guilt. The dark and
beating thing hides low behind his ribs.

He doesn’t stop
until the slow lights of town are kissed to sleep by the ever-moving night.

In the
darkness, he is alone.

*                       *                       *

The Spider

The wind kisses
the back of the boy’s neck as it passes, telling him a story of a road that
dreams it can touch the sky. It scatters dead leaves across the rough stone and
wagon ruts, but beneath his feet, they make no sound.

As he follows
the path, accompanied by darkness, spiderwebs tangle across the road. He wipes
them away as they press at his face. Cobwebs dance in his hair, a duet with the
shadows beneath his skin. In the mid-afternoon night, his stomach roiling with
nightmares, he is too weary to wipe the rest away.

The boy keeps
walking, and the webs grow thicker, trailing behind him, string and wire and
cable. They no longer look white, darkness seeps from his skin, turns them
black as ink, empty as decay.

In front of him
on the path, the webs become a thicket, heavy as his wrist, hungry as the sea
in the grey of winter. The boy looks behind him, something has woven more
tangles of white across the path he has forged. The boy can feel the nightmares
lurking, beyond the forest of dark trees and heavy web.

One gap in the
trees remains open, darkness nearly true beckoning. It whispers a soft sound, a
lover in a dream. The whispers roll across the silence of his skin, beckoning
in sugared kisses. He turns his sad eyes away from the sweetness. He will never
know that feeling, not again.

The boy reaches
out a hand and strums the web before him, a harp in the forest, singing out the
hope of a lighthouse beam over a dark sea. It is sweet and forlorn and
enticing, icing dripping from cherry lips.

The song fades,
and once more the whispers come. His fingers find the string again, and the
strand shudders, the movement rippling across the rest of the web.

Something deep
and deadly chatters high in the darkness. The sweet whispers die without a
goodnight, leaving behind a silence as bold as a sword stroke. The boy smiles,
the nervous dancing beneath his skin ending with the lover’s words.

He knows
darkness, he knows silence, he knows the brittle sting of poisoned tongues. The
return to the stillness, to the seeping darkness, calms him.

The boy steps
from the path, and the forest wraps cool fingers about his arm, drawing him
deeper, a fellow monster among monsters.

The new path
through the trees moves him forward like gates in a slaughterhouse, a labyrinth
of terrors living outside of nightmares.

The ground
slopes down, away from the road. Out of the darkness, rocks skitter down from
the hill. The boy glances towards them, away from the rough roots at his feet.
A thick strand of web stretches out unseen, it catches his shins, sending him
tumbling down the ravine.

A web slows his
fall, grabbing at him with hungry tendrils as he breaks through it. Then he
hits another. And another, until one finally catches, strands as deep as shadow,
as thick as his arm.

His limbs are
snared by the others that slowed his fall, broken as they wrap around his
corpse and trail up the hill. The torn, wispy ends of the webs grow black and
frayed as his shadows seep into them.

The darkness
weighs heavy on his skin, drawing from deep pools doubts better left in shadow.

He is tired, oh
so tired. Why does he keep walking? Memories twist between the nightmares, dark
eyes, full lips, whispers beneath a less lonely moon. For a moment, she drifts with
him in the darkness, a ripe and lovely thing, a Fae of the night, the girl in
his deepest dreams. So dark, so tired, so alone.

Not now, not
then.

She had never
been truly alone, not even during her worst nightmares. Someone had always been
there, watching. The lord of dreams, the lord of nightmares, smiling from unlit
corners.

In the forest
around him, the nightmares howl, no longer lulled by the storm of silence that
moved as the boy did. They can smell the shadows worming beneath the boy’s
skin, feel his trapped limbs strain against the strong webs.

A teasing,
singsong voice echoes from between trees and dark places.

“Hello, lovely
thing, it seems you have stumbled and tumbled down into my kitchen,” the voice
titters.

The spider
appears from the gloom, a bloated shape in the lightless forest. She moves
slowly, dancing this way, then that, across her webs, a dark creature pleased
with its work.

The spider
perches above the boy, close enough for him to smell the forgotten bones of
lonely travelers rolling like a rotten perfume across her hide. The wake of her
moves a hair across the boy’s forehead.

“Why do you not
fear me?” The spider asks, her voice a song in the deep wood. “Is it the sadness
behind your eyes? What things have you seen? How far have you wandered?”

She pauses,
legs rocking beneath her bulbous body.

“Ahhhh, I sense
a dream nestled between your lips. Can I have a taste?”

The spider
leans closer still, rubbing her hair against the boy’s flesh. The shadows press
against his skin, tasting her right back. The spider convulses and darts back
across her web, her bull-sized body swaying the trees.

She retches and
shudders, the ripple sending a bittersweet whisper through the webs.

“You are
tainted, poisoned!” The spider shrieks. “You taste of nightmares on a night
with no moon, of kept promises turned lethal, broken limbs and stab wounds left
to fester.”

The spiders
great head swivels about her body, testing the air.

“Oh, ohhhh, they
come for you, a monster a monster would not dare to eat. But they want you none
the less.”

Her fangs
clatter against one another as if she is licking her lips. When she shivers
again, the movement is pure ecstasy.

“And I want
them, they hide from me, but their terrors are pure. They will sit in my belly
dark and full. More will come, more than I can eat. I will wrap them in white
until no more shadows spill out, but first, I will let them devour you. Let me
be free of you and your curses. You taste like the lord of nightmares before he
became the lord of dreams.”

The boy does
not speak, he only watches the poison spread from him, turning the web to
shadow. The grasping strands will not have the time to turn to rot and darkness
before the nightmares are upon him.

“As we wait, I
will go back and fix what you broke.”

The swollen
body disappears into the night, leaving him alone with thoughts like crumbling
mountains and open graves.

The dark is
nearly impregnable, but it does not bother the boy. No, he feels it in his
chest, a familiar thing. It soothes the tender dreams strung together between
the shadows, soothes the nightmares begging to come out and play.

It is his home now.

Ever since he
met her.

Ever since he
lost himself.

No, ever since
the boy had learned about Him.

The lost lover
who had stalked her dreams.

The shadows
writhe across the boy’s skin, remembering a nightmare, a former master, a
creaking floorboard in an abandoned house.

It isn’t the
darkness that makes his knees ache, his skin crawl. Nor is it that he cannot
move, trapped in his own dark cloud, waiting for his dark companions to come and
devour him.

No, it is
something far deeper.

“Whooo, whooo
do we have here?” Comes a clacking and pompous voice from overhead. “Ah, a
young traveler caught in a web. How your skin crawls at the thought of not
being able to fly away from your predicament. What a joy it is to be an owl.”

The owl tilts
its beak up to the sky, fluffing its feathers proudly.

“But you can’t
escape the darkness, can you?” The owl ponders. “The nightmares are always
close by, but they don’t fully fear you yet. I wonder, I wonder. Hoo, hoo.”

The owl looks
up at where the moon should be, the white of its face studiously searching the
darkened treetops. It skips around the branches for another moment, cocking its
head to the shudders of shadows growing near.

“Oh, my my,
what a clutter. Oh, my my, I wonder if you dream,” the owl says, perching on a
branch near the boy. “You seem so full of secrets, they squirm beneath your
skin, howl in the back of your throat. I’m an owl, I know many things as well,
many things you may not know without my help. But you have a secret I do not
know; I must know it. Yet, these things cannot be given freely. A trade perhaps?
Hoo hoo. A secret for a secret?”

The boy looks
around at the enveloping darkness, a storm of thoughts turning leaves
belly-side up in his mind. The owl is right, those secrets weigh heavy between
his ribs like crumbling mortar between ancient stones. In the dark of the
forest, the nightmares closing in, the boy does not even have a pleasant dream
to pass from one darkness to another.

The boy shrugs,
and the owl clacks its beak agreeably.

“First, I
better offer you my secret, otherwise I might never hear yours,” the owl
chatters. “You see, I am an owl, silent and intelligent, the moon on her
brightest day, but the nightmares are too close for even one such as I.”

The owl ruffles
its feathers importantly, but its eyes dart about the dark wood.

“Here is my
secret,” the owl whispers. “I am an owl, and my talons are quite sharp.”

With that, it
swoops down and tears at the web, cutting the boy free. The ground makes not a
sound as the boy lands in the mulch of bone and bark and broken things. The boy
shakes himself free of the rest of the sticky web, then he stands straight in
the darkness.

A power thrums
through him, a vile poison that soothes the shadows beneath his skin. It tastes
sour to the trees, pulses wicked through the forest.

The nightmares
step into the clearing, talons dragging in the bracken, jaws lolling against
tufted chests of pure shadow. The boy remembers the first time he had seen
them, so long ago. He had learned their faces while staring into his lover’s
eyes.

She had
screamed in quiet agony beneath the breath of a new moon. It was a nightmare
that she couldn’t wake up from, a reflection in her eyes. It had reached out to
her from the darkness, it had taken her heart in its hands.

The boy throws
back his head and howls, but of course, no sound comes out.

No sound will
ever come out.

Instead,
tendrils of shadow crawl from his jaws and wrap his arms in thickening
darkness. He pounces, dancing about the clearing as if beneath a star-filled
sky, as if the world does not rest so heavy against his flesh, as if he has
never known pain.

Oh, but he knows
pain.

The boy darts
beneath midnight claws and snapping fangs, tearing chunks from the nightmares.
He eats them, piece by piece, devouring their terrors. Every bite feeds the
shadows beneath his skin until the forest runs deep with silence.

It stains like
blood; it tastes like copper.

Then the
nightmares are gone from the ancient wood, twisting in quiet anger behind the
boy’s heart.

The shadows
creep lazily back beneath the boy’s skin, stitched side by side with new
nightmares of lost loves and promises stolen the moment they leave innocent
lips.

“I fear to ask
my question, I fear the answer,” the owl hushes the silence of the clearing, as
if the quiet is far too loud.

The boy pants
in the darkness, his body shuddering with the fresh shadows staining the inside
of his flesh. He takes a deep breath and straightens, wiping sweat from his
brow. The shadows quiver and then dance like puppets on a string.

“I know many things;
I know there must always be a nightmare collecting shadows in the night. But your
secrets lay deep, and yet you walk towards our lord of dreams, who no longer
seems a nightmare, who no longer holds that title. He is supposed to make
dreams soft and sweet with lover’s sighs, with glowing fields of green and
piles of gold. But does he? Hoo hoo. That is the question. It has not been
long, no, no, but already his nightmares fade from memory. He was always good
at that. Hm, hm.”

Strength fills
the boy’s limbs, a sour disgust that touches his fingertips with rolls of
thunder. He starts to walk up the hill.

“Our bargain
was for a secret shared, not one given,” the owl hoots, growing haughty again now
that the darkness has stopped its seething. “You showed me your power, but if
one such as I had known your title, your power would have been no secret at
all. Not for me, I know many things…”

The boy’s face
grows darker than the forest, shadows deeper than pitch beneath his skin. They
crawl like corpses from their graves, sink deep into his eyes. His face is cold
as winter storms, but he crooks a finger at the bird. The owl looks ruffled,
but its desire is deep as a river pool.

The owl lands
on a branch near the boy’s head, and puffs itself up. The boy leans over, but
of course no whisper leaves his throat. His hand blurs and he press’ two
fingers against the owl’s feathers, right between its eyes.

The owl wanted
a secret, and nothing is more private than a memory.

The owl moans
and clacks its beak, eyes lolling into its skull. It shivers, body wracked by
fear and a memory deeper than mourning.

Bittersweet.

The wounds are
bittersweet.

The boy does
not dream anymore, but he has memories, memories of dark times, of harsh words,
of sunlight upon green meadows. Not all of them are his own, they strike like
lightning on a cloudless day. He feels them all inside of him when he swallows
the nightmares. He sucks a little bit of aching memory out with the darkness to
ease the pain of those troubled hearts plagued by demons. The memories bind him
together until he doesn’t feel like himself any longer.

Bittersweet.
That is what they are.

The boy does
not give the owl one of her memories. No, those secrets are buried deepest. He plays
them behind his blackened heart until his wounds run dark and his skin grows
numb.

Nor does he
give the owl a stranger’s dreams, wrapped in melancholy and left to smolder.

No, he gives
the owl one of his own, one spent beneath the earth, in the darkness,
screaming. One where nothing turned out alright. And in the end, a face as it uncovered
the grave they had buried him in. A face they both know.

The owl falls
from the branch. It twitches on the carpet of leaves and bones and scattered
shadows. It shudders long after the memory has faded from its flesh.

The boy picks
the owl up, wrapping it in his cloak. He carries the bird for many miles, its
tears soaking through his clothes. They walk for hours until the spider webs
are a distant memory. In a beam of moonlight, the boy makes a nest of ferns and
pine boughs high up in a tree. He lays the owl to rest and turns away. The owl
huddles deep in the nest, softly weeping.

The boy carries
on, walking forward into the relentless night.

*                       *                       *

The Rider

The leather
sole of the boy’s right boot slaps against his heel. In the murky dark of the
midday night, all is silent. There is no sound of leather on leather, no soft
tread of feet on rough stone, no labored breathing of weary miles already
walked.

No sound at
all.

It soothes the
demons beneath the boy’s skin, turns the agitated prowling of shadows into the
dancing darkness of a long-stoked fire. They walk long roads beneath his flesh,
feel the deep sadness within him like a winter’s night spent all alone.

But they are
not friends.

The shadows
wait in the flickering darkness sewn of memory, in the brutal stillness of a
man waiting to die. They wait for something to happen; they wait for the sound
of broken silence.

The boy kneels,
a puff of dust wafting up from the old road. He takes a strip of leather from
his pocket and ties his boot back together. The worn leather shivers and
accepts defeat, shifting uncomfortably against the boy’s weight.

He has almost
forgotten why he is walking; the weight of the shadows turn dark the pale of
his eyes. The darkness feels the fever in him, the deep well of things left
unsaid, the memories twisted by nightmares and half-remembered details.

He watches
dreams of horror, of dark shadows creeping on motionless sleepers, of screams
in forgotten places. Mostly he watches Her, eyes open, unable to move as the
nightmares creep into her room.

On the boy’s
darkest days, the lord of dreams drifts into his mind. The boy remembers the
silhouette of a man in shadows, always watching, back when he was the nightmare,
before he was a dream.

The boy has
almost forgotten why he is walking.

He has
forgotten what sunlight feels like against tired skin, what soft words taste
like on the tip of your tongue, the scent of moonlight rolling down the smooth
shape of a lovers back.

He has almost
forgotten because he can never have these things again.

He is the
nightmare now.

The melancholy
whispers, heard in gooseflesh rippling across his skin, drifting from the shadows
and nightmares and lost souls sewn to his flesh. They suit his mood.

The boy drinks
in the darkness until it fills his lungs, until a cold chill rips a hole in his
side. He relishes the pain, the sadness, the thousand nightmares he drank so
others could sleep at night. He doesn’t deserve the warm dreams.

He stands up
and starts walking again, touching his tongue against the bitter sting of a new
memory that floats to the surface. It’s not one of his, it’s one of the many
left forgotten, sucked beneath his skin with the rest of his torments.

He likes this
one, it fits like a puzzle piece into the dark creases around his eyes.

The shadows
ripple beneath his skin, press against his flesh as if trying to stretch free
from their bonds. He holds them in place with silence and the memory of being
left alone on a grey sea, watching a ship with white sails disappear behind
gentle waves.

The shadows
stay put, but they don’t settle.

A horse’s hoof
sounds in the distance, but no sound escapes the boy. The horse approaches, a
dark shape on a dark night. It bears a rider dressed in ragged forms of grey
and black. The rider bears two swords that smell of bleeding corpses left just
outside of candlelight.

The boy stops
in the center of the path, waiting for the rider to near him. The horse shifts uncomfortably
on the road. It can feel the nightmares drifting out amongst the darkness, in
the wild, untouched shadows beside the track.

The rider does
not flinch.

The shape on
horseback stares at the boy as if he were a midsummer snow, as if he were meat
kept too long in the sun. The boy can’t see the riders face, but he can feel
the pressure of the look slide like greasy film across his skin.

Scorn.

Disgust.

The boy doesn’t
have to see the rider’s face to know who it is.

The boy keeps
walking, but the rider stops now, fighting to hold the horse steady across the road.
A breath like the last exhale of a quiet man meant to do violence escapes the
boy’s lips. It’s a soft puff of air, a calm wind before a gale. The boy runs a
hand over his face, his body past the point of weariness.

“Why do you
walk this way? You don’t belong here,” the rider says.

The boy takes
another breath, tasting the power of the earth beneath his heavy feet.

“Don’t look at
me like that,” the rider groans. “You know why. You aren’t welcome. You
remember the last time you saw him? It’ll be worse if you come back. And why
would she want to see you anyways? You won’t do anything but remind her of
moments where she was terrified, alone in the dark.”

The boy’s hands
turn into fists. They had taken everything from him, made him who he was. It
had all been for her, but they had tricked him. The boy stares at the man and
knows his fear, knows the rider is afraid of what the boy has seen. A secret
kept is a secret shared, the rider knows what dark memories glide beneath the
boy’s skin.

Of what they
had turned him into.

The nightmares
were no longer theirs to command.

“If three days
in a grave cannot teach you to stay away, my lord can come up with worse
things. You know nothing, you are a fresh nightmare, pale in comparison to what
he was. Stick to your shadows. A wedding is no place for you.”

Darkness seeps
from the boy’s broken heart. The bitter ache of a scream echoes in the shadows
beneath his skin. The boy moves forward a step, then again. His eyes are deep
as wells, distant as the lonely moon, angry as a man tortured, buried, left
forgotten and alone.

“Don’t,” the
rider snarls. “You are not needed where you are going. There are no nightmares,
he keeps her shadows at bay. You bring the monsters now; they follow in the
silence of your wake. The girl only dreams of what he wants her to. Even on her
worst days she does not remember you.”

The words
strike against his skin, drawing jagged lines across his flesh, waking a dozen
memories left buried deep. They controlled her, every last bit of her. The lord
of dreams had taken her nightmares, and had given her a dream, a gilded cage.
She was too free for that, so they bottled and branded the parts worth loving,
and cut out the parts they thought not.

The boy
relishes those pieces of her that they had thrown away, they live beneath his
skin, every memory, down to the darkest ones. They play across his flesh, a thousand
nights of relentless screams, her nails clawing bloodied lines down his arms.

The lord of
dreams had found her on those deep nights, caught in the webs of his
nightmares, enthralled by how she had become so ensnared in his darkness. He
had tempted her with peace in the chaos, a dream lover, whispering soft and
sweet all while the nightmares ripped at her flesh.

Then, the lord
of dreams had showed her what could be, and pulled her under his spell.

The memory of
it sears the boy’s flesh. He gnashes his teeth, the shadows rioting beneath the
surface, pushing him another step forward. They fill him with such darkness,
with a need to mold the shadows into nightmares. They want to be free.

But so does he.

“Remember who
gave you those scars?” The rider roars. “Me. I own you! This nightmare is your
home. Live in it.”

The boy let’s
his head fall back, his teeth bared in howl.

But no sound
comes out.

No sound will
ever come out.

The horse rears
in fear at a silence so absolute that the night forgets to draw breath. The
first nightmare lopes out from the darkness, foam curdling its lips. The rider
draws a sword and cuts it down, splitting the shadow into uneven parts.

The boy takes
one more step, the ground shuddering beneath his broken boots. Two more
nightmares emerge from beyond the path. The rider wheels his horse around and
spins his blade. He cuts the second nightmare down, but the third ducks beneath
the horse’s neck, tearing out the animal’s throat with its drooping jaws.

The horse
stumbles and falls, the rider leaping clear before the weight of it crushes
him. His two blades flash in the light of the forlorn moon, and the nightmare tumbles
to ragged shadows.

The rider
shouts out a challenge, his voice echoing and dull in the silence of the
endless night. The nightmares take up the call, their voices like killing
strokes in the darkness.

The shape of the
rider is a blur, an assassin bathed in blood and dark cloth.

He twists and
dances among the nightmares, turning them into nothing more than thoughtless
worries in a dark room.

But the nightmares
are too many, too untamed. They see their chance and some turn to the boy. The
anger in the boy’s chest is spoiled by the darkness dripping from between his
ribs. His blood turns black with fury.

The nightmares’
pounce, but he takes one, perfect step, a memory of a fight long since
finished, not yet begun. One nightmare sweeps a long arm at him, and he dips
beneath it. The razor talons whisper like waking moments in the air.

The boy glides
like forgotten memories out of the way of two more.

The rider cuts the
nightmares down, a demon amongst monsters, soul darker than the ever-present
night.

The boy takes a
breath, his heartbeat calm, pulsing sluggish darkness through his veins. Dozens
of nightmares surround the pair, a circle of shadow on a night that mourns the
moon. Ebony foam flecks their hungry lips and lolling tongues. Claws drag
heartless furrows in dead soil. The rider gives a cry that aches of thoughtless
disgust in an empty room.

The boy opens
his mouth, and the silence is infinite.

It breaks the
world in its sincerity.

The nightmares
and rider stagger backward at the blow. Stunned, they watch as the boy lets a
memory slip over him like a second skin.

The weight of
it pushes them all to their knees.

The rider knows
the memory well, so as he struggles back to his feet, watching the boy rip
nightmares apart with raw fingers, watch the shadows stretch out from beneath
his skin, still knotted to his flesh with worse things than fear.

The shadows
drag the nightmares down past the boy’s heart until they can’t struggle
anymore, down to the places the boy has long tried to forget.

The screaming
stops, the nightmares are no more, the boy’s eyes are black as sin.

The rider looks
shaken, but he flicks his swords to clean them, scattering shadows off the
blade and into the night. He faces the boy and takes a breath like a dancer
before the lights come on.

The curtain
rises and the rider strikes. The boy takes a small step to the side, like a
leaf falling, pushed by a bitter wind. The edge of the sword falls so close to
the boy’s skin that the shadows reach out to kiss the deadly steel as it glides
past.

The blade
swings again, and the boy slips beneath it. This time it ruffles the hair atop
the boy’s head.

They move, two
shadows in firelight, two dark shapes beneath cold stars.

They dance like
that for a moment, the night endless, the memories a humming whisper you feel
in your bones.

Beneath the
forgotten sky the boy stretches, awakens the fury in his veins. Then, the
shadows strike, pouring from the boy’s mouth in oozing strands. The rider bats
some to the side, with his second blade, his first waiting to attack. He slices
through a few more, but one grabs his ankle, another his wrist, then more hurl
themselves out of the boy’s skin. The shadows flip the rider to the ground,
cast his weapons aside, and buries him in darkness.

The nightmares
hold the rider down, covering him in liquid shadow until the boy kneels on his
chest.

“Are you going
to eat my nightmares?” The rider asks, his voice a mocking bird in a fox’s den.

The boy looks
at him and shakes his head, his eyes more terrible than a night without the
moon. He touches the rider softly between the eyes, filling him with memories
too dark to be any but his own. The rider screams and thrashes, terror leaking
like ink from his ears.

Then the boy
drinks, drinks until there is no more darkness left in the rider, no darkness
at all. The boy gets back to his feet, brushes the dust off of his pants, and
starts walking.

Beneath the
light of a pale moon, all that is left are a pair of broken swords.

*                       *                       *

The Memory

Rain drips
ebony down the side of the boy’s face. His feet sink deep in the mud, unsteady
beneath wandering steps. In the near complete of the night, there is nowhere to
go but forward. There has never been anywhere to go but forward. The way back
is written in twisted shadows on his skin, a kaleidoscope of bitter memories
without end.

The rain is a
constant drumming in endless patterns on the dark world. The distant roar of it
splatters across the silence that is his shield, dripping through the void on its
way home to earth.

Despite the
shivers deep in his bones, he lets his face tilt towards the storm. Even the
soaking rain is not enough to wash the nightmares away, but it is enough to
feel something new.

Maybe it is the
near cold of being drenched, or the mud soaking through his battered boots, but
the weather is something he hasn’t felt in quite a while. The lightning ripples
across his skin, silent thunder rolls through his heart.

In a moment
alone, when the nightmares are sullen and soaking and brooding, hiding from the
rain in the creases of his skin, the boy finally feels alone.

It refreshes
the long since weary tread of his feet, the dull and distant gaze he had held
for too long. A ghost of a smile breaks across the cold of his face. It lights
a spark, a silent whisper of memory. A good one. He hasn’t tasted a fond memory
in a long, long time.

In the downpour
it is hard to tell if it is his or someone else’s, but he watches it play all
the same, stopped in the mud, in the rain, in the road.

Silence tugs at
the corners of his mouth, warming his face in a small smile.

Alone in the
rain, he begins to walk.

*                       *                       *

The Moon

The air is full
of cold feelings, the ground rocky conversations. In the high mountains, the
forlorn moon lights a rubble strewn pass. The moon shakes her weary head,
silver light drifting pale into the deepening night.

It’s been too
long since she’s seen the sun, too long since she’s sunk below the horizon. She
cycles in and out of two worlds of shadow, between dreams and nightmares.

All she wants
is to not be here.

But the boy
doesn’t say a word, he only keeps walking, and silence is his cloak.

Snow clings to
his pants over the leather of his boots, but it’s too cold for the snow to
melt, even against his shadow strewn skin. With each step his foot breaks
through the crust of dry powder and crumbling ice, sinking shin deep.

The wind pines
for open landscapes. As it moves through mountain passes it seeks shelter
between peaks and barrows and shattered places. High beneath the moon, the
world is painted the dull silver of eyes that have long since forgotten the
taste of green fields and picnic lunches.

Kissed by
weeping clouds and tousled snow, the mountains ache with the cold, beating
heart of lovers just passing through.

The boy feels
it in his bones, it echoes from the deep stone roots. Even the moon hears its
call. The mountains just don’t want to be alone, but no one ever truly stays.
It doesn’t matter how tall they grow, how beautiful the sunrise brushes their
cheeks, they will never hold the sky in their arms.

The boy hurts
in the shadows around his heart, deep past the memories, nightmares, and
forgotten things. Lost moments, lost tastes, warm bread, honey tea, and nights
spent asleep beneath the stars. He is another just passing through, no longer a
lover, no longer anyone’s but the darkness. No one will ever hold him steady in
their arms.

He kisses the
mountain pass with each slow footfall.

The mountains
hum beneath his feet and lead him on his way.

In a high
forest nestled beneath the shoulders of three wind-torn peaks, firelight breaks
like waves against the cold and dark. The boy moves towards the red glow, his
feet the chill of an icy creek. Like a moth to a flame he walks, knowing no
good will come of it.

Painted wagons
circle a large fire, and frayed shapes huddle around the warmth of it. Voices
harsh and stuttering from the cold speak of small things, of tall tales, of
memories spent in warmer places. Even with soft dreams to guide them, the air
still blurs with white breath.

The world is
never too cold for the nightmares. They circle the wagons with predatory
strides, nothing but danger woven into shadowed patterns of darkness.

Despite their
stories, the travelers fear.

It’s a copper
strand of worry in an iron well, bold and bright and stinging like salt in an
open wound. So tight upon itself, it tremors with each passing breeze. Any
sudden movements might make it snap, sending its pieces tumbling into the dark
to be lost among nightmares.

The boy wanders
around the camp, alone in the darkness. He devours the nightmares, piece by
piece until nothing remains but mournful shadows crawling across bitter snow.

The silence
weighs so heavy upon the forest it settles like snow in the trees, breaking
tree limbs, suffocating the roaring fire to a candleflame. The boy moves back
to the camp and sits unnoticed, broken in the drifts of snow. He shudders, the
taste of memories vile in his throat. The fire explodes bright then, lighting
beyond the encampment for the briefest of moments. Sound drips back in to fill
the void as darkness flees.

For but a
moment the travelers can make out the boy in the snow, his skin crawling with
shadows.

A few of them
shriek.

“Was that a
demon?

“A nightmare?”

“No, a trick of
the fire!”

“A boy in the
snow!”

“Are you hurt?”
Someone asks.

“Come warm
yourself by the fire, let us see you.”

The boy steps
up to the fires edge, the shadows beneath his skin swaying with full bellies
and tousled secrets. He goes to take a step into the warmth, but the shadows
draw back, pulling tight against the threads of silence binding them. They
press themselves back from the light with such force it hurts, it floods his
veins with memories of lightning flashes and burning cold.

The boy moves
his foot back, and stops, standing on the border of light and dark, never quite
able to join the dancing flames.

A father
huddles for warmth beneath furs with his wife and two children. The man squints
across the fire at the boy’s silhouette.

“Why are you
walking alone in the dark?”

The boy shrugs
one shoulder, the movement slow with the weariness of a boy who carries too
much to be considered so.

“How did you
get away from the demons?” The spice trader asks, specks of paprika smeared
across his coat.

Two young girls
burrow beneath the trader’s arms. Two merchants’ guards, reeking of oil and
iron stand up, eyeing the murky shape of the boy in the night.

The boy shrugs
and sits down in the snow, just outside of the light

“Yes, yes, join
us. Get warm. It is a bad night to be alone,” the healer says from beneath a
heavy cloak. “There are nightmares out tonight, I could hear them among the
trails, taste their dark words in the back of my throat.”

The boy shakes
his head. Up here, on the mountain pass, he is the only nightmare. The dark terror
of it flutters and stings like wasps against his teeth.

“He is right, I
do not feel them any longer,” the cart driver says, nodding at the boy.

“Well, since we
no longer have to worry, my appetite is back,” says the cook. “Tell you what, lighten
the place up with a good story, and I’ll feed you too. Can’t tell from the
shadows, but you look a might wispy.”

The boy looks
at the crowd of travelers. He does not eat much anymore, the nightmares turn
his stomach with memories that should have never been lived, that stain his
heart black. Distant words, forgotten smells, old acquaintances, they tumble
about inside of him. A cataclysm, a world gone mad.

He steps to the
edge of the darkness and a memory plays across his skin. A bittersweet birdsong,
a morning in bed, a teary goodbye, a forgotten love.

It sits, heavy
and cold in the snow, the weight of regret drawing lines of pain across its
fragile skin.

The memory
isn’t his, but the travelers weep all the same.

The cart driver
rubs the tears from his eyes and is the first to move. Soon they all sway out
of the trance, loneliness weeping from behind their eyes.

How can one be
so alone, yet see so much flickering in the shadowed places of his eyes?

The cook moves
next, stepping up to the fire to spoon thick stew in a bowl. He walks over to
the boy and hands him the meal without leaving the ring of light. Sadness wells
like hunger in their hearts, and pity worries knots in their clothes. They wish
him to be whole again, but the message is clear. They belong warm in the light,
and he is born of shadow.

The boy sits in
the snow, spooning choked silence down alongside the stew.

After a long
moment of quiet beneath a tired moon, the father speaks.

“I felt that
like a clap of thunder in my chest. It reminds me of moments spent in the dark,
watching people leave, watching life through broken window panes. It reminds me
of a story, of a lonely moon.”

The fire
crackles, dull against the silent night.

The father
gathers his children around him, and heaves a sigh that flows from the depths
of his bones.

“The moon fell
in love. She was bright and silver and proud then, not the pale of forgotten
moments and distant lovers. She rose into the sky each night, brighter than the
stars. She was a halo of opal that could dim those celestial candleflames to
hazy thoughts of their former selves.”

“She was
content with ruling her night sky, with guiding travelers through the pale,
with watching things not meant to be seen. Each morning she’d slip back beneath
the covers of the horizon and dream in half-sleep, spinning over other worlds.”

“One evening
she stayed up too late, growing dull and sleepy as light struck the world. It
was golden and orange and soft as dewdrop grass. The lull of it drifted like
sand over mountains and through treetops, waking the world with a loving touch.
It was beautiful beyond anything the moon had ever seen, so different from her
world of silver and half-light shadows. In those early hours she met the sun.
He was proud as she, and oh so different.”

“Each breath
was a symphony, each yawn a rage of wild colors. He dashed over the earth a
wild thing, untamable, inescapable, he was life itself shining bright in the
sky.”

“The moon was quiet
and cold as falling water beneath cedar trees, silver as a darting fish,
content with watching, waiting, longing. But then she met him. She hung in the
sky all morning, basking in his light, shining it back to him, to the world
below.”

“They stole a
few hours together each morning before the sky grew fully light. She would
disappear from our sky then, to a dark place, velvet and shy and far from our world.
He awaited her there, his light burning dim, but the longer he stayed with her,
the brighter he grew, until the honey-smoothed velvet of the dark world faded
to daylight. Then he would slip away, up over the horizon.”

“Each moment
alone together created a spark of light in the darkest of places, but also cast
a shadow. That was when the nightmares grew, out of those hours when neither
the moon nor sun were in the sky, when neither could lessen the deepest of
shadows. The nightmares preyed on men and women and children, feeding them fear
until the world stank of it.”

“They roved in
terrors across mountain passes, open plains, wooded hills. In those quiet hours
before the dawn, those nightmares knew the smell of dreams, they followed along
on slow, lumbering feet, sinking deep into the shadows of the dreamers.”

“Then, a man fell
from a distant star and worked his magic on the world. He fought the
nightmares, swallowed them whole, but there were too many, he could not hope to
win in both the worlds of night and day. People wept when he drank their
shadows pale, wept for they were finally free from the weight of it, that their
dreams were no longer plagued in darkness. But not all, too many nightmares
escaped him in the early hours of the dawn.”

“The man met
the sun then, in the velvet place beyond the sky. They waited for the moon to
join them, for a decision to be made. A decision made in blood and bone and the
tired exhales of people who know they have lost.”

“’They must go
somewhere,’ the moon said. ‘Shall they haunt your dreams or your waking
moments?’ The sun cared deeply for the moon, but he would not let that burden
weigh so heavy upon his glowing world. The sun rose furiously into the sky,
escaping from the moon. He shone so bright and beautiful that the nightmares
fled, howling back into the night.”

“They would
never again walk beneath the sunlight, and neither would the moon.”

“The moon wept,
light growing dull as darkness swept over the world around her. ‘Will you leave
me too?’ she choked as nightmares lumbered below her. The man looked up, his
face sad and weary and ancient. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I will never leave you. I am
too full of darkness to dance beneath the sun, and I need you to light my
way.’”

“And the
nightmares flocked to him, and he held them at bay, drawing poisoned memories
from soiled minds. He walked, night following him like a stale breath, wrapping
him in shadow and satin and terrible choices. He walked until he had forgotten
the moon, had forgotten why he was walking. He poisoned her with writhing
shadows until she hung sad and lonely and rotting high above. The moon drifted
a thoughtless thing, wrapped in melancholy that tasted of spring water turned
brackish. She had run out of tears long ago.”

“It had been so
long since she had felt the kiss of the sun on her cheeks, tasted something
sweet on her tongue, but that didn’t matter now. Still the man walked, and so
the moon followed.”

The world hangs
motionless as a cold, winter pool slowly icing over. Death marching. There is a
long moment of stillness, it stretches until the stars give a quarter turn, and
the moon slides wearily into place.

The boy stands
then, his silence weighing on the camp like a funeral shroud. The travelers all
look at him, watch as he steps from moving shadow to pale moonlight.

The moon sings
a swan song, a whispered tune she’s been singing since the nightmares came. It
sways in time with the beat of his silence, a lilting lullaby of lost time
spent in dark places.

Sorrow rolls
like tears down his cheeks. It drips between his shadows, pooling in the cracks
between memories as guilty as slamming doors.

The boy reaches
into his pocket, finding the honey kissed by the sun.

He looks up at
the moon, his eyes deep and dark as the haunted memories fluttering about his
heart. Standing on the spine of the world, graveyard bones beneath his feet,
the boy breathes in a lungful of thin air. Mixed with sullen moonlight, it
tastes like a life left abandoned by the ones you love.

The boy reaches
up a hand to the moon. She drifts close to earth, as if she can feel the heat
of the sun etched into tombstone boulders capped in snow. She sinks until only
a forlorn sigh fits between his ink-stained fingertips and her ghostly skin.
She sinks until the white-brushed ribs of trees kiss her belly.

Shivering in
the light of her own nimbus, the gentle touch of cedar and pine is almost too
much for her lonely mind. Beneath a velvet sky, she listens to the shadows,
dark as nightmares on his skin. She tries to lull them out, to help her sleep,
but he pulls them back, ceasing their whisperings with a silence deep enough to
shake the mountains.

The shadows
writhe in anger, upset that such an easy prey is just out of reach.

A sob crowds
the moons throat. It chokes her craters, echoes against the bone-white canyons
of her.

The boy’s eyes
are the sadness one see’s at funerals, the eyes of forgotten graves watching
loved ones gather around a new headstone.

He looks inward
and touches the moon with the steady hand of someone waiting for a death that
will never come. A memory blossoms across her surface, one of his, one he
hasn’t shown even himself in a long, long time.

Leaving, that
is what it was, a memory he didn’t want to remember, but couldn’t hope to
forget. The dream kept him walking, kept the darkness stitched so close to his
skin.

It was the
moment her hand had left his and had taken another, had taken the hand of the
dreamer. The memory he had locked away, but the face he remembered, it was the
face of the man that had tricked him, had doomed the boy to a life of darkness.

The girl in his
memories had forgotten the embrace of a dream, she’d known nothing but
nightmares. The boy had freed her from that, the dreamer had shown him how, had
begged him to save the girl. It was a trick; it had always been a trick.

The weight of
it stabs into his gut like angry words left to sour overnight. The memory of
her hand slipping away draws the breath from his lungs, suffocating him worse
than three days spent buried in a grave.

He had given
her the world, had taken away her pain, had been tricked into becoming the very
thing he was helping her escape.

She had left
him then, left the boy for the dreamer, the one who had once orchestrated her
nightmares. The dreamer no longer let demons plague her sleep, no, instead he
fed her dreams so she wouldn’t stray. The boy had helped see to that, he had
swallowed her nightmares, had let her escape to the light he could no longer
touch.

The memory, it
breaks his heart asunder.

The moon sinks
deeper into mournful despair. She drips with dull moonstones, scattering
freezing motes upon the travelers.

The boy tears
himself from the memory, letting the shadows shift restlessly upon his skin.
They clamor to be heard, to see their old master suffocate beneath their
embrace.

A gentle glow
fills his hand as the boy reaches out to the moon. The honey filled with
sunlight warms his tired skin. He holds the jar tight between his ink-stained
fingers, letting her taste the memory of it. The shadows thrash and pull back
from the light.

The moon weeps
then, weeps tears of joy with the taste of lost love on her lips. She rises
back into the sky, a wistful thing flooded with fond memories of sun-kissed
daisies. Silver light floats like fairy lights down upon the snow, longing
bittersweet and full of promises not yet broken.

The boy turns
his back to the moon, shoulders her pain like all the others, and starts
walking.

*                       *                       *

The Boneyard

Empty graves
echo like war drums beneath the boy’s feet. Tombstones scatter like chess
pieces in a game long since lost. Bitter silence hangs a noose in a boneyard of
damaged souls and memories too broken to be called anything but nightmares.

The boneyard
growls hungrily, gnashing rotting hangman’s teeth in the true dark. The deep
snarl winds through the gravestones, making the deepening silence shiver
beneath a veiled moon. The graves stare at him, empty darkness lost in space.
They remember the taste of his flesh; he remembers the feel of dead-man’s dirt
rough against his skin.

The graveyard
smiles in a memory shared, its tombstone teeth broken and wanting. The boy
feels it beneath his feet, a poisoned shadow sicker than he, a roiling darkness
hidden from the moon.

It beckons, it
waits, it beckons again.

The boy moves
between graves, stepping over shattered crypts long since picked clean of
memory, long since forgotten in a river of time. Dead trees, cracked and bone
white, droop over flowers so brittle they turn to dust at his passing.

He breathes in
a borrowed breath and lets it out again, the twice swallowed air stale in the
back of his throat, hopeless and timid in his lungs. He sways beneath a hanging
arch of bearded moss and steps into a grey and forgotten place.

A bag of bones
waits on a tombstone, humming a funeral dirge. The skeleton bounces its heels
against the broken granite, its bones clacking with each strike. It stares up
at the sky, yellowed spine strung together with false memories and graveyard
dew.

The skeleton
loosens its jaw in a wide yawn, its song swallowed by the old bones. The
graveyard shifts around them, rousing awake the shadows and tortured
nightmares.

It is not a
kind place, not a place where loved ones are laid to rest. The boneyard sees to
that. It whispers unpleasant thoughts in waiting ears, reminds the trees of
tortured pasts. The nightmares call, howling among the tombstones. The
graveyard growls from between executioners’ lips and whips them into a frenzy.
They stomp and lumber and fling spittle from distended jaws, home among the
treachery and broken things.

The boy feels
it in his chest, in the squirming marrow of his bones, hot anger like broken
glass in his mouth. It starts a fire in his lungs, burning the stale, dead man’s
air to dust. His limbs flush with true dark, blacker than the shadows romping
in the boneyard, black as his mood, black as his heart.

His teeth bare
in the grimace of a proud man before a hangman’s noose.

He raises a
fist into the air.

The silence is
infinite.

The nightmares
tremble beneath the quiet, cower behind broken granite blocks. The names
engraved upon the stones have long since faded alongside their memories.

When the
silence slips away, circling the boy in a funeral shroud, the skeleton turns
his gaze downwards.

“How long has
it been, o nightmare of mine?” The skeleton asks, its voice reverberating off
its cracked ribs and yellowed jaw. “Too long, oh, yes, too long.”

The boy takes a
step forward, trailing a hand across gravestones, drinking the sensation of a
life long since spent, of too many more drunk on regret.

The graveyard
heaves its shaggy head of brittle weeds and dead trees, trying to shake the
nightmares out of their fear.

Bones rattle
and chime as the skeleton gives a madman’s laugh.

“The boneyard
hasn’t forgotten you; it doesn’t like when one gets away,” the skeleton
cackles. “Maybe you don’t speak anymore, but oh, sweet night, did you scream.”

The boy does
not utter a word, he watches the skeletons feet become shrouded by a will-o-the-wisp
as it snakes between jagged stones.

The graveyard
smiles at the memory, more mist creeping into the glade of bones.

“It took you
three days to figure that out, three days to keep the demons at bay, three days
to die,” the skeleton says, his bones jittering in the mist. “You were bad at
it then, but you are the nightmare now.”

The boy is
darkness, he can feel it in his bones. Graveyard shadows and nightmare smiles,
knit in place against pale skin. He remembers that moment in flashes of pain,
of treacherous laughs, of boneyard dirt shoveled over him. Beyond the glimpses
of darkness and the smell of a grave, the memories blur, too deep to draw from
all the rest.

The skeleton
leads him home and they stand over the open grave adorned in welcoming shadows.
They look down, and the taste of dirt and ash and dead men linger like regrets
on the boy’s tongue.

“You don’t
remember, do you? But you can’t forget, you won’t ever forget,” the bag of
bones guffaws, shaking a centipede loose from his spine.

The graveyard
urges him forward, just one more step, into the shadows, into his grave. It is
the only place he will ever sleep.

“O, sweet
nightmare, don’t fight it. You can’t remember it, can’t feel it, not up here
among the living, not here where the shadows dance. If you can’t fear, you will
never know,” the skeleton calls, its voice thunder in a forest of bones. “Down
you go.”

The boy says
nothing, but he steps forward, and disappears into the darkness.

The shadows
reach up, pulling him deeper. They twine their long fingers about him, pull in
darkness and grave dirt until all is dark, until it presses like a beating
heart against his chest.

In the true
dark, nothing makes a sound.

In the true
dark, he is alone.

The boy keeps
his fear pressed tight in his throat. It fills him with the need to claw at the
earth until his flesh is bloody ribbons. The spiraling dread urges him to tear
the shadows asunder, to drink until there is nothing left. He slips deeper
beneath that fear as it slowly fills the grave, covering him inch by inch in
memory and darkness and boneyard dirt.

He takes one
last breath, and goes under.

Terror rips out
from beneath his flesh, a living, breathing thing. Eyes wink in the darkness.
Black shapes lurk, darker than true, viler than the dreamer and three days in
the grave waiting to die.

Memories of
knives carve him into puzzle pieces. Rebuild him with shadows and memories not
his. Darkness creeps, he can see it swim through warm dreams and flower fields,
ancient memories slowly fading to black, taken from lives he’s never lived.

Above it all
the true dark, like a knife of shadow in the heart. It gives a courting sneer,
watches from the wings, waits for the darkness to take over everything. It’s
the look of a suitor who has already won.

The boy looks
down at the black blood dripping from his fingertips. Cold washes over him,
drags him to his knees. Nightmares move across his vision, no longer dancing,
no longer tame. He coughs and his lungs are filled with the dirt that lays to
rest a forgotten man, one, final time.

The pain is
gone, but the panic remains a taut, copper band played with a fiddler’s bow.
But there is no sound, no, only the vibration of it, an irrational song that
quivers in his bones. He spirals, an unending retreat into darkness.

He doesn’t
fight it, not this time, he’s been down worse paths. Instead, he grasps it like
a lifeline.

He is the
darkness now.

The boy stands
and roars, but no sound comes out. He spits grave dirt from his mouth and when
he clenches his fists, the shadows bow to his command.

The broken
glass in his chest doesn’t fit back together. It guts him, carves apart his
insides until his bones grind the glass to dust. The shadows pour in, the
memories of it all, of three days in the grave, of the three days tortured
before.

They hurt worse
than barbed promises and brittle lies running through his veins. What hurts the
most are the memories of her.

The boy pushes
up, struggling against the true dark, against those nightmares he had taken
from her. He doesn’t want to remember, but he can’t forget. They cut through his
bloodstream, and the colors leak through.

The true dark
fights against him, but it can’t win.

He is the
darkness now.

The boy crawls
from the earth, clawing at overgrown weeds and discarded stones until he leans
against the side of the half-filled grave. His limbs shake with words that will
never be said.

Above him, the
skeleton is perched on the gravestone, watching the memories play across the
boy’s skin.

They are
shapeless as half-glimpsed dreams, bloodthirsty as jealousy. The boy aches as
they bleed from his veins.

“Ah,” the
skeleton sighs. “The dreamer never told you what would come of it, what would
happen when you ate her nightmares.”

The boy says
nothing, but true black leaks from behind his eyes.

“So, you lost
her, and she had him. The nightmare who stalked her dreams became the one hope
she dreamed about.”

The skeleton
laughs, his bones shaking and clattering in the growing fog.

“What putrid
jealousy, what cunning revenge. He pulled your strings and made you dance a
jig,” the skeleton hoots, dancing like a puppet wielded by a mad master.

The skeleton
leaps between gravestones, waking the dead from their shallow slumbers. The
graveyard rumbles in the mist, a mocking noise. The noise of a predator waiting
for its dinner to lay down and die.

The boy watches
the shadows dancing beneath his skin, holding his hands in front of him as if
he can still see her memories swimming through his blood. He sits in his grave,
listening to the boneyard wake up.

After a moment
alone, he climbs up into the mist.

The skeleton
stops its dancing, watching half-decayed corpses rise from churned earth. Its
skeletal smile turns brittle with age, with hatred burning like words in its
teeth.

“He tricked you
into becoming something she couldn’t live with, and her into thinking he was
something she couldn’t live without. But you’d do it again, in a moment,
wouldn’t you?”

The moon mourns
in silver pale, far, far above them.

The boy looks
out across the boneyard, turns slowly towards the darkness, and begins to walk.

*                       *                       *

The Fallen

Shadows breath
stirs gentle beneath his skin. The truth weighs heavy as secrets do, heavier
than usual, too heavy to want to keep walking.

The boy keeps
walking anyways.

His feet have
long since been tired.

The moon is drifting,
she has slipped into a mood so dark, the world is nearly true. Nightmares
stumble along the road, caught in the dark wake of their master.

The night air
twists with frenzied screams and forgotten letters, silent as the grave, drawn
tight as razor wire. The boy hunches his shoulders against the slicing pain, he
lets the world have its due.

His mood is
dark as the moons.

His skin is
darker. His shadows twice deep. They remind him of all the little horrors that obey
his every call.

The stitching
on his heart frays just a little, aching as if he has lost her all over again.
He does not mourn himself; he has been lost for far too long.

The nightmares
lumber along like weary dogs looking for a hand to guide them. They move
through darkness, bitter thoughts beneath sallow skin. The boy feels them like
echoing heartbeats, sick and lethargic and full of poison.

Shadows kiss
his hands, whisper biting words and jagged phrases. Razor winds peel at him
until the flesh is raw and bleeding black.

The boy plods
on, one tired footfall after another, silent in the unending darkness. The dust
beneath his feet cows at each step. Shivers at each breath.

A nightmare
collapses across his path, too tired to go on, too tired to resist the memory
of a time spent in sunlight, beneath a tree of gold and green. It keens, a
wounded animal too poisoned to survive. It can feel the dreamer, it can feel
her.

The boy stops
and kneels before it. The nightmare snaps at him with all the effort of a kite
caught in a gentle wind. The boy lays a hand on its head, reminding it of
moments in dark places, of pain in shadowed lighting. The nightmare screams,
the sound hollow and broken in the silence.

In the waiting stillness,
the boy drinks, long and deep, the taste of copper on his tongue. Shadow wings,
too clipped to fly, unfurl from the darkness behind him. Nothing remains but a
patch of cold earth.

Black is his
heart, black is his mood.

The boy stands,
and the nightmares move on.

*                       *                       *

The Nightmare

Torches burn
like nails in soft flesh, dancing pools of pain in a blind world. They shiver
and move along towering battlements and cobblestone roads.

The weight of
civilization hangs heavy on the boy’s neck. Places full of people are reminders
of warm tea and soft bread and never feeling sunlight again. Never being wanted
again.

A sliver of
darkness crossing the moonlight, a forgotten memory too bitter to bring to the
light.

The boy stands
silent, an unmarked grave in a place no one dares visit. The shadows strain
against his skin, towards the roiling darkness of the sky.

They move out
of rhythm, pulsing sluggish and slow, forgotten fear and ice water spinning in
unseen currents. The boy’s skin crawls with it, a corrupted unease, a deep
melancholy of silence that blankets his bones.

The sky is too
dark, the moon too far gone.

He is the
darkness, and it weighs against his flesh like a memory that had long since
forgotten the taste of him.

The boy listens
for a long moment, weighing rancid thoughts in his head. They pull at him, this
way and that, until finally, he steps forward into shadow.

Moving beyond
torchlight and wandering eyes the boy walks towards the front gate of the city.
Demons lurk in the shadows. They are not his own. They do not come when his
silence calls. These demons aren’t nestled and woven into his skin, these
demons wedge into the cracks of things, seen from the corner of eyes and felt
in goosebumps rippling along cool skin.

These demons
are deeper, darker than true, lonelier than knowing secrets that no one wants
returned.

They sit on the
shoulders of guards, lean against signposts, darken doorsteps already shrouded
in shadows. They watch him, regret and malice searching for his own.

The boy looks
away, turns hollow eyes from grim faces and walks past them. Dark secrets ooze
against his silence as he passes, a rotten film against a bubble of stillness.
These demons search out nightmares, feed on them, breathe them into vicious
life.

The darkness
beckons him into town, swallowing him among cobbled streets and tiled rooftops.
The castle towers above. He moves between alleys and back streets, always walking
towards the brooding fortress on the hilltop.

People wander
about, staring at the uneasy sky, vague and tarnished and dreamlike. Murky
opalescence trails from their chests, wandering unnoticed through the streets
towards the dark castle. The dreamer keeps them tied, shielding lambs’ eyes
from the knife. He feeds them dreams, he works their strings, but he has too
many demons for the memories to be anything but shallow, hollow, husks.

A river of
grime beneath silver moonshine, that is all they are.

The boy looks
at them with eyes that have tasted melancholy turned brackish in forgotten
places, the sluggish beat in his heart is heavy as a last goodbye. He doesn’t
want to take their darkness, there is so much of it. He is too tired, too weary,
too knowing of what the dreamer is doing.

The boy does it
anyways, in sips and small swallows, moving along lonely streets filled with
walking dreams. Hidden in darkness, no one notices the boy with shadows
crawling beneath his skin.

No one but the
stranger.

The stranger
stands beside the boy, staring up at the castle.

“They live in
limbo, their sleep a darkness broken by scatters of light rays. Brittle is what
it is, a surface of ice with darkness beneath. They dream, but it is heroin in
tender veins, empty and fleeting and ending in violent shivers. It leaves them
sprawling and quaking like addicts in alleyways, always wanting more, always
wanting to escape. But they know it’s killing them; they know the darkness
beneath the dream is slowly eating the warm memories from the places behind
their hearts. The dreamer has none, so the memories can never be his. Only she
really dreams, but it’s a waking trance so deep she cannot see reality. I’ve
seen it in her eyes, cunning dulled by a storm of memories not hers, shining
like opals in a night sky. They are not his either, they are stolen from the
wandering corpses around you.”

The stranger
looks into the depths of the boy’s eyes, past the shifting darkness and violent
murmurs. Deeper still, deeper.

“She is no
longer your dark beauty,” the stranger sighs. “You saw to that.”

The boy’s
shoulders slump with the weight of a memory, her screaming in the darkness.
Echoing back, a hundred cries, from a hundred throats, all drifting inside of
him, rattling about his bones.

In the space
between breaths, the void between screams, he finds the silence all things
crave. The boy weaves it about the shadows until they slow their reckless
shudders.

“Everything
casts shadows,” the stranger says. “Even the good deeds. In those shadows, the
nightmares wait. And there you are, using silence as your cloak, binding the
night to you. She might have known you once, but darkness breeds darkness and
you have swallowed many nightmares since then.”

Loneliness is a
river stone, immovable in a strong current, the rest of the world racing by.

The boy’s head
droops low, watching those same nightmares dance beneath his skin, sadness and
silence binding flesh and shadow.

“If you want to
face the pain, after all I have told you, you still must find a way in, past
the ever-changing light of the half-dreams. How will you of all people do that?
The gates are barred, even to strangers like me.”

The boy looks
up, the dark memories behind his eyes a sickly weight on the stranger’s heart.

A breath like
midnight winds stir the boy’s hair, then he steps into one shadow, and out
another. Deep in the castle, deeper into darkness. The lord of dreams cares not
for the living, for those who cannot see what lies beyond the touch of night.

The halls are
dark, the shadows full and shuddering against the lull of silken dreams.

The boy can
feel it brush against his chest, a warm hand on his breastbone. The dream is
the sickly sweet of a drunken flatter, arsenic washed in sunlit honey.

Around the
corner, another dream forms, a grotesque creature of brittle moonlight. It
twists and bucks and becomes a beautiful fae being, berries in her hair, leaves
brushing her shoulders. She skips towards the beam of dream light, crawling
inside as a twisted, wonderful thing. The creature disappears, invading the memory,
all sweet bells and honeysuckle with fangs hidden beneath.

The boy
remembers dark nights when monsters invaded a different sort of dream, he
remembers the very same man who sent them.

The boy keeps
walking, feeling the tide wash over him, the dreams in their aching glory. They
are shallow as crumbling snow over a precipice, bright rays of light to turn
your eyes from the shadows. The boy knows the monsters beneath the moonlight.

He enters the
throne room, a hapless shape beneath an overcast sky. The place reeks with the
traces of nightmares hanging ancient from the vaulted ceiling. Demons crowd the
twice-deep shadows, black enough for two. Their hungry hands grope out from the
darkness, trying to touch the patterns beneath his skin.

The castle has
not seen the sun in too long a time, but the stones do not crave the touch of
warmth, not like the long road that has taken him here. Out in the world, his
every step aches a pitiful sob in the night, choked and starving for a warm
caress.

No, these
rough-hewn walls bleed for darkness. They lean in towards the boy, licking at
the shadows beneath his skin as if they do not drink enough anymore.

The castle was
never meant for the light, it had wallowed in a haunted nightscape for far too
long. Despite the half-dreams wandering the halls, this ruin is made for
nightmares.

The castle
sinks in on itself, a dark mood for a dark shape. It exhales in a deep sigh, a
settling storm of frenzied thoughts.

The poisoned
breath draws the demons in, lures them from troubled minds and dark places.
They feed on the hollow dreams of hollow souls, changing the endings into
memories not-quite right. They slip into winding beams of partial-dreams,
changing shape like the fae creature of before.

They look at
the boy and pass him by. The boy doesn’t dream, he only remembers. The visions
that dance only for him are already too dark to twist into something bitter.

He takes a step
forward, brushing aside marionette strings and memories. Shadow veins snake
through the starlight, nightmares nestle in soft dreams.

The center of
the web is dense, a murky opalescence wrapping a dark figure. The figure steals
the breath from unwatched lungs, puts a flush in pale cheeks. Beneath the
dreamy stare of a lover in heated moments are dark memories. The boy knows what
they are; sleeping forms paralyzed in fear, darkness approaching, screaming
until your lungs give out.

All of the
half-happy dreams and dark reminders wrap about the boy’s skin, pulling him
deeper, deeper. He hangs suspended in this murky place, swaying in the hollow
current of tethered dreams and unfinished truths.

The silence
fills the room with coffin nails and grave dirt, slipping around dream webs of
songbird lies that never leave rasping throats.

He drifts, and
then there she is, at the center of it all, sunlight in her hair, raspberries
tart on her lips.  His body aches from
the strain of holding tangled madness and shadowed sighs, and now his heart
bleeds at the sight of her. It drips cold down the inside of his ribcage, pools
forgotten in the pit of his stomach.

The castle
moans, and his shadows cower.

The boy closes
his eyes as a memory of her scrapes gravel across his skin. Shadows play hide
and seek in her hair, melancholy commits suicide in her dark and sunken eyes.
Fingers tremble, skin pales, and behind her lips, an endless scream, hoarse and
voiceless in the void.

No longer is
she that same dark beauty, she is golden now. Sunshine fills the gaps the boy
left when he drank her sorrow.

The boy opens
his eyes, replacing the memory with the girl dancing in the throne room. She sings
to herself as if demons do not feed hungrily on the golden beam of light entering
her. The light streams from the murky haze at the center of it all, where the
dreamer sits on his hollow throne.

The dreamer
moves, and the veil falls like rain.

The light
brightens, pulsing soft from his chest to hers. She laughs and skips about,
patting demons’ heads as she prances over shadows.

“She isn’t
yours anymore,” the dreamer snarls, the face of a dark god on a night with no
moon. “She stopped being yours when you took her darkness.”

The boy says
nothing, only watches her with eyes too weary to do much else. The pressure
sits on his chest till his ribs crack, coffin nails hammer into his tired
flesh.

“It doesn’t
matter how it happened, but she barely remembers the nightmares from long ago,
she doesn’t feel them anymore, doesn’t see them creep about her paralyzed form
at night. It doesn’t matter that I was there, watching, waiting. It only
matters that she is free, and I was the one who drew her from that well. She
doesn’t want to see that darkness, not again. You don’t want to hurt her, do
you?”

The boy looks
down at the floor, suffering, nestled amongst his nightmares.

“She doesn’t
want to remember, but here you are, the memory she tried to cut from her with
jagged knives and candleflames. It’s written in your skin, living proof of
moments best left forgotten,” the dreamer’s voice grows quieter, so full of
hate that it falls red from his lips. “Nightmares don’t get happy endings.”

The blow knocks
the boy to his knees. His limbs tremble and the castle leans in, whispering
tragedy into the silence. Demons beckon faceless from the shadows; nightmares
press embers and lead weights against his temples.

All try to drag
him below the true dark, to the only place he hasn’t yet seen.

The girl
falters, shaking her head as if waking from a dream. The light dims and flickers,
making the dreamer stagger.

“Is…is that
you?” She wonders as if from deep water, as if her words are blurred from
sleep.

The girl
shivers and shakes and wraps thin arms about herself, her light fading, lips
like raspberries turning blue.

The boy blinks
through wavering darkness, legs too weak to stand, too hopeless to want to try.

She approaches,
feet moving slowing through growing shadows, ducking underneath stuttering
dreams left to fend for themselves. The darkness grows waist-deep, ebbing and
flowing, dark water on a moonless night.

“You left, so
long ago. I missed the memory of you, but now it is so bright. Starlight and
cool grass, long nights spent in your arms, fireflies lighting the way to your
heart. You wouldn’t let me sleep, wouldn’t let me scream all alone.” She
reaches out a hand, brushing aside hollow cobwebs of dreams. “All I see is
sunlight now. He makes it all better. He made me unafraid, and when I didn’t
need you anymore, he made me forget.”

The blade digs
deep into his chest. Black blood traces patterns down his bruised skin,
skirting nightmare shadows with hungry teeth. His stitching shudders and starts
to come undone. Nightmares press against the seams.

“But oh, how I
miss you now, why can’t I remember you? Only in flashes, only in small moments,
only your face and the ache that replaced those missing pieces.”

She shudders,
the light flashing bright again, soothing her mind.

She shakes her
head, weary and broken. The dreamer steps closer, a hand outstretched. They
both stagger, her eyes changing to the pitch dark that they had been before, to
the color he had once known.

Her hand breaks
the still of the boy’s silence, her thumb brushes his lips.

“You were
always the crisp of autumn, falling leaves brushing against my skin.” Tears
drip clear down her cheeks. “Now you’re so cold, and your demons, they taunt
me.”

The shadows try
to escape the loose patterns of quiet and broken memories. He just wants it to
be over, just wants the darkness to be gone. His veins ache with the
nightmares, the dreams too dark to be seen at night. He wishes to sink to the
floor, to let the silence become his shroud, let the cold stones have their
fill.

The girl leans
forward, a strand of hair escaping from behind her ear. It traces a line of
fire across his face. Her lips are dewdrops during sunrise. They burn into his
forehead, too much sunshine for a shadow.

A nightmare
brushes her lips and she falls backward, hands brushing frantically at her
face.

“N…no. Please
no!” She sobs.

A shadow passes
over her face and her body wracks with silent screams. Her corpse thrashes,
fingernails peeling stone from the floor. Her eyes dart around the room,
helpless, hopeless, utterly alone.

She is filled
with darkness, with broken screams and unslept nights. The shadows come to
haunt her, the darkness to guide her way back into madness beyond the doors of
stone. Beneath her skin, her body weeps a mourning tune.

She remembers
how it felt to be broken, or at least the ghostly memory of these things, and
so she pulls back from him.

The boy chokes
on the weary breath that enters his lungs, his broken heart aching. The dreamer
meets the boy’s eyes, smug and seated back on his throne.

The boy crawls
over to the girl, kissing her on the lips, drawing the nightmare from beneath
her skin.

He keeps it
beneath his tongue, drinking her darkness until it is gone.

She’s naked
beneath the shadows, she’s nothing without the dreams.

The dreamer
smirks a knowing smirk. He knew, he always knew.

“I…I can’t do this. I’ve known them too long,” she sobs, shivering and small on the cold
floor. Darkness drains from the stones as the light grows again. Despite the
dregs of him drifting in her lungs, she will not meet his gaze.

Memories too painful to be real, staring at her with moping eyes. He is everything she
wishes to forget.

He looks at her, feeling the weight of her words in his veins. They tie a hangman’s noose
about his throat and kick away the stool.

“I can carry it, just a little longer,” the boy whispers.

The silence is broken for but a moment, and a single nightmare tears itself free, ragged
stitches of broken quiet wrapped about its haggard shape. It flees into the
night, but the silence returns, this time deeper than a sky without stars, than
a fourth day in the grave.

The boy
struggles to his feet, too weary to be tired any longer.

She looks up at
him then, eyes full of pity and shame, sharp as broken bottles. The light
floods her again, draining the dark from her eyes. Her gaze wanders, forgetting
that he ever existed.

The dreamer
nods and settles on his throne, the haze of half-finished dreams hiding him
once more.

The boy
breathes in a hollow breath, silent as the endless night.

Then, he turns
and walks away.

In the end, there is nothing
left but shadow…