When Shadows Find Their Voice

The villagers called it the Hollowing—the moment dusk bled into night, when shadows stretched too long and the air hummed with a sound like a choir of drowned voices. No one dared step outside after the last bell tolled at sundown. No one but Elara, the girl who heard the shadows sing.

She’d always been different. Born with one eye the color of storm clouds and the other flecked with gold, Elara saw what others couldn’t: the flicker of a smile on a statue’s lips, the way raindrops froze midair when grief struck the widow’s house, and the shadows. Not as mere absences of light, but as creatures. They slithered up walls like ink, pooling at her feet in patterns that whispered follow.

Tonight, they sang louder.

Elara knelt by her mother’s grave at the forest’s edge, her fingers brushing the weathered headstone. The villagers had burned her mother three years ago for humming a tune that made the church’s candles weep wax tears. “Witch,” they’d spat, but Elara knew the truth—her mother had taught the shadows to speak.

A cold breath grazed her neck.

“Little singer,” the shadows cooed in unison, their voices a cascade of fractured notes. “The Veil thins tonight. Follow the hymn, and we’ll show you what drowned with her.”

The forest ahead rippled. Trees bent like old men bowing, their branches knitting into a tunnel dripping with bioluminescent moss. The shadows surged forward, morphing into a road of pulsing black silk. Elara gripped her mother’s pendant—a cracked violin string coiled in a vial—and stepped into the dark.

The path led her to The Cathedral of Echoes, a crumbling structure swallowed by ivy and time. Its spires pierced the moon, and its doors were etched with sheet music no human hand could play—the notes were too sharp, too many. Shadows pooled in the crevices, humming the melody etched into the stone.

“This is where she fell,” the shadows hissed. “Your mother learned our song. But she feared the price.”

Elara pressed her palm to the door. It swung open with a groan.

Inside, the air tasted of rust and wilted roses. The walls were lined with mirrors, but they reflected nothing alive—only shadows writhing like smoke, and a thousand Elaras with hollow eyes and bleeding ears. At the altar stood a grand piano, its keys made of yellowed bone, and atop it sat a crown of thorns and starlight.

“Play,” the shadows demanded. “Finish her symphony, and the Veil will part.”

Elara hesitated. Her mother’s journal had warned of this: “The shadows bargain in half-truths. To play their song is to surrender your voice.” But the crown glimmered, and in its light, Elara saw fragments of her mother—laughing, conducting the wind, her hair tangled with fireflies.

She sat at the piano.

The first note was a shriek. The second, a sob. By the third, the mirrors cracked, and the shadows leapt into the reflections, clawing at the glass. Elara played faster, her hands bleeding as the bone keys bit into her skin. The crown floated toward her, its thorns digging into her temples, and suddenly—

She saw.

The Veil tore.

The Cathedral dissolved, replaced by a drowned city of obsidian towers and streets paved with teeth. This was Nyxen, the shadow realm her mother had once ruled. Here, music was life—the citizens’ hearts beat in time with the great Clockwork Orchestra, their souls woven from ballads and requiems. But Nyxen was dying. The Orchestra’s gears had rusted, its conductor (a man with her mother’s gold-flecked eyes) lying stiff on his podium, a dagger of light in his chest.

“Your grandfather,” the shadows murmured. “He refused to silence the song that bound our worlds. So the Bright Ones killed him. Your mother fled to yours, but they hunted her too.”

Elara stumbled toward the Orchestra, the crown searing her skull. The shadows swarmed her, pleading: “Restart the music. Nyxen will rise, and you’ll rule. But the Bright Ones will come for you, as they did for her.”

She reached for the conductor’s baton.

The choice:

Elara understood now. The shadows’ song was a weapon, a bridge between realms. To play it was to declare war on the light—to become a queen of endings, as her mother had feared. But the pendant at her throat vibrated, and in the silence, she heard her mother’s true voice, unclouded by shadow:

“Break the baton, Elara. Break the cycle.”

With a scream, Elara smashed the baton against the podium.

The crown shattered. Nyxen dissolved into ash, and the shadows wailed, unraveling into smoke. Elara fell to her knees as the Cathedral collapsed around her, the piano keys crumbling to dust.

Epilogue:

At dawn, the villagers found Elara in the forest, her eyes now both storm-cloud gray. She couldn’t speak—her voice had burned to embers—but in her hands, she clutched a single sheet of music, its notes glowing faintly.

That night, the shadows returned, softer now, their song a lullaby. They curled at Elara’s feet like chastened hounds, and she smiled.

She’d write a new symphony. Not of conquest, but of balance.

After all, shadows cannot sing without light.