Shadow's Sister

Her people would always remember her as the villain. She knew why, and she accepted it, but it made her wonder how many other villains through history had made an honest mistake, a tiny moment that should have been forgotten in the sea of tiny moments that history was made up of, but instead changed the very world they lived in. Set the timeline on a new path towards destruction.

Towards the rivers flowing red with blood as the world went mad.

It had been a day like any other, the wool of her school skirt had been itchy against the back of her legs in the hot summer air, and her cotton shirt had stuck in all the wrong placed. Annoyed and only looking forward to getting home to play in the sprinklers with her brothers, she had stomped on her way home from school. Slamming her feet into the concrete turned into a river of heat shimmer. As she thrust her foot down, wanting to send it through the sidewalk, it had crunched against something metal being ground into the rough surface.

It wasn’t her fault. She had been a child. Innocent and blind to the tricks of a world that aimed to destroy the good in everyone. Innocent hadn’t lasted as long as it should have, and she never got the chance to be blind to the evils of the world again.

Crouching down, she had found a gold locket that she thought was in the shape of a proper heart, not the cartoony ballon of a symbol she had still dotted her ‘i’s with. Tiny, too tiny to have been made by human hands, veins and muscles ran up and down the sides of the pendant. With a fingernail torn ragged during an over-zealous game of softball earlier that day, she dug it out of the crack her foot had pushed it into. With the same nail, she flicked the locket open to see what was inside her new treasure.

A cold sigh had swept up and around her, running free into the world.

She didn’t know what she had done. It would be years before she knew. But a man had seen her, and the shadows she had released. He had told his wife, how told her siblings three days later when their mother’s shadow turned on her and ripped the life out of a healthy woman.

And so the story spread.

Evolving and changing.

She became the devil that toppled the world.

And she was cursed to live in it.

Darting from one shadow to another, she worked her way down the overgrown streets of a city only she remembered the name of. This had been Chicago, the windy city. The ocean-like lake that had once stood on the eastern edge of the city had long since been contaminated. The shadows pulling the sulphur and other poisonous chemicals from the depths of the planet and contaminating the lake, and almost every other source of freshwater.

That was her aim today. After the storm the night before, there should be water in the open tank on the roof of the tower two blocks down.

Not many people ventured out onto the streets, using the precarious rope bridges whenever they could. The wolves were bigger and the trees sometimes snatched people. She wasn’t scared. A wolf would never take her and the trees avoided her, pulling their branches back to deny her the succor of their fruit.

None of it mattered. Even getting the water didn’t matter. Not really. She could no more die of dehydration as she could of starvation or wolf bites or even the weapons of her own people.

She wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t sure if it would ever end. But she could walk down the middle of the overgrown road, shouting her name and her sins, and she would still have nothing to fear.

A wolf was hunched in the shadows of an oak tree that had grown in the middle of what had once been Cermak Road, it watched her with blood-red eyes. Where there was one, there would be more. Would they attack her today or would they recognise her as touched by the same shadows as had created them and leave her alone.

The low rolling growl was her only warning. Darting between abandoned cars in a city that could barely claim the name, she couldn’t risk the fraction of a second to look around and find out where the rest of the pack was.

Pain shot through her arm, a long, burning sensation that tore from her shoulder to her wrist. A weight slammed into her back, throwing her to the cracked and pitted asphalt. Twisting, in a way that should have made her cry out in pain but that she had long ago inured herself to it. One of her knives appeared in her hand without her consciously choosing it. It left her hand just as quickly as it had appeared, sinking into the jugular of the wolf on her back. Heaving it off her back, she pushed it towards the one who had her blood dripping from its claws.

One of her few precious bullets went through the eye of the wolf who had been watching her. It spiralled away, running into the crumbled remains of a building.

Shakily she pushed her way to her feet and looked around. No other wolves were visible, three would be an unusually small pack, but not unheard of. Limping down the road, she continued the way she had been heading, only pausing to yank her knife free. The rest of the walk to the tower and the climb to her water tank were quiet.

Exhausted and covered in blood from her own wounds and those she had inflicted, she slumped against the site of the sun warm metal and closed her eyes. One hand crept along the collar of her shirt until it found the delicate gold chain that was around her throat. The tiny gold locket seemed to jump to her fingers. Tired, of everything, she flicked it open.

The shadow blocked the sun, sending a shiver of cold down her spine, and then moved, settling against her tank. The metal rusting where it leant.

“Are you ready to join us yet Pandora?”

“No.” She sighed. “I just… I’m so lonely.”

“We know.” The shadows whispered.