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Days passed Weeks, es I searched for any kind of surface that I could mark, a way to scratch proverbial notches into the wood, to count out the units of time that comprised my imprisonment It was solitary confinement, in essence, with a set of silent, faceless companions I didn’t know if a truly solitary sentence would have been worse, co surrounded by people eren’t truly people, but just mindless extensions of myself Really, just different parts of my shadow

As for e of huer, bathroom breaks – none of that truly mattered It felt like I could sleep forever if I wanted, but I never needed to If a cup of Thai tea appeared before ladly sucked it down But I didn’t feel thirst For all intents and purposes, I was exactly as Hecate had described I was so in between: not quite hu

But I could feel sorrow, and loneliness By God could I feel the crushing loneliness

Onout in pained frustration And a few ti to feel ee me? Certainly not my shadows

But one of the a little rectangle of soers My cells had re the way I would as a friend, in someone else’s ti it disintegrate into nothing betweenunder my eye with it My shade, still faceless and featureless, nodded in silent approval I couldn’t begin to explain how I knew, but it was s

Over tiress, the five of the in unusual ways thatof this term within the Dark as some kind of punishment, where I was surrounded by remnants of my personality that mocked the parts of me that still believed I was hu in ways Learning

Without fail, the very moment I expressed any kind of melancholy or loneliness, the shades would wander towardsme the eerie, voiceless comfort of their companionship I couldn’t count the nu ball on the ground,for the embrace of madness

Yet I would open athered around , the first few tih that I felt i so very pris, als, in that sense, despite ments of myself as pets

And yet as pets they presented thes, shallow coht one of theht that rocketed out of es I realized that it was also the first ti other than moan, or scream in frustration into the endless void

It was like a do shades learned to play the ga freeze tag It gavetheaoing through the motions of who and what I was as I developed as a person rowing up in Valero, raised under the love and care of Norman and Diana Graves

It ths I could go to truly turn them into companions, and not just bodies to fill the spaces of the Dark Roo the possibilities Would they ever be able to talk, to coe? Would they soic on their own?

But baby steps As Herald once told me, a step at a time And one of thoseone of those exact doors that Hecate had described It was as I saw it in the distant past, a swirling white portal suspended in space I don’t kno my shadows and I eventually found it, but I liked to think thatabout the tissue paper, too – that was one shade trying to be sy solidinto much more closely

But first, the portal I recognized it as one of several that Herald and I had shut down ourselves, back when I had to sacrifice the lingering specter of my own mother to seal away the Dark Rooates I needed to guard, to ensure, as Hecate said, that the Old Ones could never return to our world again It was the link between them and the earth

I reached for the spinning portal, unsure of what I was doing, but very aware of the skeins of shadow eers I heldto think of theed fro with those that I released into the portal

The gateway absorbed the strings of darkness as it spun, the shadows turning its glea black Still it whirled, but slower, and slower still, until the spinning stopped entirely, as if the spiritual concrete my shadows and I had poured into it had started to set