Golden eyes watching our every move
Losing time without the sun or moon
It’s easy to get lost in the darkness. Time moves differently there in the shadow realm, where midnight consumes all and light is lost. He had just been a boy once, lost and alone. Fearful of the world. He had only wanted to hide, and the shadows had been his only friends. For so long they had been his sole companions, those wolves he had called from darkness. They had become as real to him as his own flesh. More real than anyone else, than the others who lived in that world of light.
It had been easy, to fall prey to the lure of the shadow.
So long he had spent wrapped in them that he had soon lost track of where he began and they ended. They had been safe, comfortable. He doesn’t know exactly when the mottled blue and white had given way to yawning black. He can’t remember the last time he’d glanced at his own flank and seen that distinctive roan hue and not a blanket of shadow. Nor could he pinpoint when those colors had stopped bleeding through, swallowed forever more by the pitch of night. Just as his stomach had stopped paining him with hunger, so too had the wolf absorbed into him until he had become one and the same. Instead of running beside him, those creatures of darkness now run within him.
How much time has passed, he could not say. Perhaps it had only been a day, or perhaps an eternity. Time moves differently here where there is no light.
But still memory remains. The warmth of his mother, the sturdy protection of his father, the beacon of their love. The pain and despair that had driven him to his shadows for comfort. It’s dulled now, barely an ache. But still he remembers it,
Perhaps it is that which draws him back, a deep seated longing that will not leave him in peace. And so he steps from his shadows.
He blinks, yellow eyes (once a warm, rich brown) squinting in the bright light of the forest. To any other the light might be muted and hushed, but to the boy who had fled to shadow for comfort, it is the brightest light of day. Pressing himself against the broad trunk of a late summer tree, he peers about himself with uncertainty, suddenly wondering if he had made the right choice.
ether