Written by Abigail Wagher

It had been thirty-two days since the sun had died and the shadow drought began.

At least, they thought it had been thirty-two days. Without the sun, it had grown hard to keep track. Now there was just a constant state of starlight.

A boy did know for certain he had been traveling for eternity. Okay, four days. Maybe five. Were there even days anymore if it was only ever dark? His food supply was running low because he had only expected to be traveling for a day or two. His lanky limbs had grown shaky. His eyes hurt from straining in the dark. He could hear his stepfather’s Wit, mocking him. “Wise below his years.”

 For the first time in his fourteen years of life, the boy thought it was, perhaps, possible he’d made a mistake. Or at least, that he could have suffered a little more foresight. But he was desperate. No, not desperate, determined. Determined to fix things, for everyone. For himself.

Now he trekked through the dense forest, his lantern light a dull blade against the inky armor guarding the trees and the spaces between them. His foot snagged on a tree root and he stumbled, using a tree to catch himself only breaths away from falling into a thornbush.

His palm scraped hard against the bark. Blood pooled in his palm and dripped down his wrist. The flame in his lantern flickered. He froze, steadying himself, afraid to even breathe near his lantern, afraid of killing the only light he could muster. In the stillness of bugs chirping and animals rustling, he could hear the chaos from miles away of those trying to scrape together their own light. People burning houses, land, the edge of the forest, the clothes off another’s back, all just to cast light, all feeling the ache of their shadows being ripped from them.

But the boy understood. The same ache pounded through him, a thorn in his heart, throbbing beat-for-beat with his now-bleeding hand. He wiped his palm on his shirt and carried on through the woods.

It was an unfamiliar ache, knowing his shadow wasn’t following him. He never thought he could miss the weight of something weightless. When the sun still reigned, shadows came to life even in the dead of night, the moon filled with the overwhelming brightness of their sun. Now, a gaping hole where the moon should’ve been threatened to swallow the weak specks of starlight whose beams didn’t even reach the dirt earth under the boy’s bare feet. He was alone. Really, completely alone, for the first time in years. It was an ache not unfamiliar, but an ache he’d forgotten.

His village sat on the edge of a vast forest at the very hollow of a great valley. In his village, every shadow meant something different to every person. For some, shadows meant Wealth. For others, shadows meant Beauty, or Strength, or Cunning.

Every shadow meant the same thing to every person. It was the way to know someone. The traits the sun cast onto the ground, the stories shadows displayed; that was a person. All were known by the distinct shape and movement of their shadows. No one even needed names anymore.

For the boy, his shadow meant friendship.

He shifted the weight of his travel bag on his shoulder, though it weighed very little at this point. His head pounded with dehydration. His hand stung where he grabbed the strap of his bag. He thought, maybe, he could find water, or a berry bush if he tried hard enough, but the candle in his lantern was running low, and he wasn’t sure he could afford sidetracking. Well, intentional sidetracking. Really, he figured his whole trip had been one big sidetrack. He didn’t even really know where he was going, only what he was looking for. Who he was looking for.

He sat down, slowly, taking a moment to catch his breath, to swallow his heartbeat, to shove the heady pulse of anxiety deep into his chest where it belonged. He placed his lantern gently on the ground and thought about the Sage. He hadn’t thought about him in years, much like the forgotten ache that he tried to shake out of his head and his chest but that insisted on resurrecting.

After the sun’s death, it didn’t take long for the village to drive the Sage out. He was supposed to be the wisest man. Well, wasn’t supposed to be–he was the wisest man. The wisest, the most caring, the constant amidst flood and drought. But when the sun died and the Sage refused any wisdom or care, the village and the boy questioned that he was ever wise, that he ever cared.

For as long as the boy could remember, and his parents, and their parents before them, the Sage oversaw the wellbeing of the village. People reaped and people harvested, and people danced and people got sick, and people fell in love and people died, and the Sage tended to it all. To the young man who didn’t know how to ask for a woman’s hand, and to the mother who couldn’t get her child to stop crying, and to the sister who grieved the death of her brother.

The Sage knew every villager by heart, and he knew every villager by name. Every baby was taken to the Sage within days of their birth, and there, swaddled in the mother’s arms, or carried by a heartbroken father when the mother didn’t make it through birth, the Sage would stretch out his hand and brush his thumb against the infant’s cheek, and he would give them a name based on who he knew they would be.

His words and his hands watered the roots of the village. The boy had hit the lowest point in his life while he himself was still low in years, and he could remember running to the Sage, begging him for answers.

“Why would he leave?” The boy demanded, words camouflaged in his violent sobs, “Why did I make him mad? Why is my mom mad that he’s gone, when he made her so sad? Why is it my fault?”

The Sage had gathered into his arms all of the boy’s scrawny frame and all his whys, and with tears on his own lined face, only said, “Oh, son. You have so many years you haven’t lived yet.”

The memory, the echo of the Sage’s voice felled heavy, unexpected onto the boy’s shoulders, uprooting buried sorrow behind his eyes. The exhaustion. He was just exhausted.

He remembered that, even though the Sage hadn’t fixed the problems in his life, he had felt seen. Safe knowing someone knew him. The village hadn’t been so grateful to the Sage at the death of the sun. Truth was, he had become less and less important in the past number of years. No one needed help anymore, for their greatest needs were provided by their shadows. No one needed names anymore, for they were known by their shadows. The Sage had outlived a wide expanse of the village’s history, but now, he had outlived himself, his own use to the people.

And, now, in desperation, the boy had sought him out in the woods.

“Pathetic,” he muttered to himself, rising back to his feet. “Stupid. Stupid idea. Stupid old man–” In just a few steps, he was cut off by a giant, dead tree trunk blocking his entire path. It had to be one of the biggest trees the boy had ever seen. Of course. He paced with his lantern, looking for a way around. When he found none, he held the light up to the bark and, without any of his friends around to think him a wimp, he winced at the size of the spider that scurried across the log, dodging his light.

Dread filled the boy’s lungs. His shadow was not the Athletic girl’s or the Determined boy’s that he sat near in lessons, and he barely ate even on a good day, and he couldn’t tell if his headache was starting to make him see double, or if that was just the dark closing in on him once more.

He looped his lantern onto his bag and said a word that had once gotten him sent out of a lesson.

He found hold after hold, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes over the sharp pains shooting through his wounded hand and tearing through his body.

I’m never going to find him. It was within the boy’s lifetime that the Sage had faded from the village’s mind. He had been five years old, cowered against the door to his room so his mother couldn’t drag him out to school. He’d been crying, his tears washing his filthy cotton shirt, the inside of his chest fluttering like a hummingbird with a broken wing.

Just when he thought his mother would break down the door, her poundings suddenly stopped. He paused his sniffles just long enough to hear a woman yelling in the streets, “Come! Look what I’ve found!”

He sneaked out after hearing his mother leave the house, smuggled his small frame through the crowd that had gathered in the village square.

A woman turned in slow circles as the crowd murmured. It took the boy a moment, but he inhaled sharply when he saw it. Her shadow. A dense darkness on the grassy street, not following her movements but moving like flamelight, not shaped as her but as its own entity, and all he thought was, Brave.

As it turned out, she had traveled to another village far away and came back with an enchantment of shadows. She spoke the enchantment aloud, and whatever she most desired to be, her shadow gave to her. But the shadow didn’t just give it to her; it renamed her. Claimed her. She was known by her shadow. She wasn’t brave; she was Brave.

At first, the idea filled the boy with unease. He watched his mother try on the enchantment. She was Desire. Soon, the boy had a stepdad, who was Wit. He watched as one by one, his peers at his lessons took on shadow enchantments. Every shadow molded differently, moving differently, Funny, Charming, Artistic. He hadn’t had friends before, but he really didn’t have friends now, everyone casting disgusted glances at his shadow that mirrored him.

He went to the Sage one day and asked, “What do you think about the shadow enchantment?” He noticed the Sage’s shadow remained untouched.

The Sage sat at his kitchen table, a cup of tea in hand, and for the first and last time the boy ever saw, looked worried. “I think it is foolish, putting all your worth in something so easily gone. It is not all you are, none of those things the shadows claim. I beg you–don’t do it.”

He crested the top of the dead trunk. His pulse bruised his ribcage. He swung his feet over the top and sat, cradling his injured palm against his sore chest.

Sometimes, though, the loneliness was too much, his mother and stepfather eating meals without him, his peers keeping their distance like his breath would collapse their lungs. He gave in. He shaped his shadow, there on his tiny, earthy bedroom floor, watching it contort into someone he wasn’t. In the morning, he sat with his parents at breakfast. The next day at school, peers flocked to him. He was no longer the outcast. He was Loved. And suddenly, nothing the Sage had ever told him mattered, and didn’t matter for the next nine years, to him or the people of the village.

Now, he looked up at the sky, up at the millions of stars that shone on despite the world ripping apart below. Even the stars have company, he thought.

The day the sun died, the sky had been brilliant as it always was. Shadows were in full shape, the Intelligent and the Athletic and the Creative on full display, the Loved boy surrounded by his peers as they stood at the edge of the woods and sketched plants for their science lesson. He had made a bad joke about why trees needed naps (“For rest”), and everyone laughed, and then everyone disappeared. Nothing but blackness falling, covering screams and commotion from throughout the village as people poured into the streets.

Without his shadow, none of the boy’s peers thought to even utter for him.

Ten days without the sun, and the people raged against the Sage, who did not tell them how to win back their shadows. Did not, or could not, no one really knew, but when they set his house ablaze, the boy had stood at the back of the crowd. Silent. Unmoving. He may have been the only one to see the Sage escape into the woods. He did not reveal the Sage. But he did not give his help.

Three weeks without the sun, and people started burning. Small things, at first, leftover lumber and bad crops, thinking that they could work together, help one another. A little firelight, and shadows reappeared. But fire could not be sustained. All burned to ash, scattered in nightly breezes. The fleeting shadows that firelight did cast were hollow, stretching in strange ways that faded into the darkness.

So people moved to burning troughs. Barns. Houses. Ripped clothes off people’s backs, snagged sheep and cows and pigs from their pens. Some villagers banded together and locked others away, or worse, so that there were fewer people needing to share what light they could scrounge up. Without their shadows, they forgot each other. Forgot themselves.

 Although the boy knew he’d be safe for a while since his house rested on the edge of the village, his lack of shadow pained him, and he didn’t trust his parents not to burn the house down themselves. With nowhere else to turn, he escaped to find the Sage.

Now, the boy looked at the drop below him.

He probably wouldn’t die, but it wouldn’t be a comfortable drop, either. He took a deep, shaking breath. His palm burned. His muscles felt like sap. He felt his headache in his teeth, and his stomach clawed for something to eat. Why did the Sage have to leave? Why did he give up on the village?

On me. The thought came sudden. He knew he hadn’t gone to the Sage in years. But he hadn’t needed him in years, and he needed him now.

Selfish. He fought back the shame of it. He made himself lower, find footing on the other side. I have to find him.

His foot slipped.

His body cracked against the ground, his skinny frame reeling against a rocky patch. It shouted up his spine, into his skull. His ankle blazed with hopefully a sprain, probably a break. He cried out. Birds rustled in the trees, scattering away from him.

And his lantern rolled a foot away from him, smoldering, its flame having extinguished halfway to the ground.

“Please.” He whispered. The surrounding darkness sank into his body. “Please.”

He had grown up with nothing.

“Pathetic.” His father yelled every night over many, many mugs of stolen rum. The boy looked up from where he drew pictures on the dirt floor with his finger. His father stumbled over, kicking away the drawing.

The man went through his tirade nightly. She’d begged him to stay after she realized she was pregnant. He stayed because his family wouldn’t take him back after getting her pregnant. Naturally, the boy was a walking reminder of it all. He was too young to really understand what his father was saying, but he memorized the words so he could understand when he was older.

They had five chickens and a house with holes between the slats of the roof, and his father worked for pennies at the nearby miller, and his mother was too afraid to say her son wasn’t pathetic, or just another mouth to feed. They lived on the outer edge of the village, saving people from the sight of them. For the most part.

The boy started school when he was four. He went barefoot, scrawny, dark curls matted to his forehead and one of his two dirt-caked cotton shirts slipping off his shoulders as he sat down in front of the teacher to learn his alphabet. None of the other kids sat by him.

He walked to and from school on his own. One day, he arrived home to his mother alone by the hearth, turning the dirt floors to mud with her weeping. She looked up at him. Her eyes were filled with enough loathing to instantly drown the boy. He understood at once his father was not returning, and so he ran to the Sage.

And without the boy’s asking, the Sage started to pick him up from school everyday. In the Sage’s humble home, he served the boy honeyed tea, warm but not scalding, and all the parchment and charcoal he could ask for. The boy laughed at the Sage’s jokes and read the Sage’s books and watched the Sage name several infants. The Sage helped the boy wash his clothes and the Sage crafted the boy shoes and the Sage reminded the boy that his name was not “Pathetic.”

And as soon as the boy became the Loved boy, his time with the Sage faded until he forgot the scent of honeyed tea, the pleasant stomachache of uncontrolled laughter, the feeling of crinkled, aged story pages under his fingers. He left the Sage and all his love behind. For something better. For something worthless.

His eyes cracked open to a lantern much brighter than his had ever been, making him wince.

The Sage examined the boy. The boy’s throat closed, hot, wretched shame gagging his words.

“I found you,” he croaked after a few moments, his voice cracking. The Sage sat down beside him in the grass.

“No, Kiran,” he tilted his head,  “I found you.”

Kiran’s vision blurred. He hadn’t heard his name in years. Not from his mother, not from his teacher. He’d forgotten how the beat of it sounded.

The Sage lifted Kiran’s hurt palm in one hand and placed a leather water canteen in the other. “What are you doing here, Kiran? What do you want?”

Kiran knew he needed to drink. His head pounded, begging for water. But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t stop staring at that lined face, extra wrinkles around the eyes, couldn’t shake the hands binding his palm in clean cloth away.

“I…” A choked noise escaped Kiran’s throat. “I…I need the sun back. We need the sun back. Why is it gone?” Flaming tears spilled out, burned down his cheeks. “Why are you gone? Why didn’t you help us?”

Even as he said it, he heard the hollowness of it, so Kiran stopped talking. Soft sobs shook his frame. It hurt. Everything hurt. The Sage leaned back and watched him.

“You don’t need the sun back,” he said after a few moments, and Kiran didn’t argue. Then, the Sage got up and reached out both his hands. “Come on, it’s time we head back. Lean on me as we walk.”

The first thing everyone noticed was the warmth.

Kiran was the only one who saw how it happened. He and the Sage walked, unseen amidst the dark destruction. They stepped over dying embers and little fires and made it to the village square. By the light of a nearby flame, Kiran just made out the Sage’s hand reaching into the pocket of his trousers, an illuminated fist coming out, light spilling out the cracks between his bony knuckles. He unfurled his fingers.

They noticed the warmth. On their backs, their shoulders, in streaks slicing against the fire and ash that faded into the light. It pulled their heads up from piles of scorched homes and clothes in time to watch a swirling galaxy of sunlight spread across the sky like ink across a page. Constellations of bright white clouds dotted a cerulean expanse. It blinded. It revealed.

It revealed the Brave woman standing over a bleeding, shaking younger woman. The Brave woman held a shovel above her head, about to bring it down on the younger woman. She grimaced at the sun and faltered at the sight of the Sage.

He shook his head at her. “Aesira. You forget yourself.” Her shadow followed her movement as she lowered the shovel.

At the rebirth of the sun, all shadows returned to normal. The village, dazed by their own delusions, were unsure where to begin with their damage. There was no undoing the destroyed houses, the loss of livestock, the injured people. They could only rebuild. Rebuilding required the village to band together, and the village banding together required a chorus of reintroductions. Names came back to life.

No one breathed a word of the shadows. Kiran wondered at times if it had all been a dream.

For Kiran, life returned mostly to normal. He still ate meals by himself at home. At school, which was held at the edge of the forest until the schoolhouse was rebuilt, he made a couple friends. As it turned out, peers could like him just fine without the enchantment when he talked to them, shared parchment with them, skipped stones on the river with them after school. He was nowhere near popular. Some still avoided his beaten clothes and rough-skinned hands.

It still hurt, on occasion, the ache of loneliness. In flashes, in the pangs of a dulled clapper against the inside of a rusty bell. He knew, though, he could never be liked enough for that to go away, and that his worth rested elsewhere.

Kiran saw the Sage almost every day. Together, with a few other villagers, they rebuilt the Sage’s home. When Kiran and the Sage weren’t helping the rest of the village rebuild, they sat down at the table together over honeyed tea and charcoal and parchment, and Kiran fashioned new shoes for himself and made tea for the families that came by with infants. And sometimes, when he sat by the Sage’s hearth at night, storybook in hand, radiant moonlight streamed through the window and cast his shadow clear on the floor. It always caught Kiran’s eye for a moment. Then the moment ended, and Kiran would look back at the storybook as he turned the page.