Excerpt from Dolor and Shadow
A void encompassed Kallan. Distant voices faded in the dark. What pain there was, she didn’t feel. Not yet anyway. The darkness devours everything. Light does what it can to fight it off, producing endless energy to do so.
Endless energy. Endless Seidr. Light has to try so hard. Darkness just is, there, suspended in the Great, waiting for when the light goes out, when there can be nothing but the Great Void to welcome it.
Such stories emerge from the Black. Some of them true, some seeded by a variant of truth. Most are just ludicrous lies.
Every child grew up with the stories of the Shadows, where figures brood with menacing long fingers, sharpened to long, fine tips, and pallid, sickly skin stretched over a skeletal frame. Their hair was wild and wiry, and as black as their horrible eyes. Those eyes, those dreadful, lifeless eyes, bulbous and bulging like polished, black stones that could pierce through any darkness. It was in those eyes that gave rise to the rumors of the Shadows for it was long said that they could extract the light from anything, and with it, life.
They drank blood and ate children. The sun was their only bane. Their breath brought the winter, their voices, death. They never slept and lived to devour. Over the years, rumors evolved dramatizing their weaknesses: pendants and charms worn to daunt them, herbs and spices woven and hung over thresholds. Waters stolen from Mimir’s well, all to deter the Shadows. All were just ludicrous lies.
