Shadow Stories (Prologe and Beginning)

I can smell the fire long before I actually see it. The forest is thick with summer growth and I give thanks that the night has sucked away some of the daytime heat. In the shadows everything is cooler. In the shadows I travel. The sounds of animal and insect life grow faint long before I near the circle. I begin to see snatches of light through the trees and I hear a lone voice speaking. 1

Satanists… glorified Christians gone the other path. You didn’t realize? Believers in Satan must be Christian because Satan does not exist without the Christ. He is the Adversary. So Satanism is a sort of reverse-Christianity. That being said there was a lot of negative energy pouring out of that ceremonial circle.2

I moved closer, passing through the flickering shadows in the trees as a ghost, until I stood at the edge of the clearing. The group was too involved in their ritual to even notice a gunshot. Too bad I don’t use guns. 3

There was six of them. A sacred number so says the Book of the Beast. I was betting they were using a bonafide copy for there rite. The sixth person lay tied to a cross unconscious and next to the fire. It should have been uncomfortably hot enough to wake them so I was betting they were drugged or forcibly knocked out. 4

The entire circle was laid out in a reverse pentagram. The goats head as the Satanists call it. I was betting the circle was closed to magic and sure enough I was right. Not only magic; I realized, the circle was closed to everything. I could not penetrate the edge of the circle. Their magic felt thick, noxious and full of hate. 5

The main orator stopped speaking and the other four picked the cross up and placed it in front of the fire upside down as the book tells them. The sacrificial knife was held by the orator. The cross dropped into what must have been a pre-dug post hole and the four stepped back to the inner pentacle corners of the pentagram. The orator slowly walked around the fire reading from the Book and speaking in Demonspeak. A language I knew very little of. I got the gist of what was about to happen by the gestures made each time the orator passed the sacrificial “goat.” The virility of the sacrifice was to be passed to the orator. This was to be a Soul Feast then. A very old rite indeed. I had only heard of such things I never imagined witnessing one first hand. A Soul Feast enabled the orator to assimilate the powers of another to himself making himself more powerful. The unfortunate side effect is that the other person ends up dead. Their very soul drained from their bodies in an agonizing searing of flesh. Or so I’m told. Too bad I wouldn’t see this Feast to its conclusion. They did not realize that where there was light, there was darkness. Their sacred fire had opened my path.6

It was time. I stepped back away from the circle and into the shadows. I saw the shadows cast by the cross through the fire and I was there. For a moment, nothing happened. The orators eyes flashed wide a second before he lashed out at me with his athame. I barely had time to block the strike and as I redirected his momentum he managed to slam his weight into my body. We both went sprawling to the ground. The four corners woke from their trance and rushed at me from all sides. I reached for the cross and drew myself into its shadows. The orator scanned the circle wildly.7

“How did something pass the circle?”8

“Nothing should be able to pass the circles edges.”9

“What demon is this?”10

One of the four corners was dead. The orator stumbled over his body and fell. 11

“Behind you,” he screamed!12

The warning came too late as another of his compatriots hit the ground. One of the remaining Satanists began screaming a curse from a spell book he took from his pocket and he stepped backwards into the empty space above the goat’s head. I pressed towards him but could not pass the line of the pentagram. I turned to the remaining Satanist. He began to run past the orator towards the edge of the circle when the sacred athame suddenly plunged into his breast. The man fell in a movement that should have wrenched the blade from the orators hand but miraculously he kept hold of it. As I listened to the scream of the dying man I realized what had happened. The Soul Feast had taken place but with a different offering than was originally intended. The orator stood taking in the power of the dying man. He had now become stronger and much quicker. As I ran towards him he flew towards the crucified man in a blur. I flitted through the shadows and met him as his knife began his down stroke. I reached towards the cross and drew a shadow blade. The weapons met a hairsbreadth from my neck and I fought his new found ferocity with little success. I managed to keep him from plunging our blades into my neck but just barely. The orator’s roar brought forth more power and I was slowly being overpowered. My back pressed into the flesh of the man on the cross. I had no other choice then. I felt the shadows all around me promising release. I found the path. Instead of letting go, I took him with me.13

His blade plunged into the back of the last Satanist. His momentary shock at his ward being penetrated flashed in his eyes before he slumped to the ground. The orator’s eyes grew wide once again as he realized what had happened and then even wider as he felt my blade destroy his spine. As he fell to the ground the fire dimmed and then fell to a small Indian style campfire. I felt the circle dissipate and I sank to the ground to rest for a moment. 14

So the Soul Feast could happen to more than one person at a time. Interesting. After a minute or so I stood and walked over to the first man to be stabbed in the ritual. His corpse had turned to ashes. As the circle fell the wind returned to scatter them across the forest floor. I watched as the stab wound on the second victim burned through him until his body began to blow away as ashes as well. I walked over to the Book of the Beast and picked it up. It had not burned. Its magic was too powerful for that. It even protected its possessor. Sort of. The dead orator smoked as though he was a wet log thrown on a fire but did not burn down to ash like the others. Well there is one way to fix that. I dragged his body to the original bonfire area and stoked the small fire until it was blazing again. I threw the smoking orator on the fire and he finally began to burn. I turned my attention to the man on the cross. Using a blade I cut him carefully down and laid him near the center of the clearing. He was groggy but slowly regaining consciousness. He was a volunteer sacrifice I realized. Another Satanist. I felt the balance teetering with the deaths of the others so I could not justify killing him. Plus, I just worked so hard to save his life. I left him to the forest and melted into the shadows. I found the path and made my way home.15

***16

The shamans words came back to me, clear even now: “You must learn to move as a shadow and through the shadows. Where the world is at its darkest. You must find the path that will take you from one place to the next. When you have found the answer you will understand, but realize that there is a price to pay for such power. The world in which you travel will forever keep a piece of your soul.” 17

I remember the feeling when I first was able to walk among the shadows. When I tried to step from them it felt painful. Like the ripping apart of a sacred being. An internal scream that left me exhausted and split open. It felt as if I emerged with a separate consciousness. A separate sight. I could see the world beyond the true world. Laid over the true world as a blanket marked by holes where the light was to great. Always there were shadows. I could feel that part of me that was forever connected with that darkness and I knew that I had gone to far to ever reclaim it. 18

I remember before the ceremony. Trying to shut off my literal brain that would not accept that such things were possible. To it they seemed impossible. A conjuring act with a plausible explanation. And so I trained. Hard enough to force my mind to shut off that which disbelieves. Slowly, the results came. I found myself moving through an alien world and slowly learning the paths.19

“There are things that live in the shadows that hate travelers and you must conquer them if you are to ever survive the darkness”20

I remember my first battle with a demon. A grueling affair that may have lasted hours or days. I emerged from the shadows battered and broken, but victorious. I was soon to learn I had faced one of the weakest and through subsequent trips began to realize how lucky I had been. It seemed like each day there was a battle to be fought and each time I came out with more control until I could fight back with weapons of my own creation. Each fight was a test. One with deadly consequences where failure meant a slow torturous death. The demons began to slow their attacks as I became more and more proficient. They began to accept me as a creature of the shadows. Then one day as I flitted through the shadow world I passed a great demon and he began no conflict. I was now learned enough to focus in on training once again. I no longer needed to use all of my strength and concentration to stay alive. True, there still were the occasional encounters from time to time, but they are few and far between and I chalk them up to random encounters that would be had by anything in the demon world. 21