Perfect Shadow: A Night Angel Novella

spilled through the streets, slaughtering women armed with little more than sticks and children throwing rocks, one man fled who had never fled in his life: Acaelus Thorne, unwanted treasure in his hands, left the fight. Under orders. He crept like a coward, outran the krul who chased him, stood among the corpses and filth and cowards at the mouth of the pass into the Fasmeru Mountains, and looked back. The krul were a black blanket held tight over the face of the burning city.
    A light bloomed from the castle’s highest balcony. From a hundred points lightning cracked down. Every flying narokghul dropped from the sky, becoming a smoking, bleeding rain. The bleak clouds rolled back in an instant, as if shoved aside by giants’
    hands, and the light swelled ever brighter. Acaelus staggered up to a group of deserters, leaning against a granite wall at the mouth of the pass, catching their breath, weaponless, bloodied, their eyes dim, the eyes of the shamed and broken. But now those eyes reflected one sharp light. Those who had slumped now stood.
    Titans rushed for the castle, smashing through three-story stone houses, stone shrapnel turned into dust motes dancing in the light of a rising sun. The earth heaved upward, just once, sweeping men and krul and titans and a hundred other kinds of monsters off their feet. Even Acaelus fell. Dogs whined. It was as if the earth herself were flinging her power into this enterprise. Into Jorsin Alkestes.
    And then, just as they all stood again – obliteration. Light that blinded. Light that burned. Light that boiled the bloody river. Light that purified. Light that roared.
    A rushing wind filled the blindness that followed, Acaelus knew only that it felt as if his very body were afire, veins burning inside his skin. Time shattered, scattered, thrown about and blown about. He came to himself, and the first thing he saw was his own blackened skin. Smooth, burnt perfect black, like he’d been dipped in tar.
    Acaelus stood, feeling curiously whole, unconscionably strong. There were pillars of ash around him, howling winds already blowing away the remnants of what had been men. Against the granite wall, etched by light, shadows stood. Ghosts of the men who’d been vaporized. One shadow was different. One shadow stood, defiant, one fist raised, edges perfect, outline crisp – Acaelus’s shadow. The others were dim, washed out.
    Bleached by a flood of light that had continued even after the men who had cast them were burned away. But through all the fire, one man had stood.
    The black skin retreated into his body, unbidden, leaving him naked. His clothes and even his armor had been burned away.
    Acaelus looked at leagues of wasteland. Nothing stirred but what was stirred by the wind. Death had taken the throne from Jorsin. A gleaming black dome huddled where once Trayethell had stood.
    ~Acaelus. Mourn later. There is work to be done.~
    The voice came from inside his own head. The black ka’kari. It had saved him. It had been a secret gift from Jorsin Alkestes, who had told bull-headed Acaelus Thorne to flee, to live.
    But Jorsin hadn’t said he meant Acaelus to live forever.
    I’ll come back and take it off your hands, Jorsin had promised with his roguish grin when he’d given Acaelus the treasure. The liar. He was wan, washed out, but his eyes burned with a fevered intensity. He’d been spending every day fighting and every night with archmage Ezra, making…something. Never sleeping. Working on some last-minute salvation that Acaelus only slowly came to understand wasn’t coming.
    Jorsin Alkestes: emperor, genius, archmage, tyrant. Jorsin Alkestes was a light so bright he left shadows standing centuries hence. The semblances of men, burned onto granite walls. And one shadow was perfect above all others. A walking, breathing shadow. A shadow as flickering as the ghosts thrown by a candle, as mutable as a king’s promises. A shadow who devoured light and life.
    Light is, but a shadow undefined becomes simply darkness. And light had been too long denied the man who had been Acaelus Thorne. He was thin, fraying, a bowlful of smoke. He was becoming undifferentiated darkness.
    What if the light itself had been a lie?

    * * *
    Mount Tenji is the tallest mountain in Ceura. When I was a kid, people used to make pilgrimages up the mountain. It’s been too cold for that for centuries. It’s a volcano, but it hasn’t erupted in more than a hundred years. Some smoke from time to