2. The Human Nest

Demix laughed and laughed, bouncing on his toes in the manner of someone not entirely bound by gravity.

“Oh, the expression on his face! I didn’t think a human could run so fast, but never mind that. I’ve eaten my fill… and I feel so strong! No wonder the laws forbade travel to this realm—the elders only wanted to keep these prime feasting grounds for their own private use.”

“Let’s never go back,” said Silane, an equally loopy grin on her face. She spun in circles around a support column in the center of the cabin, giggling all the while. The solidity of her form was questionable: at times, parts of an arm or leg would blur into mist before reforming into matter.

Elrach, too, had plenty of energy after the feast. He had glued a web onto a ceiling beam and hung upside down from it, swinging back and forth with six legs waving in the air. A morsel wrapped in thick strands of webbing dangled from one leg. “Easy meals, excellent dining, fine company, and splendid weather this night—although it is rather bright out,” Elrach mused, sticking a web onto the nearest window. The moonlight decreased. “What have we been doing all this time, hunting scrappy little wisps in the Isle? Such bounties the mortal realm contains. The prey have never known fear, and their flesh is all the sweeter for it. We should’ve come here ages ago.”

In time, the elation of a successful hunt faded, leaving behind the warm satisfaction after eating one’s fill. Hunger thus sated, curiosity arose: the cabin was filled with an inexplicable variety of solid objects. Most denizens of the Shadowed Isle existed as insubstantial mist, and those powerful enough to condense their essence into physical objects were usually also the type one oughtn’t approach if one valued existence. As a result, Silane had not interacted with a lot of solid objects aside from rocks. Furniture, stove, clothing, utensils, even the dead meat and plants that the humans used as food—all were new and fascinating.

Silane wandered from object to object, trying to figure out the purpose of all the unknown shapes and materials used to construct each item. Demix poked and knocked on everything. Elrach, the most responsible of the group, busied himself with wrapping the leftovers in strands of web. Of the five humans and seven dogs that had formerly inhabited the cabin, two of each were alive and unconscious. Elrach had often used his webs to preserve captured wisps in the Shadowed Isle for a later snack, and the same principle applied here: wrapping up the prey in webs would prevent it from fleeing once it regained its strength.

At the window, Silane tugged aside a corner of the web intended to block what few rays of moonlight penetrated the clouds. However, the moon had already sunk out of sight. In its place, a brilliant blue aura flowed over the treetops, casting a strange, shifting light across the bottom layer of clouds.

“The horizon… it’s gone blue,” Silane whispered in awe, squinting from the intensity of the light.

“Impossible. The sky doesn’t change color,” Demix scoffed, jostling Silane aside. He glanced through the window, and his jaw dropped open. “No way.”

“The old stories say that, in the daytime, the entire sky over the mortal realm turns blue,” Elrach said sagely. He plastered another thick sheet of web across the window, reducing the fierce light of dawn to a more tolerable intensity.

Demix and Silane absorbed this knowledge with wonder, peering between the strands of web at the incredible sight of a sky changing colors. Even as they watched, that blue stripe spread upward, chasing away more and more of the night. In the trees surrounding the cabin, leaves rustled in a gentle breeze, and multi-toned chirps arose from the forest creatures. Color seeped into the world, color that the Mistforged friends had never before seen in such radiance: vivid green of plants, rich brown of the ground, vibrant red streaked across the cabin floor. At the very horizon, where the blue of the sky was most intense, thin clouds began to glow with hues of pink and yellow. One cloud shifted in the wind, and light stabbed forth.

How could one describe the astonishment, or the horror, of witnessing the sun rise for the very first time? Words failed to capture the terrible magnificence of the sight: a burning slice of light ten thousand times brighter than the rays of the moon at its fullest. The Mistforged naturally gravitated toward darkness, for moving unseen lent the element of surprise to those who first came into existence as weak and insubstantial wisps. In the Shadowed Isle, darkness was the natural state of the world: the sky was either black in daytime or blacker at night, and rare gaps in the clouds revealed glimpses of only the moon or stars. The presence of a sun was merely a theoretical concept to those who had never set foot in the mortal realm.

The webs pasted across the window vaporized in black smoke at the first touch of sunlight. Brilliance flooded in, blinding the three curious Mistforged. Elrach leapt for cover of shade moments before a shaft of golden light impaled the cabin. Silane was a touch slower to react, and her hand skimmed a patch of sunlight as she jumped away. Four fingers evaporated in an instant. Silane cried out.

Demix pulled her into the shadows beneath the window, where she curled up around her hand. Black mist trailed from finger stubs, sluggishly condensing into first the outline of a hand, then solid material. The color and opacity of her skin took longer to recover. Silane flexed translucent fingers, whimpering.

“What is that light?” Demix asked, a rare uncertainty in his voice.

Elrach crouched beside them, legs tucked near his cephalothorax and pincers clicking grimly. “It must be what the old stories call the ‘sun.’ The mortal realm’s greatest weapon.”

“Sun,” Silane echoed, still staring at her restored hand in shock. “This terrible power… if we go outside while it’s around, we will burn.”

The cabin, already glowing with a diffuse golden ambience from that single ray of sunlight pouring through the window, grew brighter by the moment. Demix shielded his eyes with one arm. He was sweating profusely from the heat, black mist steaming off his form at a slow but steady rate. “If more of that light comes in, we’ll burn anyway.”

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“Yes,” Elrach said grimly. “In the time of the Great Pilgrimage, the Ancient Ones created the shadow realm from their own bodies to protect all Mistforged from the sun. Thus were bestowed the Four Gifts of the Ancients: the seas to birth us, the clouds to shield us, the mist to nourish us, and the Stargazer to reign supreme. In leaving the Shadowed Isle, we have strayed beyond their protection.”

A palpable dread settled over them.

“It’s getting even brighter. We’d never make it back to the Worlds Gate in time,” Silane said.

They all thought deeply.

“We could possess the bodies of mortals,” Elrach suggested. “Hear me out. The denizens of the mortal realm exist here both day and night, and this lair is not light-proofed. Thus, the mortals must not be harmed by light exposure in the daytime. If we wear their skin, it will shelter us from the daylight. As long as we stay inside the mortal skin until night returns, we should be safe. However, we must make sure the mortal skin is not excessively damaged while we are inside, else the light may reach us.”

A borrowed body under foreign possession was unlikely to handle as well as a solidform custom-tailored from one’s own essence and willpower. However, Elrach had always been knowledgeable on matters of Mistforged lore; if Elrach reasoned that a body of mortal flesh was more sun-resistant than a body of condensed mist, then Silane and Demix would defer to his wisdom.

Two humans and two dogs still clung to life, if only just. They would be suitable candidates for possession. Elrach claimed the largest dog, stating more legs to be a necessity. Silane called dibs on the smaller living human because it resembled her preferred solidform the most. Demix shrugged and took the other human, which had the bonus of being the tallest and most intimidating of the lot.

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Silane had gained sentience in the Shadowed Isle. Before this night, she had never tasted a real human. Her solidform was a superficial mimicry of shapes used by more senior Mistforged, customized over time to better suit her purposes. It had everything she thought she needed: skin that contained her innards, eyes that sensed light, ears capable of hearing sound. She had never imagined there could be more, never experienced a mortal human body with a full nervous system.

How could skin feel so much: the brush of air across little hairs, the roughness of floorboards beneath feet, the wet ooze of vital fluids from a gash across the stomach? Sunlight that had previously burned Silane now impressed only a pleasant warmth on her mortal skin. By contrast, the inconvenient aesthetic of physical damage on a solidform became unpleasantly painful to mortal senses, an outcry of torn nerves that hindered function beyond the intrinsic hindrance of the wound itself. Vision, too, differed: mortal eyes could not see in the dark. Where this realm’s dawn had been painfully bright to eyes of condensed mist, now it was a bleak and dim blue with the barest hint of fuzzy shadows where furniture, friends, or trees ought to be. The remnants of life in Silane’s borrowed body acted as a veil, blurring the life-glow of the world around her and concealing her own Mistforged nature.

Demix adapted to moving the quickest, puppetting his possessed body with all the grace of a brick rolling downhill. He only tripped over a couple of rocks—invisible on the energy plane, for lack of life—before figuring out how to use fleshy eyes to detect and avoid such inert objects. Silane followed soon afterward, only the slightest bit more coordinated due to the similar sizes of her previous solidform and the new possessed body. Slowest was Elrach, who had experienced a major downgrade from eight legs to four, and eight eyes to two; he kept bumping into trees and tripping over his own feet. Moving around was far from a pretty sight, but they managed enough semblance of basic mobility to locate some humans.

The first specimen they came across was a man banging a metal-tipped stick against a tree. When Elrach approached, the man shouted in tones different to those heard in the cabin: not fear, but challenge. Elrach met this challenge with a vicious attack, as was proper when dealing with belligerent prey, but his possessed body was smaller and weaker than that of the human. The man swung the stick with enough force to knock Elrach back three paces. Elrach sprang an inconvenient drippy leak in the torso area.

They abandoned that pursuit in search of easier prey.

After a long and arduous journey, they came to another dwelling, similar in shape to the first one in the woods, that contained both large and small humans inside. However, hunting in the daytime proved to be quite a different experience than the prior night’s feast. They were attacked by a deceptively small and feeble-looking old woman who fended them off with a rake. Newly acquainted with the unpleasantness of pain and the inconvenience of crippling injury, they made a tactical retreat rather than risk further flesh wounds.

Next, they arrived at a huge nest of humans. The delicious glow of life-essence spread across an area as vast as the Shadowed Isle itself! The nest was packed with dense clusters of buildings interspersed with a network of open pathways. Humans swarmed throughout the buildings and along the roads in a chaotic tangle of motion. Amid all this activity, each human rushed along their route with unidentifiable purpose, somehow navigating through the press of crowds without collision or altercation.

After some discussion, it was agreed that a straightforward attack would not work when they were vastly outnumbered by human locals. The best strategy was to avoid drawing attention until they were able to separate a few weaker prey from the masses. Since this was a nest of humans, and not dogs, Demix and Silane stood a better chance of luring out one or two unsuspecting victims than Elrach. Demix and Silane set off toward the town, moving slowly so as not to aggravate their existing wounds, while Elrach found a clump of low bushes that would serve as a good position for an ambush.

Demix and Silane crept behind buildings or between bushes, moving parallel to the main street until they identified a suitable target. Silane climbed onto a wagon, then a low rooftop overhanging an old doorway, using the better vantage point to direct Demix toward a secluded spot in a nearby alleyway. Nearby, three small human children were tossing a sphere back and forth, shouting at each other in rapid bursts of chatter. Human speech was understandable, if only just: the accents and intonations of language had diverged in the centuries since the split of mortal and shadow realms, but words could still be discerned from the noise if one concentrated, as Demix did. The children were saying such phrases as, “bet you can’t catch this,” and, “I got it! I got it!”

One of the children threw the sphere too high for the others to catch. It rolled into the shadows of the alleyway where Demix was hiding, and the nearest child came running after it. Demix picked up the sphere. It was soft, pliable, and completely lifeless.

“Thanks, mister…” The child trailed off. Her smile became paralyzed as Demix emerged from the shadows. In the afternoon sunlight, lurid red stained Demix’s shirt with evidence of the possessed body’s many injuries.

“I… got… it,” said Demix, speaking the human words with sufficient airflow to create slow, crisp enunciation.

All three children went pale.

Silane dropped down from the rooftop behind them, landing with a brittle crunch. She picked herself up, motions jerky and graceless as she stood. One arm had a few more angled segments than arms typically possessed. The human children huddled together, cornered.

Demix closed his fist. The sphere collapsed inward with a thunderous bang of escaping air. The empty shell fluttered to the ground. A child screamed.

The noise drew attention, and adults came running.