Forgotten Shady

I watched a pelican dive into the distant waves and emerge with a fish.

“I never told my parents about the totems. By that time, I’d learned the lesson. Mentioning the voices or the visions earned me increased dosages, lectures and concerned looks. Thus… I developed this… curation habit. Speak at a wall about what I saw, and sort the experiences into a mental lockbox. One Ash goes to school, does homework, makes small talk. The other rants about and catalogues the inexplicable bullshit, then shoves it away into the dark, forgotten crevasse.”

Shady’s massive head had risen off my lap. She sat upright now, ears pinned forward, every line of her body tense.

“There’s more?” She asked.

“Pipestone National Monument, Minnesota. The quartzite quarry where Native Americans have been carving ceremonial pipes for at least three thousand years. Mom’s erosion survey again. The red pipestone layers were exposed along a cliff face, and there’s a waterfall at the north end called Winnewissa Falls.”

“And?”

“I stood at the base of the falls and I heard voices. Endless echoes entwined together as one.”

“Aetheric memory saturation,” Shady breathed. “Maybe some Omnid accidentally made the falls into a playback device by burying an artifact upstream.”

“I stood there for twenty minutes, listening. Most of it was incomprehensible, fragments in languages I didn’t recognize. Siouan dialects, probably. Some in French, from the fur trade era. Some in English. Mildly… freaky.”

“What else?”

“Nevada’s dried-up… Winnemucca Lake,” I said. “I saw the sliced up clouds again, above it. Then my dad showed me… these limestone boulders. They had these… abstract-ish designs like ovals or diamonds in a chain. More circles in circles too.”

I went to Goodle and typed the location to find the photos. “These.”

“Could be old syntropy-reinforcing runework,” Shady stated. “Frighhh, this is a lot of magic stuff.”

“You’d think that ten thousand Scrutimancers looking for you would find all this shit too,” I said.

“They might find it eventually,” Shady said. “Scrutimancy stalls hard when it encounters linearity. It needs very high entropy all over to function. It needs the System to be present on a world to ‘identify direction to magic stuff’. Without such, the Scruts are blind and deaf unless they’re extra-attuned to local conditions… like you were. You felt, saw magic stuff from specific angles right?”

“Yes.”

“Exactly,” Shady said. “Extradimensional stuff is really hard to spot unless you’re standing at an exact spot viewing a thing from an exact angle with the right, two-soul mindset. What you saw were possibly cracks in old wards. Maybe… echoes of things from the past… or buried artifacts? Was there anything else? Any other events?”

“One more,” I said. “And then I’m forever done ranting about my suffering and you owe me like fifty answers.”

“Shoot.”

“I… was alone on this one. Mom and Dad were in Alaska for six weeks. They parked me with Grandpa Archie for the summer. Grandma was gone by then and granddad had a caretaker nurse.”

Shady’s tail wrapped around my leg.

“I hiked into the forest behind the estate. Towards Darkfall. Our old stomping grounds. I was… mostly stable on a lower Abilify dose, and hadn’t seen anything unusual in years. Figured I’d just… walk. Remember the trails.”

“And?”

“And I walked to the large oak tree and saw… ‘S&A’ carved there inside this… angular sideways number eight that was wrapped by a heart. And I stared at it like an idiot, not understanding how it was possible. There wasn’t anything else unusual. No singing or ghost people or breathing or voices from the valley below. The world was boringly, oppressively normal. Just Darkfall below wrapped in fog, trees and rocks. Mount Olympus watching a sad teenager standing in a circle of mossy stones looking at a symbol his mind refused to accept as real… because accepting it meant that you were real. It… meant that I wasn’t broken and alone a decade ago.”

The tail tightened.

“I cried,” I said. “For the first time in years. The emotional blunting… broke. Standing in the stone circle… and the edge Abilify’s chemical wall cracked, then crumbled. All the grief I’d been storing since age nine came flooding through at once. I cried so hard I couldn’t stand. Collapsed onto the moss. Sat there bawling like a child for I… don’t know how long.”

Shady’s hand found mine under the table. Large. Warm. Padded. Gentle. Sparkling with violet ripples and orange stars where our fingers touched.

“When I finally stopped, the fog had thickened to the point where I couldn’t see five feet in any direction. And the number eight with letters… lit up ever so slightly, like it was painted with violet… phosphorus. I reached out and touched it and… for a few seconds, I could feel you… feel your echo, almost heard your voice from long ago. Then, warmth and pressure and overwhelming sadness pressing against the other side of an… elsewhere otherness I couldn’t identify. Like you were leaning against a door I couldn’t find the handle to.”

Shady nodded, her eyes wet.

“The symbol went dark after a few seconds,” I said. “The fog lifted. I… suppressed the shit out of it, told myself that it wasn’t fucking real and hiked back home. Told Grandpa I’d gone for a walk. He looked at me, noticed that I was hell-a red-eyed and grass-stained, and he said… ‘She will be back.’ I nodded, not really wanting to think about it. He hugged me and made me hot chocolate and never mentioned it again.”

“He knew,” Shady said. “He was Zexxia’s kobold.”

“He never told me.”

“He was ‘prolly protecting you. Or doing whatever job Zexxia assigned him to.”

I drained the last of the cold coffee.

“Your turn,” I said. “Explain to me what I am. What the fuck have you done to me?”

Shady slid out from under the table, sand cascading off her dark fur. She stretched to her full height, antlers catching the morning sun, and looked down at me with silver eyes blazing.

“I’m not a Wisdom mage,” she stated. “Understanding stuff… is more of a Sage thing.”

“Try,” I pursed my lips.

“You’re a Liminal tree,” she said. “The crack… the divide I made in you as a kid didn’t create your ability, Ashy. It basically pried open… wobbled, activated what was already there. The Wandjinn saw you because you noticed them. The totem sentinels tracked you because you register on both sides of the divide… As linear and liminal. The fairy circle and the friendship rune we carved into the tree responded to your presence because you and I created it, your soul resonating to the Netherweave Fold we built together.”

“And the antipsychotics?”

“Probably didn’t do fuck all except muffle your feelings about… me and all the messed up stuff you saw.” She paused. “Maybe even made you better at sensing, seeing and naturally speaking out about liminal shit.”

“What?!”

“You actively spoke about what you saw, to the adults even when they thought you were insane, yes?”

“Yes,” I gritted my teeth. “I couldn’t bloody keep my mouth shut about it!”

“Cassandra syndrome,” Shady stated. “It’s a known issue… with young kobold Seers. The magical observation must be spoken about, to release excessive entropy from the body with the words, otherwise it builds up, accumulates and fucks up your insides.”

“Fucking hell. What the fuck?! The antipsychotics made me a better Seer?!”

“I’m not a doctor or an Animancer. Theoretically… if a person is subjected to particular suffering like carrying weights on their legs, their leg muscles become stronger. When did you stop taking the meds?”

“At… college,” I said, recalling that I jokingly pointed out that North was a vampire and that Marya was a werewolf before they were revealed to me as a crystalloid and Skinwalker.

“First week at UOFSE, I met Dax… Maksymilian Drzewiecki, six foot two of pure Polish extrovert who showed up to my dorm room holding a broken espresso machine and said ‘you’re an engineering student, right? Let’s fix this and we’ll be best friends forever.’ I fixed it with him. We became best friends. He took me to parties, introduced me to people… none of whom I got along with that well. Got me some blind dates too that didn’t go anywhere on the account that I suck at expressing my feelings properly.”

Shady’s lanky fingers idly played with mine, glittering with orange stars.

“Dax figured out I was on meds by semester two. ‘Hey man, you seem foggy today. When’s the last time you talked to your doc about dosage?’” I pantomimed my friend. “He spent six months tapering me off, monitoring withdrawal symptoms, making me eat, dragged me to classes. He nearly failed chemistry because he was too busy making sure I didn’t go insane during the adjustment period. After graduation he went back to Poland, got a job there through his family connections and I once again was alone for the summer and then… Inherited my grandfather’s gargantuan house with far too many rooms, most of which I didn’t even bother exploring… Because I felt so shitty and lost. Because it all fucking reminded me of… A girl I lost so long ago. My… Pippi Longstocking!”

I noticed that my eyes filled with tears.

“Ashy, Ashy… I’m sorry,” Shady uttered, wrapping herself around me, circling me from behind. “I am so sorry! I didn’t mean to leave you alone for so long, I swear. Aunt Evely caught me skulking in the Deep near her office, pulled me out and said that I’ve spent enough time roaming aimlessly in the Corpse God Citadel. She put me to sleep with a spell. When I woke up… I was in my dad’s estate in… Omnithornia. She must have done something to my head too, because I mostly forgot about you. About us.”

I nodded, holding tightly onto my Wendigo best friend.

“I gradually healed, remembering the good times,” Shady said. “But had no way to get back to Zexxia, until my graduation from Skyfall. Seeing the spliced boy in Lissander’s broadcast was the final straw. I demanded to do the bloodline trial ceremony thing ASAP… and they finally opened a gate for me back to the Corpse-God Citadel.”

“Hrm,” I let out, wiping my face. “Guess I’ve been under some serious stress this week, and it’s all finally coming out.”

“It’s okay,” Shady rubbed her skull-face across my head, eyes closed, letting out a purr she probably copied from Nexxali. “I’m here. I’m back. Back with my bestie…”

“Jeez,” I half smiled, “I completely forgot about the damned Pippi Longstocking thing.”

“Pippi… Yass. How well do you remember… Pippi?”

Shady saying it sparked a fire in the murky swamp of medication-addled memory.

A book with dog-eared pages. Orange cover. A girl with red pigtails lifting a horse over her head.

“Sort of,” I said. “Fragments. I recall reading it to you, then us reading it together?”

“Yes!” Shady’s blade-claws turned rubber-soft as she squeezed me hard. “We found it in your grandpa’s library. ‘Pippi Longstocking’ by that lady… the Swedish one…”

“Astrid Lindgren.” I stated.

“YES! And you read it to me and I went absolutely batshit because Pippi was ME! She was the strongest girl in the world! She lived alone in a big house! She had a horse and a monkey and her dad was far away and… she made her own freaking rules and adults couldn’t tell her what to do!”

More memory surfaced in patches like faded photographs floating up from an abandoned pool.

A blanket fort in the library. Christmas lights strung along the shelves. A smaller, thinner Shady with stubby antler-nubs reading aloud in a halting voice, struggling with Swedish-to-English name pronunciations.

“You declared yourself Pippi,” I said.

“OBVIOUSLY! And you were totally my Tommy!”

“Initially, yes,” I smiled. “Then we found another book. Right?”

“Yesss,” she whispered reverently. “You read me the Peter Pan book and said Tommy was boring and you wanted to be Peter Pan instead because he was a leader of Lost Boys and could fly.”

“And you got offended because Pippi could lift a horse and Peter Pan couldn’t.”

“Lifting a horse is way more impressive than flying! Flying is pedestrian for an Omnid girl with wings, lifting an entire horse with one hand as a kid is ATHLETE behavior!”

I found myself grinning. The memory was grainy, faded like a VHS tape left too long in the sun, the antipsychotics and time having scrubbed half the detail away. The emotional texture was there though. Cozy warmth. Joy. Endless, manic, boundless energy of two kids convinced they were the main characters of stories they’ve read together.

“We spent… how long arguing about Pippi versus Peter Pan?” I asked.

“Weeks!” Shady laughed. “You insisted on being Peter because Peter Pan could take Wendy and the Lost Boys to Neverland and Pippi couldn’t take anyone anywhere. And I said Pippi didn’t NEED to go anywhere because everywhere Pippi stood was already the most fun place in the universe!”

“And then we compromised.” My smile widened.

“We MERGED THEM!” Shady bounced on her haunches, the entire patio rattling. Claire peeked through the window with mild concern. I waved at her reassuringly.

Just a big dog being a big dog. Definitely no talking, hopping, space-Wendigos over here.

“We said you were Peter Pan and I was Pippi and together we’d make Neverland real in the magic forest-fog! Because Peter brought the magic and Pippi brought the strength!” Shady shook me, looking increasingly excited.

“The fairy circle,” I uttered.

“THE FAIRY CIRCLE!” Shady barked, barely containing herself. “We built it, Ashy! In Darkfall! You found shiny rocks in the creek bed and I dug up the glowing ones from the abandoned mine and LICKED THEM all…”

“And I made fun of you for licking rocks all day long.”

“Shush. They tasted like juicy starlight and I was a kid with zero impulse control!” She giggled and then looked up at me. “Oi, that’s a judging look, quit judging me!”

“I’m judging you forever. You licked so many rocks.”

“Magic rocks! I activated them with my saliva by claiming them! Wendigo-science!”

“Uh-huh,” I teased her. “Peer-reviewed rock licking.”

“ANYWAY!” She swatted my leg. “We found this amazing ring of mushrooms in the deepest, darkest part of the forest on one of our walks… and added our rocks to it… and… I…”

Her face scrunched up. “Fuck. I can’t remember this part.”