Prologue

Introductory prologue

Each change was provoked by a “blink”, a momentary loss of complete and total concentration not unlike blinking into the bright sun’s glare.  

Each blink was more brilliant than the last.

It drifted almost lazily through the eons, stopping only to take in what little bit of information it could before it was shunted to the next time and place.

It saw sunrises, sunsets, life and death; atomic clouds blossomed over the horizon of the New York skyline, and at one point it was pretty sure it saw the world burn entirely from an outside view on the moon (there were folding lawn seats on the rocky surface of that pale satellite, it had tried to sit in one and fell through).  The planet flared up into a beautiful orb of white-hot plasma, and when it became too much to bear to look at the shade turned away.

It sat in serene silence as a family of deer passed it by, unconsciously moving around the space where it would have occupied had it been corporeal. The shade stretched one coil of energy towards the smallest of the family, lightly trailing a line from the base of its neck to the center of its spine. For a brief moment the shade fancied that the deer twitched under its touch.

A crashing sound rolled out of the woods behind them, and just as soon as they had arrived the family of deer fled; the shade whirled around and saw what appeared to be a great oak falling from the top of the tree-line, and by the time that ancient living thing smashed into the earth the shade was gone.

It was like that: blinking across time and space, only in a place long enough to truly feel alone.

Time is only linear to those who exist in a fixed point, at a fixed rate; the degradation of the body being the ultimate countdown clock.  There was a point when the shade may have understood this, embraced it even; it may have thought to itself at that point that it could see the things that it never had been able to when it was alive. It might have been overjoyed at this arrangement of life after… Well, whatever was before?

I need him.

The shade paused, as it could not remember the last time it had had a thought, much less a thought involving the sense of self. It hung there in the air trying to compose itself before the next blink; it hovered in the center of what appeared to be a-

High school hallway lockers on the wall go team go team I need him

-crowded hall filled with people; teenagers wove through each other and pressed against the steel lockers lining the walls in an effort to get through to their destinations.

With slow and deliberate movements the shade began to uncoil itself, every inch of its non-existence spreading thin to try and get a better look at its surroundings. Around and between people the tendrils wound, and for the very first time since it had been put in this predicament it found itself thankful (another odd thought) that nobody could see it now; an amorphous shape hovering three feet off the tiled floor in the center of this hallway, constantly writhing in on itself while also weaving its rope-thin extensions through the mass of unwary students.

Where is he?

Over and through the crowd it explored, tentatively at first but soon growing to an almost frantic rush; it didn’t know what it was looking for, just that for first time in… well, time, that it had felt anything other than a detached emptiness.

Where?

The shade began to push its tendrils not around the people in the hallway, but through them; the pale glow of its whip-ish arms vanishing flush against the clothing and exposed skin of the various unwary children it violated. Memories flooded the shade: a first kiss, the light tickle of a spring breeze on the tip of the nose, hands being clasped tightly together while young and inexperienced bodies gyrated; the shade saw alcoholic parents and abusive siblings, and enough sleepless nights combined to make it almost feel a kinship.

The shade saw a thousand faces in a heartbeat, a million in a second, and it was like that that it sat; for three whole minutes the entity gently swayed above the group so it could get itself into everyone it could perceive. It drank it all in, and it searched for the Him. It was driven by an urge that it could not describe, nor did it even realize that a description could possibly exist; the shade embraced everyone below it and it tore through their minds like an emotional wrecking ball.

A memory flashed through one of its feelers, a face that scowled beneath a paper-boy’s hat with a furrowed brow and brilliantly green eyes. The shade followed the extension to a young girl, perhaps sixteen years of age. One pale tentacle (such an ugly word, the shade realized) jutted out of the small of her back, winding tightly against itself in uncontrollable excitement. The shade studied her for a brief moment as she chattered with another girl, completely oblivious to the presence of the ageless entity that was slowly withdrawing its “arms” from all of the other students and had begun to converge them all around her.

Her, she knows him.

  Each thin rope of energy lightly trailed over every exposed bit of skin that it could reach on the girl, gently probing under to feel the soul beneath. The shade quivered in anticipation and began to slowly push itself into the unaware girl.

Mine.

The girl collapsed underneath it, but the shade was too occupied to notice; it followed her to the ground drove a tendril through her too-blonde hair into the spongy brain beneath.  There were noises all around it now, the sounds of laughter and crying and shouting; the shade pushed farther into the girl as she seized on the ground. Her hair fanned out onto the tile below as she thrashed back and forth, and the girl’s eyes rolled back up into the top of their sockets.

He’s mine.

The shade ripped down the walls in the girl’s mind in search for more images and associations of the man with the green eyes, drinking in every single moment of exposure it was able to find; dimly it was aware that the girl was being crowded by people, stepping through the space occupying the shade’s non-form. It ignored these intrusions as it embraced the girl.

HIM it’s HIM!

A leg moved through the space where the shade sat, and it knew that the leg belonged to the man it searched for; it withdrew instinctively from the blonde girl and wound around itself uncontrollably. One arm limply tried to reach out to touch the source of its excitement and found itself frozen in place. The universe fuzzed in and out of existence, and where the shade saw the man with the green eyes crouched over the girl it also saw an eternity of time stretched out forever in each direction.

It was with a feeble cry that the shade blinked, and found itself on a mountaintop in the year 1342 with nothing but its own thoughts for company.

Contemplation was not an unknown thing to the shade, but it had been so very long since it had felt the urge to contemplate anything in direct regards to itself that it found itself at a loss of what to think. It remembered the feel of the girl thrashing and screaming underneath it, and much to its surprise it felt something that could only be described “shame”; it hadn’t meant to hurt the girl, only to share in the memories that girl had of the man.

Who is he?

A puff of snow, kicked up by a gentle breeze, drifted through the air around the shade. The shade stopped to survey its surroundings; it knew that it was in the year 1342 on a mountaintop in North America, although how it knew that was still an alien concept. Fresh prints in the snow showed that a pack of wolves had moved through this are not too long prior to the shade’s arrival, and in a moment it studied the largest of the tracks and began to work on a formula to determine exactly how many subatomic particles made up the entire composition of the alpha male.

I need to find him again.

Mentally it began to backtrack through its recent memories (already starting to distort and blur much like everything else); looking for clues as to what time and place it had found itself in just moments- hours days years lifetimes- ago. It dawned on the shade that in all the time it had been doing this it had never come into contact with human beings before, and with that realization came clarity of thought.

I will find him again.

The shade, after finishing its estimate (430,000,000,000,000,000,000,062, roughly) began to listlessly drift in the wind towards the canyon below, counting the number of particles in the air around it that could be considered carcinogens.