Free Shadow by Will Elliott

staring at the ceiling.
    He was pondering the part inside him which had gone numb as though to protect itself. He peeled off its shell and looked inside it. He saw that he had come to completely understand: this was no game, no adventure, no dream or comic book; he was not going home. Ever. Everyone he knew by now was as dead to him as the war mage he’d shot in the head, high up on the city wall, to watch Tormentors flock to its falling corpse. And to the old world, he was just as dead. Case, if still alive, was the only link to who Eric used to be, aside from the shoes on his feet. (Kiown’s face flashed through his mind with mocking laughter.)
    Link. Levaal means link, someone had told him. Link which protects. Protects what?
    Would they have had a funeral back home, with no body to bury? He could see it all very clearly, his mother crying (the picture brought tears bubbling up in his own eyes); his father grim-faced, showing his usual level of emotion – not a whit, unless it was anger steaming out of him. He wondered what songs they’d have played, what old forgotten friends would have turned up to say goodbye.
    Siel’s arm was slung over his chest, using him and offering herself as warmth. He gently clutched at her forearm and tried to switch off his mind before the numb part filled with feeling again, but found her touch had the opposite effect. His body trembled with sobs.
    One of Siel’s eyes slid open. Across her face at first was annoyance at being woken, but she watched him for a moment as he wiped his eyes and tried to calm himself. She moved closer to him. ‘Shh,’ she said. ‘You’re here now. And you will make a difference here. There is a war for us to win. But only if you’re strong.’
    She stroked his hair until he felt sleep coming. He didn’t know if hers was the empathy of someone who cared or if it was the touch of a mechanic fixing a machine so it would function better. But he felt that either would have been much the same.
    Their sleep was broken by daylight, the feel of blades at their throats, and a slow, heavy voice saying: ‘I can tell you didn’t do it. But someone did. And maybe you know who.’
    3
    Eric had had a very strange dream, which his mind held with perfect clarity:
    He was someone else, seeing through someone else’s eyes. He’d been wandering in the night with clumsy steps, through the very fields in which this village lay. The strange sky to the south had piqued his curiosity. He would go across sooner or later, but there were gods hanging around, and he had seen what happened to the Nightmare cultists.
    He could make it across the boundary, probably – he could move much faster than them. But for now there were other things of interest to look at. Like that piece of half-broken magic lingering over the village, there. A deceptively simple bit of trickery. How had it been done, covering the village like a big glass bowl? The eye just glanced off it! But the foreign airs had disturbed the disguise, the glass bowl had been cracked.
    There, two bodies bundled up. Their warmth made pulsing red-yellow splotches on his vision. The girl, the fellow, dreaming away. As were those two dogs, similarly curled together on the ends of their chains. And there was that other, hidden away in the square hut yonder, a lone man it seemed, working into the night on some project over a bench, muttering to himself. Time for a closer look.
    Closer. That was easy. Here to there, very fast, the ground rushing away like the world had tilted sideways to drop him down its sheer face, then righted itself again, all in a second. Easier than walking. One of the dogs stirred at his scent.
    These dogs. Funny bodies, fur, teeth and paws. How were these things actually alive? It seemed a miracle, very peculiar. What was inside those funny bodies? More fur, bundles of it packed into that doggy shape?
    That unpleasant mystery solved (no noise