Shadows monthly prompt

We are so back with the #MonthlyPrompts, I have the artistic ability of a doorknob so I’ve written you all something.

I’ve went for an apocalyptic sorta story in which a mysterious rift opens in the sky, blotting out the sun and the moons.

Genuinely enjoyed writing this so much I may have to do some follow ups BUT I wouldn’t read if you’re particularly triggered by blood, and very very very very very vague references of s*icide (just a deer but still!!!!!) this clocks in at just under 4000 words and I haven’t proof read at all so shout at my for inconsistencies and typos etc.

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“No one ed the exact day that the light died, only the Rift that opened. It wasn’t a single moment, but a slow, quiet unraveling, like a song that ended mid-note, leaving only silence behind.

They say it began with the moons. Masser and Secunda, vanishing from the night sky without warning. The air had grown…still. Not peaceful, but waiting. One evening they hung blood-red above the Throat of the World, and by dawn, they were simply gone. The stars followed next, swallowed by an inky darkness that stretched beyond the reach of even Azura’s grace.

Within a week, sunlight no longer warmed the frostbitten soil and the land itself was condemned to shadows. Not because of clouds or storms, but because the sky itself had changed, thick and unnatural, like the void beyond sleep and the death of the Godless. The priests and zealots of Azura screamed that the Evergloam had bled into Nirn, that Nocturnal’s realm had torn a hole in reality and had begun to feast on the sun.

The animals were the first to change. Birds forgot how to sing. Wolves howled perpetually, their eyes hungry with shades of jet black, their bodies stretched and twisted as though the dark had seeped into their marrow. Deer turned pale and blind, huddling in herds before throwing themselves off of cliffs as if fleeing something only they could see - something that was worse than death itself. Trolls began to speak in tongues, chanting to stones and eating only fire. The dead stopped sleeping in entireties and burst from their crypts in hundreds, spreading their unholy blight. Docile giants slaughtered their mammoths before attacking cities and towns, brazen and uncaring.

Then the people changed.

Dunmer once loyal to Azura now whispered to shadows, their voices echoing oddly, as if speaking from a great distance. Nords barricaded themselves in their mead halls, only to be found later with their throats torn out and faces disfigured, doors still locked and barred from within. The Khajiit all but disappeared, forgotten and abandoned and forsaken by their Gods, the moons. Brothers killed brothers, husbands killed wives, all sickened with madness.

Those who wander amongst the dark for too long begin to forget. First their names. Then places. Then family. Then why they exist at all. Some wander into the hills and forests and fade into obscurity amongst the shadows. Others return days and weeks later, emaciated, grinning and blind and devoid of whatever humanity they once clung to, begging to be let inside before nightfall, though there is no difference between night and day anymore.

The College of Winterhold is silent now and nobody knows what became of the mages within, save for a blue glow pulsing endlessly from its highest tower. The Vigilants of Stendarr set fire to themselves at the steps of the Halls of the Dead and their own Hall, chanting prayers that curdled into animalistic screams, in hopes that their Patron will deliver his justice, swift and without mercy. The Dark Brotherhood kill indiscriminately and publicly, regardless of their mother’s whisper and the Thieves Guild pray for days on end, until starvation takes them, for their mistress has returned once more.

Others feared it was something worse, something older and angrier and hungrier. The Divines had gone silent. Daedra spoke only in riddles, those that dared speak at all.

They say the only light left comes from fire and memory. And even those grow dim.”

17th of Sun’s Height, Fourth Era, year 202

~Arno Mondragón, heir to Rivenspire, second son of the red and gold, finest swordsman in all of High Rock

I buried the last of the villagers myself; thirteen men and ten women from a hamlet near Lake Ilinalta I had stayed with the night prior. At least, I thought it was the night. Sunset and rise became suggestions now, not events set in stone. Collectively, they had chosen to walk into the woods instead of starve. I found them smiling. Peaceful. As if they’d found a new God in the cold dark that promised better and sooner than the ones who had forsaken them. I almost envied them. The perpetual night is dark, it is angry and it hungers insatiably, its shadow casts its grip across all of Skyrim, perhaps all of Tamriel, perhaps all of Nirn itself. It is indiscriminate and merciless. We are but dust and shadow now, the bones and the flesh and the blood within us are subject only to the reign of night, for, in time, it will claim us all one by one. There isn’t a sword sharp enough, a flame hot enough nor frost cold enough, a shield steadfast enough or a champion worthy enough that can save us. I walked autonomously from their shallow graves, some ancient and forgotten survival instinct pressing each step onwards, neither towards damnation or salvation but purgatory. I thought that, for a moment, I could hear them call out to me as I turned. They begged for their lives in one utterance, and begged me to them in the next. “Oh the fun!” A young elven voice called out. “The finest ales and wines, riches and luxury beyond your comprehension!” They called out in their grisly dozens, beckoning me back to bed as though it was an early morning accompanied with a lover. What I wouldn’t do to feel the sun once more.

I looked up to the sky. It did not move. It did not swirl like a storm, or shimmer like magic. It simply hovered above us all, a void so black it hurt to gaze into. It was dark, but likewise simply absent. Like it had cut a hole in the sky, and the world had started bleeding into it. Perhaps something gazed back at me, malicious. Perhaps it was simple nothingness above me.

I haven’t slept in three days now, maybe four. Not because of fear, but because even dreams had become unsafe. They are no longer mine. Each night I see a place not bound by time or flesh; a shifting place of angles and soundless screams. A well without bottom. There were things in it. Watching me. Waiting for me to them.

The same voice came each time.

“You are ed, while the rest forget. You belong to us.”

I pressed on another half dozen miles or so, time had lost meaning as the suns and moons were slaughtered and so did distance. The air was thick, unyielding, uncaring. It had not temperature, neither particularly hot nor cold. It enveloped me in its embrace and the weariness took hold once more. I knew I couldn’t fall asleep, not here, not if I wanted them to take me. Perhaps I was too stubborn, perhaps I had the foolish ambition of righting all these wrongs. There was an old hunters cabin just ahead, barely decipherable its the endless twilight. Once proud oak was now darkened and dampened as though it was coated in tar. I opened the door and whatever part of me that expected to see a loving family crowding around had been butchered long ago. Their was nobody here, but there was once long ago. A rotten meal sat atop a table just before and cold fireplace which had long since forgotten the feeling of hot coals and burning wood, a tankard of half drank ale which more resembled putrescence next to it. There was a coin purse on a table off to my left and parchment, a quill and a half empty inkwell. Neither gold nor words had much meaning anymore, the former was redundant and even the latter would be claimed in time. I couldn’t stay for long, the longer I stayed in one place, the more this place learned me. It began by taking memories. Then senses. Then shape. Then entirety. I could stay for maybe three hours, maybe less, maybe more, I dared not linger long enough to learn the consequences but I could at least remind myself of past comfort in the fabricated safety of the old wood. The fire almost refused to light, as though even the flame was unnerved by this place, but it obeyed before long. I found a mirror in the corner, dusty and below a crown of cobwebs. I gazed at myself for a moment. My name was gone. It had been something short. Or long. It didn’t matter. I knew he had once held a blade. Or a spell. Or maybe a ring. There are calluses on my palms, faint scars across my ribs and my left eye was all but gone. That meant something, didn’t it? Of course! The swords on my back, they are mine. Fleeting memories rushed back as I reached for my journal. “I am Arno Mondragón, heir to Rivenspire, second son of the red and gold, finest swordsman in all of High Rock.” I ed now why I wrote this down, for this very event. I hardly recognise the man in the mirror, staring back at me. But it was me, it had to be, for was I really living if it was not? I breathed and I felt and I made my own decisions, I ate and I drank and I slept, but if this man in the mirror is not who I preach it to be, then is this all futile?

The fire behind me hissed out as though it had been choked. Something was coming down through the door behind me. Soft. Tall. Wrong. I didn’t hear it, but rather felt it, like a pressure in my bones from deep underwater, like a memory too cruel and lamenting to hold. I turned slowly. It looked like a man, at least from a distance in the now dark confines of the single room cabin. Closer, it looked like what an artist might imagine a man to be, if it had forgotten the details. Too tall. Too smooth. Tight skin like dusk draped over gaunt bone. Its eyes were not eyes at all but little windows into the Rift above us all, flickering with that same slow, pulsing blackness. It is wrapped in layered black cloth that writhed in the windless air. Its face is blank stone, like a statue half-carved and abandoned. “You were born in High Rock, little Mondragón,” it said without moving its mouth. “But you were forged by the Pattern. Now the Pattern dies and you are the wound we .” I did not draw my blade. Not yet. Rather, I replied “What is it you want?” Was that my voice? It did not feel right as the words escaped my lips, the way the little vibrations felt in my skull and the accent all felt alien. The thing smiled. It was the wrong shape for a smile, soft spoken with a broken jaw and far too many teeth, some dull, some snapped, some razor sharp and prickled with blood. “To forget. To forget everything. You are the last name left in the world. And soon…” It stepped forward, and the light around it died. “…you will forget yourself.”

I drew my sword but it was gone, such frivolous attempts to frighten me and before long I worked on relighting the extinguished flame. The flame was meek and tender, frightened and skittish, but it warmed the cold if even slightly. I pulled the blades from my back and placed them before me, and then my satchel. Whatever magic lingered within their sharpened steel had long since faded into obscurity, an inferno and a glacier snuffed and melted. Conversely, the magic had long since been siphoned from my veins as well and we were all left to our own devices, the pen no longer mightier than the sword. I sifted through my satchel, a handful of potions and then the note. Of course, the note! I felt like a fool for forgetting but I am sure the Gods could forgive my ignorance. The parchment was muddied and tarnished but still legible.

“You must understand, if anything is still to be understood: the world is not ending with fire or ice, but with forgetting.

We called it the Rift, or the Null Star, or the Black Eye. Fools’ names. Names are part of the Pattern. It does not care for names. Ithel-Nur yes, I name it, was never a god in the way we know Gods. Not even a Daedra. It is the hunger before creation. The silence before Akatosh’s first breath.

Before time began, Ithel-Nur was. It was bound outside the Pattern by the singing of the Aedra, sealed behind the myths of memory. That’s why we forget dreams. Why we age. Why we write history down; to against the dark.

But we broke too much. The Dragon was bent too often. Scrolls read too far. And one of us, one of the Psijics, I think, opened a door they thought was a window. And now Ithel-Nur wakes.

It eats not flesh, but sequence. First time. Then form. Then story. Then soul. Until nothing remains but the hum of empty potential, waiting to be made again. But there is one thing the Void cannot digest: the soul that re itself.

So listen, if you are still whole. If you still your name or even just the shape of it. If you dream in language, and not in lightless static. Go to the shrine beneath the bones of the sky, the cave of blue glass, beneath Mount Hrothgar’s shadow.

She waits there. The Lady of Dusk and Dawn. Azura, who re all who have been forgotten. Or perhaps Meridia, if the stars align. Or some flicker of Julianos. I no longer know. They all weep now. Even gods are beginning to forget their faces. But something still burns there. A memory. A choice. Go before you are unmade. Or go to be remade. If enough of us , we might write a new Pattern. Or sing a song strong enough to hold back the dark for one more age.”

-

“The snow no longer crunches beneath my boots. It whispers. Everything whispers now, the trees, the stones, the wind, the forgotten. Not in words, but in something else, baser and primal. Like the dwindling memory of an ancient language. Like thought just before it turned to sound. Was it always this quiet? I can’t .

The note burns in my pack like a second heart. By now, I’ve read it dozens of times over. The ink, scrawled in half-mad script, dances in my vision when I close my eyes. Perhaps hope blinds me, could the Lady of Twilight await there?

Gods have grown thin lately. When I try to pray, the words come out wrong. Sometimes backwards. Sometimes empty. Sometimes not at all. I ‘met’ a priest of Talos on the road last week - his mouth sewn shut, yet still chanting, muffled behind his lips.

I wonder now if belief itself is part of the Pattern. And if that was unraveling, then faith might be just another kind of forgetting. And yet, the Rift remains. Unblinking. Growing ever darker, threading to swallow all light upon Nirn. It didn’t burn. It didn’t strike. It just was a concept that refused to fade. If Daedra had done this, there would be a form; wrath, ambition, cruelty. If Aedra, there’d be meaning. But this Rift had no motive. No face. No will. It is…subtraction.

Maybe that was the point. Maybe Ithel-Nur wasn’t coming at all. Maybe it was ing us out of existence.

Somewhere beyond those pale ridges, behind the frozen vale and the dying pines, the bones of the sky will rise soon, and I will know I have reached my destination.

A cave of blue glass, where memory burned bright. A place where one of the gods, Azura, Meridia, or another waited. Or wept. Either way, I must go. I must .”

19th of Sun’s Height, Fourth Era, year 202

~Arno Mondragón, heir to my Rivenspire, second son of the red and gold, finest swordsman in all of High Rock

I crossed into a valley carved from cracked basalt long ago, its stones slick with a glistening sheen that shimmered between colors no eye was meant to name, yet still perpetually dark. Trees twisted unnaturally, not bent by wind or force, but turned inward, their bark folding into itself like a crease upon paper. Branches curled into spirals that never ended. No birds made their nests within its branches. No tracks trotted around its trunk and no creatures satiated their horns and claws upon its bark. I wondered if there were any animals left whatsoever, for I haven’t seen a deer or wolf in at least a week now. A week? The saying felt so…unnatural, for what was time now? The day not longer bled into night, nor the night into morning. It was the peak of summer now yet it was colder and harsher and darker than the dead of winter.

There were no sounds, no wildlife or civilisation. Not even the White River roaring just a quarter mile behind could break through the shadows. Just humming. Always humming. Neither human nor machine nor animal, simply present.

I descended into a small valley and the sky snapped a shade darker as the shadows embraced me. I saw the first one - a person, or once a person. It crouched by a frozen stream, rocking back and forth with its head in its arms, its limbs long and jittering, ts bending with the twitch of puppet strings. Its fur was spotted. Orange and gray, thinned and patchy. A Khajiit, or what remained of one. It froze in one unnatural movement with a harsh crack. Its head snapped toward him - not slowly, but in a single, shuddering tick, like a broken gear jolting into place. No eyes. Just smooth, milky hollows with claw marks just below still drilling a shade of crimson.. The thing opened its mouth and moaned, not a scream, not a cry, but a long exhalation of lost sound, as if venting memory like steam from one of the lost Dwemer’s automatons. Words spilled from it. “Masser is gone. Secunda is gone. This one is gone. We are gone.” It rose. Its legs bent the wrong way. Its tail dragged behind like a dying snake, almost completely flayed. The face flickered, briefly and I thought I saw something behind the smoothness. A memory of laughter. A campfire. A brother’s voice, a lovers touch. Then the shimmer ed, and it was naught more than a husk once more. A dozen more came and it backed away into the crowd. They all only raised one long, trembling hand and pointed—to the sky. Imperial and Stormcloak, Dunmer and Argonian, Thalmor and Talos-loyal, tribe orc and city orc, all sons of the shadow united under one dark banner. They were twisted with a variety of injuries, broken fingers and jaws, some were stretched tall as others shambled upon unsteady legs. “Masser is gone. Secunda is gone. This one is gone. We are gone.” They chanted. “Masser is gone. Secunda is gone. This one is gone. We are gone.” They shouted. “Masser is gone. Secunda is gone. This one is gone. We are gone.” They screamed until their vocal chords tore to shreds. The Rift pulsed, and the world skipped a breath.

I ran, and when I could no longer run I walked and when I could no longer walk I collapsed upon the roadside. Their shrill echoes still bouncing around my head, no matter how many metres I put between us. And still I walked, until the soles of my feet bled bloody and raw. Because the note burned. Because the Pattern flickered behind his eyes. Because someone else still ed. I allowed myself to rest for as long as I deemed safe before returning to my feet, the weariness was coming soon I had been for far far far too long, something was coming. I followed what was once a lake but it had no name now. I followed it upstream, boots slick with moss, the water running thin and oily between the stones. The wind carried no birdsong, only the distant rhythm of bells. Not musical bells. A warning, an omen. Hollow. Slow. As if rung by forgotten hands. Twilight stretched across the plains there were once teeming with game and bandits and hunters like a wound that wouldn’t close. At the end of the lake, where the water was shallowest I expected to see more ruin. More rot. Instead, I found a village. Small. Ringed in dead pine. Thatched roofs, firelight, figures moving. It was like a segment of the old world had made itself known, hope on top of a symphony of cheer and song. It couldn’t be true, could it? I refused the false hope that crested in my heart and nestled in my stomach. There were people - real people. They were gathered around a bonfire, drinking and feasting and playing games my hands had long since forgotten how to play. There was comfort, or their should have been but my skin began to crawl. The fire gave no warmth. Its flames were white- sharp, like shattered glass flickering. The figures around it were dressed as commoners, but their motions were wrong. Too fluid. Too synchronized. Heads turning at the exact same time. Eyes blinking in unison like clockwork. Smiles never moving, never wavering as though they were drawn on. Children danced in slow circles. They all hummed, at the same time, in the same time, not a tune, but a frequency like a dream trying to itself. I crept closer, if only out of hope that I had found reality. Each wore a different face. Their skin was sewn crudely, patchwork masks of old identity, Nord, Breton, Mer. As if they’d forgotten their own and stitched together borrowed ones from memory. The skin was yellow and rotted with infection, other parts fresh and virile. One woman turned to me and smiled with impossible speed, feet practically gliding over the knee-high grass to get just in front of me. Her face and her smile was too wide. “You’re just in time,” she said, though her mouth didn’t move from its eerie smile. It grabbed my face, sharp nails drawing blood from small prinpicks and dragged me to the fire, holding my face just above it. If I had yearned for warmth before this, I rued it now. I cursed the flame and spat venomous insults as I felt hair singe and skin wilt. A Redguard man stepped forward from the crowd. His arms were open, robes stained with ash. His eyes were pits of shimmering amber, and something moved behind them, like figures walking across a distant mirror. “We gather,” he intoned. “We . Together.” The crowd echoed his words. The leader held out a long ceremonial blade alreadyred and glistening with blood and held it above the flame, inches from my face. The fire screamed and as did I, as the blade cut into my jawline, shallow yet shrill akin to a paper cut. My blood tarnished the fire and it grew angrier and hungrier, hardly an inch from my face now. They danced and laughed as though I was a jester, mocking me, or welcoming me to linger amongst them.

No. Not like this.

Wether or not it was adrenaline or the promise of salvation at the foot of the mountain, I do not know, but I slipped under the hand that held me down and drew my sword. Their faces twisted all in one. Enraged. Their eyes filled with blackness and hatred for all things living and ing and the mouths barred like dogs, dozens of rows of sharp razors spitting venom and the vilest of curses one wouldn’t even say to their mortal enemy. I cut down the Redguard first, but it dissipated amongst shadows and fog. The bonfire, the houses, the dancers, the children were all gone. Even the Redguard whose blood lingered upon the honed steel was…gone. And yet, I could still feel the fires blaze upon my face and neck, and the cut still bled upon my jaw, dripping into the grass below. I must continue and lift the shadow. I must push on.