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Calling, calling.

The feral shadow is used to the voices of humans echoing through the streets of the city. The voices call people to prayer, call children to mothers, call families to dinner. No one ever calls to the shadow. It is a nothing, a thin puddle of mist and smoke and winter darkness creeping along alleys and under awnings. The shadow is always just out of sight, never recognized as a threat, never creating alarm. It has lived its life before this as a wispy but voracious hunter of rats, dogs, cats, and chickens. Once in a while a human sees it, but no one calls to it then: the human just stands in paralyzed silence, or runs screaming wordlessly.

The shadow is used to the voices; ten thousand times it has heard the humans call to one another. But this voice is different: it calls to the feral shadow. Nothing has ever called to the shadow before. The voice is more entrancing than all the voices on the street, a sweet summoning as faint but inexorable as a dream. The shadow twists like smoke, compelled to answer the call–

–and feels the sudden heat of a pounding savannah sun, smells dusty plains and herds of antelope and wildebeest.

Even though it is afternoon and no longer the height of day, the light burns like fire. The shadow screams and flees its enemy the sun, scrambling into the comforting dark of a large rock’s shade. To the single man who sees it before it hides away, the shadow looks like a scrap of fog, a whispering current of night. But he’s not surprised by its appearance: he is expecting the shadow.

The shadow sinks into the ground, filling the gaps in a patch of soil. Above it, the man speaks in a steady rhythm, and words fall like ropes around the shadow. The words are inexpressibly sweet: a demand for faithful service, tasks quickly done, well done–with the soothing promise of rewards all the more attractive for the lack of detail. The shadow listens, and walks willingly into the snare.

Like the sun hidden by heavy clouds, the shadow’s thoughts are suddenly obscured by the Great Darkness of the human’s control. Its hunger, its fear disappears; new urges and needs replace them. The human now owns the shadow’s mind, and with it, the shadow’s body, such as it is.

The Great Darkness tells the shadow to seek a sorceress of a nearby town, a young fine-boned woman. Kill her, the Darkness says, and bring her remains to me.

The Shadow has never killed a human before. It knows that humans never take the loss of their own easily: unlike rats or birds or even pigs, the rest of the human herd will quickly seek out anyone or anything that harms one of their number.

The feral shadow is afraid to harm one now, but the Darkness cannot be opposed. It slithers into the excruciating light of the sun and the lengthening shade, to do as it is told. Perhaps it will soon be called back, by a voice of honeyed sweetness, like a dove baked in pastry and almonds.