Again and again, skimming beyond the world, dipping in on occasion to gain experience and feel the slick shock of existence, the shade tried to tap into the mind. It offered itself first, giving the mind something to focus on, but it must have frightened it away instead. It had no way to lure—it was essentially nothing but future memory, so what could it possibly offer a mind of such magnitude?—and so instead it had to inveigle its way inside. It would use its pure, untempered instinct for life, the one sense that its god had perpetuated and encouraged and which nature, by judging it as an imperfect example of its sort, had sought to take away. And this life had the god at its center. The shade put ideas of its god into the mind’s way, letting it stumble and trip and absorb, drawing it up out of the real world until it began to soar again, questing knowledge. Still it veered away from the shade, afraid of its blankness, but the shade persisted, planting more ideas, steering the mind, hovering and struggling to find a crack through which it would penetrate to become corporeal at last.

That crack came unbeckoned.

The mind suddenly exploded up and out of the real world, a maelstrom of confused emotions blended with pain and surprise. The shade backed away and let the mind soar, expand, open itself out until it settled once again just beyond the boundaries of unreality. There it dreamed and reveled once again in its knowledge. But there was something ever-present—a worry, a fear, a dread—that the shade could work on.

It approached, dipped down and found itself sharing.

The mind recoiled. The shade rejoiced. It spread itself and was instantly dizzied by the sensations and emotions therein. There was pain and the taste of grass and mud, the sound of distant shouting and the sense of a heartbeat, fast and irregular, grasped in an icy fist of fear. It opened its mouth and shouted, felt the thing it had become shouting along with it, raising a voice that echoed back again and again. It could smell heather and blood, feel something sharp pressing into its face and something soft and cool next to that, tickling its mouth.

It was a person. Its name was Alishia.

The shade screamed again from sheer delight and Alishia jumped to her feet, laughing and spinning around, tripping and jarring her knees and palms on rough rock, hardly noticing the pain.

For a few seconds that she could not explain, Alishia reveled in the simple fact that she was alive. And that life was rich with potential.

Chapter 14

Chapter 14