Chapter Ten #3
“I think they are. Lies have a way of taking on a life of their own, so it makes sense the Shadows do, too.”
Aoife nodded. Hesitated. Stopped. “What?”
Shadach took a few more steps and then stopped walking, looking back. “Sorry?”
“What do lies have to do with Shadows?”
“They are the Shadows.”
Aoife stared at Shadach. Shadach stared at Aoife.
“What?” Aoife said, for lack of a better response.
“When people lie, a Shadow is created … you didn’t know?”
Aoife shook her head, stepping out of the path of a Shadow, feeling a sudden and terrible pressing sensation on her chest. Every Shadow was a lie. Slithering through the air. How many lies had Aoife told? There was something deeply unsettling about the idea of her lies floating through the air.
“No, I didn’t know,” Aoife managed to say. She forced herself to start walking again. “So … if I lie, does a Shadow just appear somewhere in the world?”
Shadach hesitated, glancing at her carefully before saying, “Not quite. The Shadow comes off your body. When it’s first made, it’s invisible though. It grows darker and more visible with time, but by then, it’s impossible to know who the Shadow came from.”
Aoife fought the instinct to pat down her body, as if she could convince her lies to not jump off her skin and into the air. “But if they’re invisible,” Aoife said, “how do you know they’re lies? Or that people create them at all?”
Shadach gave a soft laugh. “Very astute. There were people a long time ago that could see them when they were created. It’s well-documented.”
A long time ago? What happened to the people? Aoife wondered. But instead, she said, “Can they hurt you?” That seemed like more pressing information.
“Me? No. Over two hundred years ago, the Shadow Sickness claimed hundreds of thousands of non-Halcin lives. But the sickness hasn’t been seen since.”
“Are you immune?”
“Something like that.” His tone was biting. Which made Aoife desperately want to know more. For science. Obviously. Not because she found Shadach endlessly fascinating.
A hundred attempts to get Shadach to say more sprang to her lips, but before Aoife could speak the words, something caught her eye. Something beautiful. Something forbidden. At least, to Aoife it felt forbidden.
In the ground, a short ways off the road, was what appeared to be a mural.
It had been dug into the dirt and hardened.
What in the world kind of curing process could do that?
As Aoife stared, something niggled at the back of her mind.
She’d seen art like this before, hadn’t she?
Her mind flipped through the places she’d been as if it was a picture book.
There. She landed on the metaphorical right page.
In the town square, when she’d first arrived.
She’d seen a mural carved into the stones.
But that one had been faded. This one was less weathered.
Aoife left the dirt path and stood beside the ground mural, drawn to it like a negative charge to a positive one.
From close up, it was an engraving of a village. But there was no joy, no hope in this particular place. Twisted and broken stars reigned overhead, the houses devoured by flames, the people lost. Faceless.
Aoife felt cold as she stared. As if her own soul was being wiped of its uniqueness just as the faces were wiped from these people.
The feeling was unsettling and yet, as she stood there, letting herself absorb on a visceral level the history, the story, the warning this art had to offer, it felt like home.
Cosy. Warm. Right.
In that moment, Aoife wondered, fleetingly, what life would have been like if she hadn’t pursued computer science. If she had pursued art like she had wanted to deep down. As quickly as the thought came, it shattered, the cold hammer of reality fracturing the comfort of the moment.
She knew what would have happened. Her life would have been awful. There had been a time when she had tried. Given art, dreams, whimsy her all.
A long time ago, when she’d been eight years old.
At the time, she and her family were living in Australia for Mum’s fellowship position at the University of Sydney.
Aoife didn’t exactly fit with her family.
She was chocolate, they were vegetables.
She was metaphors, they were tell-it-like-it-is.
She was an artist, they were scientists.
But Aoife didn’t mind, because she knew that someday, somehow, they would acknowledge who she was.
They would see her way was just as valid as theirs.
That opportunity came when Aoife’s primary school held an art competition.
Not a silly art competition with stickers as a prize.
A real one. A big one. The prize was a private tutoring session with one of Sydney’s best up-and-coming artists.
Aoife couldn’t believe her luck. She would enter the competition and she would win.
She would win so hard that her parents would have to see how right she was.
That her hobbies were just as important as her brother’s.
Maybe, she would win so good even the Prime Minister would want to meet her!
Aoife dreamed about all the places she would go, all the people she would meet, when she was a famous artist as she worked on her competition piece: a ceramic teapot.
Pottery was her favourite. She loved the cool of the clay against her hands, the peace of watching the clay spin around and around the wheel, the way her two little hands could mould a lump of nothing into something beautiful.
Not just beautiful, but useful, too. And Mum loved tea, so this was a win-win!
It didn’t matter that Mum kept telling her the competition was silly, that she shouldn’t even bother, that art would do her no good.
It didn’t matter that even at five years old, her little brother was looking down his nose at her dreams. None of it mattered, because Aoife knew she was right.
She knew in her heart of hearts she was born to be an artist and she was going to win.
When judgement day came, Aoife could barely breathe from excitement.
This was it. This was her moment. They announced …
someone else’s name. Aoife had felt her heart rip.
She had poured so much time and energy into her project, and she hadn’t even been a runner-up.
Dejected and confused, Aoife lugged her failed teapot home.
She had really thought she was meant to win.
She’d wanted it so badly and had been so certain.
But maybe it wasn’t as bad as all that. Maybe she was meant to win a different competition and she’d just gotten mixed up.
Maybe she just needed to try again.
When Aoife got home, she put the teapot on the table while she pulled her books and homework from her bag. Mum came in. She laughed. Aoife looked up, wondering what was so funny. It took a moment before Aoife realised her teapot was what was so funny.
“What is that?” Mum laughed.
Aoife’s heart sank to the floor. She swallowed. Straightened her shoulders. “It’s my … I made it. It’s a teapot.”
Mum picked it up. Laughed harder. She patted Aoife on the head. “You best stick with the sciences.”
“But I want to be an artist,” Aoife whispered. “I could meet the Prime Minister.”
Mum shook her head, still laughing with the hilarity of it all. “Sorry, Aoife, but that’s not for you. Besides, artists are nothing but muppets who can’t make it in the real world. Do you want to end up broke and homeless eating out of a bin?”
Aoife shook her head.
“Of course you don’t. Because you’re smart.
” Mum tossed the teapot back onto the table, but she might as well have stomped on Aoife’s heart.
Popping it into oblivion. Aoife choked back her tears.
Once Mum had left, she ran out back with the teapot and smashed it in the yard.
Again. Again. Again. Her hopes and dreams a shattered mess on the floor.
Months of love, of care, of work. Destroyed.
No one ever noticed the broken teapot.
Aoife stood in front of the mural in the earth, hot tears pressing at the back of her eyes.
No matter how old she got, no matter how many degrees or accomplishments, that memory would always hurt.
She could still hear that laughter, shrieking, shrieking, shrieking in her mind like a banshee of death.
How foolish she had been to think she could have her dreams.
“Do you like it?”
Aoife jumped at Shadach’s voice. She’d forgotten he was there. That anyone and anything but her, the mural, and the painful past was here.
Of course I love it. “Not really.” It’s breathtaking. “Art isn’t my thing.”
Lying was the right thing to do. Aoife needed to stay on task. The last thing she needed was to be distracted by old hopes, old longings.
“What an odd thing to lie about.” Shadach’s eyes were dark and cutting, as if he was looking into her soul.
Aoife took a step back. Caught off-guard. “What?”
“I can’t imagine why you would lie about liking art.”
Because it’s the wrong thing to like. “I’m not lying.” Aoife’s voice cracked mid-sentence, making her conviction pitifully weak.
“You are. You obviously are. Again.” Shadach’s stance was wide, his shoulders squared. Something about the power of his form, the relentless force of his gaze set Aoife alight. As if he had reached inside her and flipped a switch on her most primal needs.
It was precisely the opposite of what she should have been feeling.
“I …” Lie. You need to lie. “I …” You’ll be ridiculed. Humiliated. Destroyed if you tell the truth. “I wasn’t …” But he already knows you’re lying. Can you lie your way out of a lie? “Do you like it?”
“Of course I like the art of my people,” he said. Not missing a beat.
The words hit her like a slap in the face. His people? The Halcin did this?
“You,” she said, “know how to make this?” This beautiful thing?
Shadach nodded, eyes still seeming to peer into her soul. “I could show you, if you like.”
Aoife’s chest squeezed, her heart beating so fast she could barely breathe.
Show her? She could learn this? Could make something as exquisite as this?
A hope. A thought. It flickered in Aoife’s soul.
What if she knelt on this ground, with this gorgeous man, and created something beautiful? Horribly constructed teapots be damned.
What if she could have what she’d thought was impossible?
“Thank you,” her voice nearly shook, “but no.”
Of course she couldn’t have that. Not now. Not ever. Life was not made of dreams. It was made of logic. Of science. That was the only way to live.
“You don’t want to learn?” Scepticism dripped from Shadach’s words.
“Your people’s art is lovely. But art isn’t really my thing.” Aoife turned back to the road and kept walking. Walking. Walking. If she didn’t stop, if she stayed ahead of him then he couldn’t see. He wouldn’t notice her face. Her panic.
Her anger.
Those Gates. How dare they. Dangling this man, whose very body was a work of art, in front of her. This man who was offering to make long-dead dreams come true. It was cruelty of the highest order. Because the dreams Aoife once had could not be. Dreams of art and beauty and whimsy.
Those dreams were for fools.