Yo. http://royalroadl.com/fiction/8780

There it is. My new story. The title is: 'The Traveler and the Shade'

Is there anything else to even say here anymore? The worst was approved is already over...

Oh well. If you want to, have fun and go read my new story!

Here is the entirety of chapter 0 (basically a prologue).

Chapter 1 should be posted at the same time as this.

Chapter 0: Dreams

What is every man’s dream?

I believe it is to live in a fantasy world with strong swordsman and powerful magicians.

So, what happens if you come from a fantasy world? What is your dream?

At a very young age, my dream was just to stay alive long enough to create another generation. It is what I was taught to dream of from birth.

I had no ambitions like a normal man. I was unable to use magic, I was not as strong as a swordsman as I did not have the time to learn the sword. I was a simple farm boy growing up. I tended to the fields and chickens.

However, I was different from other children despite my lack of willingness to agree to such a statement.

I was told it was just an imaginary friend at first. At first I thought it was cool, a thing shaped like another child, but comprised entirely of shadows.

Years go by and the thing doesn’t leave me alone. Weird, I was told an imaginary friend would disappear as you got older. I always wondered how I met this thing even. I just remember one day, it was there.

It also speaks, it sounds slightly feminine, but with my experience of another boy from the small town I lived in, it is not wise to assume gender.

Anyways, the thing talks to me, asks me questions about the things in ‘This World’. I don’t know what it meant by that, well, I do now, but I was not aware of it at the time.

I talked to it, taught it to read as I was learning to read. At some point, I stopped treating it distantly even though I was called insane for talking to myself all the time.

I just couldn’t abandon the weird thing, but nor did it ever abandon me.

A while after teaching it to read, It started to become slightly more intimate. I was of marriageable age in my world at this point, but who would marry an insane man that talks to himself all the time. Abandoned by my parents not long after I learned how to survive on my own.

I lived in the middle of nowhere. I had cleared out a small section of a large forest over many years.

I built myself a small hut, tended to a small field just outside my house and fed the chickens my father gave to me when I left.

Was I lonely? Maybe.

But I had the shadow to keep me company.

Then one day, the shadow started to teach me a few things.

It taught me about other places, very far away. How it had been so lonely, as no one else had ever interacted with it.

It taught me languages I didn’t know existed, it taught me about subjects most in this world would call blasphemy.

But I didn’t care. I was happy that it was staying with me.

One day, I asked a simple question to the shadow. ‘What are you?’

For several days it was silent, not knowing how to answer. It stayed silently at my side while I was doing my work. Then it came, the answer.

‘I don’t know. Some worlds called things like me Calamities, but others called me things like; Curse, Witch, Faceless, Anomaly, Friend, Shadow-kin.’

I smiled at the shadow. It was the first time I’ve smiled in a long time and I asked it another simple question. ‘What do you believe you are?’

‘I believe… A shade?’

It was a simple answer, but little did I know, the meaning behind the simple answer was much more complex than I could even think.

I think though, it was at that moment that my dream changed.

Have a great day/night!