Chapter Eleven: A Tale of Shadows (Part 1) "I was in eighth grade, on the last day of school. That was the first day I noticed Opal Pryor. We became the best of friends, and seven years later, we married. I took her last name, Pryor. We were happy for a while, then I noticed something going on with Opal. She was afraid to go to sleep, and kept telling me someone was appearing in her dreams, asking for her help." James sighed, looking weary. I really wished Rook agreed to go. I didn't want to listen to anymore of his lies. Surely Rook didn't believe him? He was lying, I was sure of it. Even if he was our father, he couldn't just try to make us believe that our real mom, Cecily, lied to us. He continued, "I should explain this world before I tell you anymore about Opal. You know by now that this is a completely different world. It is called the Shadow World. The dark counterpart of our own world. Here it is eternal night. The only light comes from a moon, and even that isn't real. It's a maze, and many of the things here are just shadow illusions, like that tree we came through." I had almost forgotten how we seemingly walked straight through a tree. I had been more preoccupied with James and the things he said. From the look on Rook's face, she too had forgotten it. Noticing the looks on our faces, James said,"Yes, that was an illusion." "Can you tell the difference between an illusion and a real object?" Rook asked. "Yes, I can. It takes a while to notice, but all illusions fade." "...Fade?" I said, wondering what that meant. "Yes. I don't know how to explain it, but the illusions aren't perfect, so if you look close enough, you can see what's behind an illusion, like a window." I thought about this. I wanted to find that tree, to see if I could see it "fading". (Continue Below)
"Well, what were those monsters chasing me and Rook?" I asked. "Those were shadows. They serve the leader of this world, called the Shadowlord. Some of them are his creations, but most of them were former humans," he said, earning gasps from both me and Rook. "Former humans? You mean, like, there are other people here? And they got turned into shadows?" Rook said, alarmed. "Correct. If those shadows had caught you, you would be just like them." "So other people can come here? How? Also, how did we get here?" I asked. Could the door we'd crawled through been some kind of portal? One that led to the Shadow World? Wow, she and Rook were lucky they weren't shadows. Out of all those shadows she'd seen, most of them were probably humans, actual people. It was scary to think of what they were now. Shadows. "The door you came through was a portal, a bridge that connects these two worlds. There are many portals throughout our world. Some are hidden, some are in plain sight." "So, you mean, I could have walked right past a portal without knowing what it was?" "It's possible. It's rather rare to find them." "But you said some of them are in plain sight." I argued. "And yet you'd be surprised to find out that barely any people find their way into them." "Wait, we're getting of topic," Rook said. She turned to James," You were talking about portals and something about Opal having weird dreams." I looked at her. She hadn't called Aunt Opal "Aunt". Did she really believe him? "Right. Opal told me about the person in her dreams, and kept talking about "a world of darkness" and other stuff. She told me he was made of shadows and needed help escaping from his own "world". At the time, I worried for her sanity. I thought maybe she was really stressed and beginning to confuse her dreams with reality. But it was much more than that." Chapter Twelve:
