Shards of Flame

Prologue

The shadows creep in through the cracks in the boards, slinky shapes crawling over slate grey walls. They prey on the sleeping, on the vulnerable. They feel the peace, sense it, follow it like bloodhounds on the hunt. Their speciality is sliding through the gaps, under doors, through open windows, even the cracks in a wall and into a host. A person. Their essence seeps into the victim's bloodstream, slowly turning it black, blacker than twilight, colder than the frost's kiss, acting so slowly you don't even know what's happening until it's done. Eyes turn dark, lips turn blue, skin grows paler than a white rose, ready to flutter away at the hint of a breeze. Their work completed, the shadows slither away and slip into the night. These are the Dusks, creatures of the devil, intent on sucking the happiness out of this world and turning it into a husk as cold and lifeless as themselves.

One day, I found my brother like that, a corpse coloured in shades of purple and blue, his eyes colder than the Sea of Souls. Mother cried that day, radiating an air of misery and despair, thicker than the clouds above us. Father however blazed with a wave of anger hotter than the sun, his eyes full of uncontrollable thirst to murder the creatures that killed his son, his pride and joy. Me on the other hand, I sat quietly in the corner of our kitchen, fingers twisting the necklace around my neck as my brain replayed the pallid, empty look on my brother's face. They took the person he had been, someone who smiled, who laughed, the only person who made this place somewhat tolerable and turned him into a shell, an empty vessel, dead. Something inside me died that day too. The little girl who felt helpless and frightened morphed into a fierce, fearless warrior who would batter and beat and burn every Dusk until nothing remained but dusty ashes.

That is when I vowed to hunt down and make every last one of the dusks pay. Every. Last. One.