Loomian Legacy Veils of Shadow

Up Close and Personal with Darkness

Thane's rematch with Naya was a breath that Lauren, Noah, and Derrick needed. The moment Lauren burst in through the lab doors, exclaiming that Thane was on TV for his rematch, Noah and Derrick quickly abandoned their scans of the stone chuck. The three of them rounded up the Starter Loomians and rushed home. Derrick and Noah quickly paired food into bowls for the Loomians, and Lauren quickly threw bags of popcorn into the microwave one after the other.

When they finally got settled in, the battle was just getting underway. They treated it like a league tournament match, and when Thane and Embit won with a final Ear Slap, the cheers that erupted from the house could probably heard all over town. Lauren watched through the screen with pride in her eyes as her son received his first Battle Theatre medal. The first out of eight, then, the league tournament. She thought.

That was a few days ago. Lauren and Noah had hung a Harmony Medal in Thane's room, planning to add a medal every time Thane bested a Battle Star. A few neighbors had congratulated them on Thane's performance. Some even joked that maybe they would finally have a Roria Champion hailing from Mitis Town. That was all a few days ago, but the excitement died down and it was back to studying the strange stone, at least until Thane showed up on TV again.

Lauren didn't like the stone. The Starter Loomians she cared for seemed to be unnerved, to even terrified of it, and whenever they didn't like something, she didn't like it either. Even her tough, "I'm-not-afraid-of-anything" Wresolen seemed put off by it, and even he kept a safe distance from it whenever he was helping out inside the laboratory. Sometimes he would just sit and stare at the stone, twitching slightly. So it was settled, that if the Loomians didn't like the stone, then neither would Lauren. If only Noah and Derrick felt the same. The Loomian's unease was infectious, and a pit formed in her stomach whenever she looked at her husband and Derrick working with the thing, and at the thought of her son actively searching for more out in the wild, away from home.

One night, when Derrick had gone home, Lauren and Noah locked up the lab. Lauren had managed to calm the Loomians enough for them to sleep. "I feel bad leaving them in there with that rock." She said as she locked the front door. "It clearly scares them, and it kind of scares me too." She said as the couple began their walk home. "Lauren, sweetheart, relax." Noah began. "It's just a rock, what could it even do to us?" Lauren let out a dry laugh. "Yeah, it's just a rock that can fly away whenever it wants to. Maybe that's why I worry. We might be way over our heads on this one, and we might have sent Thane into something he can't handle alone." A cold silence clung to the air as the words left her lips. "Let's, let's just go home, it's freezing out here."

The night, it stood in its normal stillness. Lauren, Noah, Derrick, and every other living being in Mitis Town slept peacefully. The seven starter Loomians all slept soundly. Fevine on its rock perch, Dripple on the surface of the water, Vambat hung upside down from the ceiling, and the others slept in the soft grass. All of them slept, all but one. Vambat hung from the ceiling. Its yellow eyes glowed in the darkness, making it look like just two floating orbs of yellow light.

Its eyes were focused solely on the stone chunk. It seemed to glow a menacing purple in the darkness. It was a living shadow. Cold seemed to radiate off it, the air around it was nearly freezing. The cold penetrated Vambat's fur and seeped into its bones, it was painful, yet also comforting at the same time. Vambat couldn't look away, it was impossible. His head was forced to look at the stone as if something was holding it in place. It started small. At first, clangs echoed off the walls, but soon a crescendo of whispers erupted from the stone. None of the other Loomians seemed to stir from the sound, but the whispers echoed off the walls and through Vambat's ears. The twisted melody split his skull with pain, but it also filled him with a strange sort of comfort.