Do you remember when we  first saw each other?

You were beautiful-

Somehow, all the colors in the world 

paled in comparison to 

You.

You loved me-

You told me I was special-

the only color you hadn't yet seen.

We loved each other with every color of the rainbow.

And life was good.

Do you remember the last day we saw each other?

You'd found another-

She was vibrant, brighter than me

You loved her more.

loved her with a brighter rainbow.

I applaud your right to that, but it still broke my heart.

I still loved you, you know.

Even if you didn't.

But she broke your heart-

you came crawling back to my, on bent hands and knees

and begged for me once more. 

You begged to share my loving rainbow.

Time had passed, since you broke my heart

and the shards had hardened into stone.

When you came back into my life,

I could firmly say,

I loath you with every color of the rainbow. 

Black was a bad idea. She came to this conclusion whilst hugging a tree, angry squirrels pelting her with acorns and a foul smelling substance that she’d rather not identify. Wearing a black t-shirt was definitely a bad idea. And yet, that morning it had seemed the greatest idea ever.

    She reflected on how’d she’d come to the conclusion that black was a bad idea as goblins chattered angrily up at her. Could it possibly be the flour and sugar stuck to her from her baking escapades? The silver polish that smelled like urine and bleached all color out of her shirt? Or perhaps it was the milk stain she’d acquired when someone jostled her elbow at lunch? She reached the conclusion that it was the stripe of toothpaste down her front that brought the outfit together into a rank, soiled mess that she wore out of spite.

    A goblin yelled up at her, in the roughest form of Common Tongue she’d ever heard, “Give name, live fire!” He gestured at the torch his friend held.

    She called down in the same rough tongue, “Name mine! Leave, live dark!” She pointed a finger at him while saying this. As the roughest common tongue translations usually required jumping up and down and grunting, she put particular emphasis on the pointing.

    The goblin grunted. “Fire beat dark! Name now!”

    “Damn.” She muttered to herself. She could summon darkness and shadows, but the goblin was right. He held the torch. She was too damn tired and too damn done with the world to summon enough darkness to stifle the torch. “Name later! Fire later!” She called down. The burlier squirrel threw a pine cone at her fore head. “Ow! Fuck you, you little-“ She thrust a hand at the squirrel and it yelped as it was yanked into enveloping blackness.

    The goblin turned to his friend and said something in the screeching language of the underground.  She didn't need the Common Tongue translation to know that he had just given the order to light the tree underneath her on fire. “NO NO NO NO NO NO!” She shouted. “Give name! Give name! No fire!” A thought in the back of her mind came to her: How stupid she must look to them, flailing her arms while trying to balance on a tree with only her legs. She pushed the thought aside and yelled down, “Name! Give name!”

    The goblin grinned. She forced herself to hold in her vomit. Goblins measured rank by ugliness and smarts, so this creature must have been very smart as well as ugly. He was obviously in charge of something. His face was covered in welts, boils, and pimples that looked infected and green. His head resembled the love child between a pancake and a rotten potato. His body was portly and oozing. She could smell him from up in her tree, over the smell of her shirt and the muddy substance being hurled at her with more force now that the squirrels were out of acorns. If you could get past that, he was quite attractive. “Name! Name! Give name, no fire! True name!” He screeched up at her.

    Fuck.

    He’d invoked the spell of Paternity. She couldn't lie about her name. She had to fess up and tell her real name, or risk being sent to a dimension where everything you said became a pun that was thrown back into your face. She swallowed. She was stuck between a pun and a torch. She could lie and live life as a joke, or she could tell her true name and be tracked by the smelly brigade for the rest of her life. “Cerna Tma,” She whispered. She knew that the spell forced him to hear her name, no matter how softly she said it. The goblin beneath her grinned and walked away, his stubby legs forcing him to waddle comically. Cerna sighed and hugged her tree again. She knew she should get moving before the people begging for her neck came calling. The leaves above sighed with her as the wind rustled her shorn hair. She felt a cold drop on the back of her neck. “Fuuuucckkk,” She whispered into the bark. It was raining.

    She felt as if she should toss herself from the tree, kill herself before they killed her. But she had a better idea. “HEY, PRETTY!” She shouted toward the diminishing torch light. It came trotting back into view at an alarming rate, accompanied by a fading scream.

    “Bad move, Cerna Tma!” The goblin screamed as he waved the torch had wrenched from his friends hand-rather painfully, it looked, for the arm of the friend still clutched to it.

    “Watch this!” Cerna shouted back joyfully. She snapped her head back, and her body followed. She fell gracefully off the tree, her body spread like an eagles wings. The goblin leader screamed bloody murder and dropped the torch to try to catch her, but as she fell, snaking rivers of shadow crawled over her chest, wrapping around her legs and whispering in her ear. As the wind rushed by her face and brought a satisfyingly cold jolt to her head, she thought, Maybe black isn’t so bad after all. She laughed a high and inhumane laugh as her body was yanked into the darkness.

    By the time the goblin got to where she should have landed, there was only a torn and stained and rank black shirt.

Hvid Lys snapped his eyes open and sighed. There was a ruckus in the courtyard below. He hated to get up- his latest sweet heart was sleeping peacefully and there was no way to untangle himself without waking her. She stirred in her sleep. “Wassa?” She mumbled.

“Shh, darling. It’s just a little row in the garden. I’ll go take care of it- you just keep sleeping.” He slipped out from the covers. “Damn servants- I’m the only one who can get anything done around here.” He muttered.  He cinched a white dressing gown around his muscular waist. As he passed a mirror, he paused to ruffle his hair. All the more to scare the servants- an unwillingly awakened master was much scarier than one wide awake and reasonable.

Hvid’s  right hand man met him outside the door. No matter what his name had been before coming to the Lys manner, it was now Jeeves. “Good morning sir,” he said. “Did last night go well?”

Hvid walked briskly down the hall. “You should know, Jeeves. You were listening at the door.” He shot a look to his servant that he hoped compelled the sheer amount of anger he held at this one little flaw in his otherwise perfect butler. “Remember, I control the light and keep the shadows at bay. ” He said as he walked out a door.

Jeeves, blessedly, did not follow immediately. An unspoken agreement- Hvid would go ahead and take care of everything. Jeeves would follow and quietly clean up the mess. Hvid was much too important to dirty his hands with peasent work- that was the only reason he kept the useless servants around, really.

Hvid found himself in the courtyard, looking onto the scene causing the disturbing racket. There was a circle of people, all crying out at something in the center of the circle. He shoved his way through the crowd, expecting to find nothing less than a demon.

He was slightly disappointed. It was only a half naked girl.

Wait, he thought to himself. Back up, what did I think? ONLY a half naked girl? Do you know how hard those are to come by? Unless you’re willing to spend lots of money- which he was- the only way to see a half naked girl was to woo her. While one appearing in his garden was suspicious, he was not going to lose the opportunity presented to him. He hid the grin growing on his face. “What’s this?” He asked the crowd, playing the part of a disgruntled master.

The answers came flying fast and furious. She was a demon, she’d appeared out of nowhere, she was an unknown servant who had lost it. No one seemed to know for sure. 

Key word, “seemed.”

He selected a fiery red-head from the crowd. She had a spark of defiance held deep in her eyes. He made a mental note to woo her later. “You there.” He called pointing to her. “Do you have any idea where this… Demon came from?”

The woman he stood over made an indignant grunt. He felt she would’ve said more, had she not been looking into the face of an angry mob.

The red-head held her chin high and said, “She’s a human, not a demon. She walked out of the shadows in those bushes over there and collapsed. I offered to get her water after I’d learned she was human, but she fainted. When everyone started shouting, she woke up. It’s amazing what you can learn by talking to people instead of screaming at them.” She delivered this last sentence with obvious contempt for the people surrounding her.

Hvid turned his eyes toward the girl who seemed to be stuck on her back. “And do you agree with this, young lady?” He noticed things about her as she tried to gather enough breath to reply. She had on a black exercise bra, jeans, and filthy sneakers. He noticed the smell of spoiled milk about her, yet her smile was dazzlingly white. Her hair was inexpertly shorn, longer in some places and sticking up at odd angles.

She drew her breath in disdain and gasped, “We’re the same age, you fucker.”

Hvid frowned. “Daring words from someone who could die in an instant.” He drew up his hand and let it become enveloped in the blinding light he controlled.  “And how do you know my age?”

The girl laughed breathlessly. “It’s amazing what you can learn from a man’s shadow.”

Hvid glanced at the ground next to him. The light in his hand had made the shadow he always cast deepen. His eyes widened as he realized what he was standing over. “You’re… you’re a shadow witch,” He said, stumbling backwards.

The girl laughed. Her body held no love for him, now. “Not a very good one, I’m afraid.”

Hvid tried to regain his composure. He killed shadow witches for a living- the way to defeat them was to learn their name. “I am Hvid Lys. And you are?”

The girl stopped trying to pull herself upwards. “There is no way in all of the Seven Hells that I’ve seen that you are going to learn my name. I already have the lord of smelly douches on my tail because I accidentally killed a guard.”

“Huh?”
She waved a hand in a non-committal way. “It’s a long story.”  She forced herself to sit upright. “But unless you want to bring three hundred goblin warriors down on your head, I suggest you comply to me.”

Hvid felt loathing in his throat. She was making him look the fool, in front of all those he claimed lordship over.”Fine.” He said through gritted teeth. “What do you require, oh great queen of the darkest lands?”

She huffed. “Don’t call me that unless you want to see your entire building reduced to rubble.” She stood on shaky feet. “A bath would be nice. Also, any black shirts that you have. My got torn when I jumped.”

“Torn?”

She smiled at him mockingly. “Why, since you’re an expert on shadow witches, I expected you to know that every time we jump in the shadows, we are forced to leave something behind.”

Hvid felt his face grow hot. He struggled to keep his cool with the dangerous- though undeniably attractive- woman in front of him. “Of course.”

She went on. “A glass of milk would also be welcomed.”

Hvid gave an overly preposterous bow. “As you command. I shall fetch the milk myself.”  He strode back into his house- it was his house, dammit, and no wench was going to tell him how to rule it. As he poured the milk into a glass, he slipped something from his pocket- something he always carried with him. A fine, powdery potion, that when mixed with a liquid, dissolved instantly and was quite deadly. He handed the glass to Jeeves, who was carrying a fresh black shirt to the bathing area. “Don’t let her smell it,” he muttered as he passed it off. He was rather angry he had let the opportunity get away from him.

Jeeves smiled knowingly and walked out of the room.

Unbeknownst to either of them, the shadow witch knew exactly what was going on, and had no intention of being poisoned. That didn’t stop her from smiling when she accepted the cup, nor did it stop her from taking a long draught off it. Jeeves smiled and left the clothes outside the door.

Hvid had returned to his room. The girl he’d been with the night before had been disposed of. No one would ever hear from her again. He made a note on his dresser that the red headed servant girl was to be his next conquest. He smiled to himself- today had been a better day than it was promised to be. White always was his lucky color.

He pulled a book from his shelves- the dusty tome about shadow witches. Maybe. It could’ve been a different book- the only thing he remembered about it was that it was always dusty. He flipped through until he found the ‘Killing Shadow Witches’.
 

Blah, blah, something about names, blah blah, Ah! ‘The effects of poison on Shadow Witches.’ He read the passage quickly.

Blahity blah, something something, here we go! Poison…does not negatively affect shadow witches in any way, shape or form. Because many poisons require the blood of the shadows to create, it is considered shadow magic and therefore makes the witches stronger.

Hvid closed the tome slowly as he heard sounds of destruction work their way to his room. He cursed himself for forgetting that only one poison worked on followers of the shadows. He readied himself with his light magic- if he had to go down, he was going down swinging. As the door rattled on its hinges, he reflected on the fact that maybe white wasn't his lucky color after all.