I do not remember much of our hosts, except that they were adults in the way all adults who aren’t parents are, to little children. They were kind enough to me. I couldn’t comprehend the nature of condescension at that age, but I did find the cooing manner of most adults who talked to me boring, and they were no different. Though I’m grateful for their hospitality to my family, I cannot, in retrospect, look upon them with much returned kindness.
They showed us the imprisoned Nightmare on the second vigil of our stay. It was in the deepest recesses of the manse, which was more an oversized, glorified bunker on the hill of Weep-for-Day than anything else. We went down into a dank, dim corridor in the chilly heart of that mound of crustal rock to see the prisoner.
“I call it Shadow. A little nickname,” Sir Tylvur said with a toothy smile, his huge moustache hanging from his nostrils like the dead wings of some poor misbegotten bird trapped in his head. He proved himself right then to have not only a startling lack of imagination for a man of his intelligence and inquisitiveness, but also a grotesquely inappropriate sense of levity.
It would be dramatic and untruthful to say that my fear of darkness receded the moment I set eyes on the creature. But something changed in me. There, looking at this hunched and shivering thing under the smoky blaze of the flares its armored gaolers held to reveal it to its captor’s guests, I saw that a phantom flayed was just another animal.
Sir Tylvur had made sure that its light-absorbent skin would not hinder our viewing of the captured enemy. There is no doubt that I feared it, even though its skin was stripped from its back to reveal its glistening red muscles, even though it was clearly broken and defeated. But my mutable young mind understood then, looking into its shining black eyes—the only visible feature in the empty dark of its face—that it knew terror just as I or any human did. The Nightmare was scared. It was a heavy epiphany for a child to bear, and I vomited on the glass observation wall of its cramped holding cell.
Velag didn’t make fun of me. He shrank into Mother’s arms, trying to back away from the humanoid silhouette scrabbling against the glass to escape the light it so feared; a void-like cut-out in reality but for that livid wet wound on its back revealing it to be as real as us. It couldn’t, or would not, scream or vocalize in any way. Instead, we just heard the squeal of its spider-like hands splayed on the glass, claws raking the surface.
I looked at Father, standing rigid and pale, hands clutched into tight fists by his sides. The same fists that held up the severed head of one of this creature’s race in triumph so many years ago. Just as in the photograph, there were the horn-like protrusions from its head, though I still couldn’t tell what they were. I looked at Mother who, despite the horrific vision in front of us, despite her son clinging to her waist, reached down in concern to wipe the vomit from my mouth and chin with bare fingers, her gloves crumpled in her other hand.
As Sir Tylvur wondered what to do about his spattered glass wall, he decided to blame the Nightmare for my reaction and rapped hard on the cell with the hilt of his sheathed ceremonial sword. He barked at the prisoner, wanting to frighten it away from the glass, I suppose. The only recognizable word in between his grunts was “Shadow.” But as he called it by that undignified, silly nickname, the thing stopped its frantic scrabbling. Startled, Sir Tylvur stepped back. The two armored gaolers stepped back as well, flares wavering in the gloom of the cell. I still don’t know why the Nightmare stopped thrashing, and I never will know for sure. But at that moment I thought it recognized the nickname its captor had given it, and recognized that it was being displayed like a trophy. Perhaps it wanted to retain some measure of its pride.
The flarelight flickered on its eyes, which grew brighter as moisture gathered on them. It was clearly in pain from the light. I saw that it was as tall as a human, though it looked smaller because of how crouched into itself it was. It cast a shadow like any other animal, and that shadow looked like its paler twin, dancing behind its back. Chains rasped on the wet cell floor, shackled to its limbs. The illuminated wound on its back wept pus, but the rest of it remained that sucking, indescribable black that hurt the human eye.
Except something in its face. It looked at us, and out of that darkness came a glittering of wet obsidian teeth as unseen lips peeled back. I will never forget that invisible smile, whether it was a grimace of pain or a taunting leer.
“Kill it,” Velag whispered. And that was when Mother took both our hands tight in hers, and pulled us away from the cell. She marched us down that dank corridor, leaving the two former knights-errant, Father and Sir Tylvur, staring into that glimmering cell at the specter of their past.
That night, in the tiny room we’d been given as our quarters, I asked Velag if the Nightmare had scared him.
“Why should it scare me,” he said, face pale in the dim glow of the small heating furnace in the corner of the chamber. “It’s in chains.”
“You just looked scared. It’s okay to be scared. I was too. But I think it was as well.”
“Shut up. You don’t know what you’re saying. I’m going to sleep,” he said, and turned away from me, his cot groaning. The furnace hissed and ticked.
“I think papa was scared also. He didn’t want to see a Nightmare again,” I said to Velag’s back.
That was when my brother pounced off his cot and on top of me. I was too shocked to scream. My ingrained submission to his power as an elder male authority figure took over. I gave no resistance. Sitting on my small body, Velag took my blanket and shoved it into my mouth. Then, he snatched my pillow and held it over my face. Choking on the taste of musty cloth, I realized I couldn’t breathe. I believed that my brother was about to kill me then. I truly believed it. I could feel the pressure of his hands through the pillow, and they were at that moment the hands of something inhuman. I was more terrified then than I’d ever been in my entire short life, plagued though I’d always been by fear.
He held the pillow over my head for no more than four seconds, probably less. When he raised it off my face and pulled the blanket out of my mouth he looked as shaken as I was. His eyes were wet with tears, but in a second his face was twisted in a grimace.
“Never call papa a coward. Never call papa a coward. Papa was never afraid. Do you hear me? You never had to sleep alone in the dark, you don’t know. I’m going to grow up and be like papa and kill them. I’ll kill them,” he hissed the words into my face like a litany. I started crying, unable and probably too scared to tell him I hadn’t called Father a coward. I could still barely breathe, so flooded was I with my own tears, so drunk on the air he had denied me. Velag went back to his cot and wrapped himself in his blanket, breathing heavily.
As I shuddered with stifled sobs, I decided that I would never tell my parents about this, that I would never have Velag punished for this violence. I didn’t forgive him, not even close, but that is what I decided.
I was seventeen the last time I saw Velag. I went to visit him at the Royal Military Academy’s boarding school. He had been there for four years already. We saw him every few moons when he came back to the City proper to visit. But I wanted to see the campus for myself. It was a lovely train ride, just a few hours from the central districts of the City-of-Long-Shadows to the scattered hamlets beyond it.