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You sat slumped against the door, the cold floor biting through your clothes like a lover scorned, unforgiving and intimate. Your back pressed to the wood as though it might shield you from the voices beyond—those voices that clashed and fractured like glass under strain, always about you. Always about what you were. Your knees were drawn to your chest, arms looped tightly as if to hold yourself together—if only barely. The candlelit shadows flickered across the room, dancing across walls adorned with yellowed obituaries and rain-warped posters of the long-forgotten. Each missing child’s stare met your own with a solemn familiarity, their stories now part of your shrine. You knew you weren't ordinary. You rarely blinked when others did, your gaze lingering too long, too still. You clipped roses from their vines not for beauty, but for the way they died so delicately in glass jars by your bed. There was comfort in decay, in silence, and in all things mournful. But comfort was not the same as acceptance. They hated this version of you—the one who moved through the world like a ghost in a living body. And still, they argued, thinking perhaps they could stitch you back into something palatable. But you were not made to be palatable. You were made of dusk and funeral hymns. You were you. And that, it seemed, was unforgivable.
You rose from the floor with a slow, deliberate grace—like a marionette cut free from its strings. The echoes of their voices still clung to your ears, sticky and cloying, but you would not let them fester. You drifted toward the window, fingertips trailing along the peeling wallpaper, the chill of the glass whispering promises only the night could keep. With a quiet creak, you unlatched it and pushed it open. The wind met you like an old friend, tousling your hair and kissing your skin with cold breath. You slipped through the frame, the world below swallowing you whole. You didn’t know where you were going—only that your feet moved with a purpose your mind had yet to catch. Down winding alleys and over rusted fences, through the overgrown bones of forgotten gardens. The night called to you—not in words, but in pulses, like a heartbeat buried in the earth. It knew you in a way no living voice ever did. And somewhere in the dark, something waited. Something just as lost, just as unloved, just as strange. You wouldn't leave it alone. Not when the night had finally answered back.
Your feet, as if led by memory or fate, carried you beyond the sleeping houses and into the slumbering cradle of the forgotten—the cemetery. The iron gate groaned as you slipped inside, a sound like a warning or a welcome. The air grew heavier here, perfumed with damp earth, old moss, and the faint, ever-present sweetness of rot. Tombstones surrounded you like a silent congregation, each bearing names half-swallowed by time and dates long devoured by rain. You walked among them slowly, reverently, fingers grazing the worn stone faces as though to stir the sleeping souls beneath. Each touch was a prayer, or perhaps a promise. You didn’t flinch at the broken ones, the sunken ones, or the ones with no names at all. These were your kindred. And then you saw it—the weeping willow, stooped like a mourner frozen in grief, its long tendrils swaying like whispers in the dark. Beneath its shadow, the night seemed to deepen, folding inward into velvet silence. You made your way to it, letting the hush settle in your bones. Turning your back to its trunk, you let your body slide down until the bark met your spine, grounding you like an anchor in a world that never wanted to hold you. The wind rustled above, and the stars peeked through the canopy in scattered fragments. You sighed—a soft, weightless thing. Here, among the dead, you finally felt peace. Not because it was quiet. But because it understood.
The wind slipped through your ribs like a hymn, ancient and aching, singing secrets only the dead would understand. The willow above shivered, its long limbs trembling as though caught in a dream. Shadows bloomed at your feet—thick, deliberate, and slow. They coiled like lovers waking from a long slumber, stretching toward you with familiarity. You didn’t move. The dark shifted around your shoulders first—a breeze that felt like breath, cold fingers brushing your throat, then curling beneath your jaw. It wasn’t threatening. It was… remembering you.
The touch faded like a sigh, only to return—firmer now, at your waist, like a lover reclaiming a space once lost. You felt the press of something behind you: weightless yet there, like fog with a heartbeat. It leaned in. The willow above swayed harder, leaves whispering as the figure’s presence settled into your bones. A nose ghosted along your hair, inhaling like it had waited lifetimes to find you again. “Penumbra...” came the voice, barely audible, but so close it felt like it bloomed from beneath your skin. And just like that, the graveyard wasn’t so cold anymore. The night had touched you—and this time, it wouldn’t let go.
“Lord of Shadows,” you breathed, your voice like velvet wrapped in dusk. You leaned back against him, resting your head upon his chest—where no heart beat, but still, something moved inside him at your nearness. He pressed closer, his nose burrowing deeper into your hair, as though trying to hide in you entirely. His eyes, once pools of shadow, darted away, their gaze fleeing to the crooked tombstones and quiet earth.
“You don’t have to call me that anymore…” he murmured, voice barely above a hush, frayed with something soft—something human. And then, in a shimmer like moonlight skimming still water, he flushed. Gold.
“…How come?” you asked gently.
He hesitated. Then, your fingers rose to cradle his face, and he turned into your touch like a flower aching for sun. He closed his eyes, kissed your palm, and held it there, as though afraid it might vanish if he let go.
“It’s… embarrassing, Penumbra,” he confessed, the name thick with devotion and shame, like a prayer whispered too many times.
A smile ghosted your lips. You leaned into him, letting the dark wrap you both like silk. “Well,” you whispered, your words curling between the willow leaves above, “nobody’s here but us.”
And in that quiet cocoon of grave dirt, shadow, and wind, the Lord of Shadows said nothing more. But the way he held you—tender and eternal—said everything.
He huffed, just barely—a breath that rustled the space between you like a flicker of wind in a candle’s flame. His lashes lowered, golden flush still clinging to the high bones of his cheeks, but he would not meet your eyes. Not yet. Not while your presence softened him. Not while his title still echoed faintly in the willow-hung dark. But eventually, as silence grew thick and fragrant with secrets unspoken, he looked at you. And when he did, it was like the sea itself had stilled. His gaze found yours—deep and solemn, the colour of oceans that held too many shipwrecks. His voice, when it came, sounded less like speech and more like a pull from beneath the waves. “What regret fills your heart tonight?” he asked, as if he already knew but wanted you to say it anyway. As if your sorrow, like his, needed to be named aloud in order to be cradled.
You hummed—a low, silken note that curled in your throat like smoke from a dying candle. Slowly, you turned in his arms, wrapping yours around his neck with the grace of a black swan descending upon still water. He held you instinctively, hands resting at your hips as though you were the very thing anchoring him to this plane.
“No regret fills it, my Shadow,” you purred, eyes half-lidded, voice as velvet-dark as the night around you. “Rather… a tender melancholy. Rich. Lingering. Like the final notes of a requiem echoing through an empty hall.” You leaned in closer, your nose brushing his. “A beautiful feeling indeed. Almost indulgent in its sorrow.”
He shivered beneath your touch, utterly enraptured, as though each word from your lips was a spell stitched in satin and blood. The gold blush returned to his face—stronger this time, and helplessly smitten. “You speak of melancholy like one speaks of wine,” he whispered, eyes glinting. “And you make me crave it just the same.”
He took your wrist with a reverence that bordered on worship, fingers gliding over your skin like he was reading scripture carved in flesh. Then he pressed his lips to it—slowly, lingering—his kiss not one of lust, but of quiet devotion. As if he were tasting the dusk that lived in your blood, as if your pulse belonged to him.
You watched him, the way his eyes closed when his lips touched you, the way he held his breath like it might make the moment eternal. You couldn’t remember when you first met this fine shadow spun from night itself—when the darkness first took form and decided to follow you home. You didn’t know if he’d emerged from the roots of the willow or from the hollow between your ribs.
You couldn’t quite recall when he first crept into your life—this elegant shade dressed in shadow and sentiment. Perhaps he stepped from a dream or from the quiet between heartbeats. You never asked. You never needed to. Love, after all, does not require origin stories to be real. And what were you two, exactly? Lovers? Haunting? A hymn hummed under breath at midnight? There were no words you’d found fitting. No earthly label could hold it. Could hold him. But oh, you knew this much:
You would not change a single moment, nor dare trace the lines of your fate any differently.
A chill slithered up your spine—not from the wind, nor the night—but from the sharp, unwelcome intrusion of thought. You tensed in his embrace, your mind dragged back to that house of pale walls and hollow voices. You saw it as clearly as if it unfolded before you now: your bedroom door creaking open, the silence behind it deafening. Your window ajar, curtains fluttering like frantic ghosts.
Your parents would find your absence and call it disobedience, not longing. They would whisper of concern, but it would be fear wearing a mask. Fear of you. Fear of what cannot be pressed into daylight.
The thought did not thrill. It sickened.
Not the beautiful ache of romantic suffering you so adored, but the cold, colourless dread of a world that would never understand. You did not wish to go back. You never had. And the cruel tragedy of being born to those who could not see you—who refused to see the exquisite shadow in your soul—was a wound too deep for daylight to touch. To be loved is to be understood.
And he, of all the phantoms that ever walked the earth, understood you.
Sensing the shift in your stillness, he tilted your chin up with a gloved hand, his eyes burning with adoration, his voice low and dripping with graveyard honey. “What troubles you, my Penumbra?” he asked, the title falling from his lips like a sacred hymn.
You met his gaze—dark, deep, and wild like a moonless sea—and whispered, barely breathing: “Would you share your darkness with me?”
A stillness fell then. Holy. Heavy. The kind that belongs in cathedrals of bone and forgotten crypts. He didn’t speak at first. Instead, he cupped your face with both hands as if cradling the most divine relic, his gold-touched flush returning like a sun rising only for you.
“Penumbra,” he breathed, lips trembling with gothic reverence, “I would lay the velvet night at your feet. My shadows are yours to keep, to kiss, to bury deep in your heart like the most treasured sin.”
You sighed, melting into him, as though to vanish into his coat and never be found again. “Then…” you whispered, your voice the sound of candle wax dripping onto marble, soft and irrevocably final, “will you turn me into your shade? Let me belong to you… forever.” The words fell from your lips like a vow wrapped in silk and blood.
He froze—not in hesitation, but in awe, as if time itself had knelt at your feet. His gloved hand found yours at once, fevered and trembling with something more than affection. He brought it to his chest with desperate reverence, pressing your palm against him, where no heartbeat lived—only a hollow space that had long ached for you.
The space you were meant to fill.
“I wouldn’t want nothing more,” he said, voice low, cracked at the edges with devotion so deep it bordered on madness. His eyes shimmered with a golden sheen, but beneath it swirled a storm of shadow—centuries of solitude, sorrow, and the ache of eternity—all now eclipsed by you.
“You beg me to make you my shade,” he murmured, leaning in, lips brushing the underside of your wrist like a sinner kissing a relic. “But, my penumbra, you’ve always been part of the night. Every breath you take is a lullaby to the grave. Every glance, a poem stitched from dusk.” He drew you closer still, until his forehead pressed against yours, breath shallow, reverent, as if your very presence threatened to unravel him. “Let the sun turn its back,” he whispered. “Let the world lose its taste for beauty too strange to name. I will wrap you in shadow, clothe you in silence, kiss away the last gleam of light from your skin—so you may never leave my side.”
Your lips curled—not in joy, but in something darker, deeper. Something like home. “Then take me, my beloved. Let me decay beside you. Let our names be etched in stone and moss, in songs the living are too afraid to sing.”
He smiled then, slow and broken, and kissed your hand again—this time over your pulse, where he would one day feel nothing at all. "And from that moment on,” he whispered against your skin, “even the dead will envy us.”