Into the Shadowlands

In the end there were too many secrets. There was too much that was beyond control. Secrets generate secrets until they take over everything and what was once real becomes like a shadow reality; where a parallel life goes on in a parallel world.

All of which does seem a bit odd. It was as if what was once real has become shadow and what was once shadow was real; not only that, it was because of the shadow worlds that her life of secrets had become so unmanageable.

Once it was simple for Helen. There was the world and there was everything else that she knew didn’t exist, except in her mind and in those dreams that left her feeling so strange in the mornings. Dreams that made her feel as though she had slipped through some barrier into a world that lay at an odd angle to this one. It was a strange dreaming place, but to her it had more of a feel of where she belonged than this world she lived in, or, rather, merely existed in.

Then came the days she thought of as the time of transition, when more and more of that world from her dreams began seeping into what she had once seen clearly as reality. Reality itself grew soft around the edges, amorphous, as the other world took over, creating corners where there were none and bringing new worlds out of the shadows and quiet places.

More and more, Helen found herself drawn to these corners where the worlds intersected. Drawn to the shadows and quiet places where her other world waited for her, until that one day she took a deep breath, clenched her hands and stepped through into the Shadowlands.