Shadows In The Light

Boom! Boom! Boom! Three pounds of a gimlet reverberated across the sunny horizon. Afraid and weak, something crawled out of a cave in the distance. The cavern had been its home for more than thirty years. This something was a man by the name of Bregða E. Margr. He was built on a wiry frame and a Sumerian warrior in 4000 B.C. 

The drilling had caused a cataclysmic structure failure and opened his home to the elements. Looking into the hovel you could see lacerations from animals long extinct, fodder on the slab in the middle of the subterrane. The stone was polished after many years of use. Scraps of unidentifiable rotting food and corn shucks lay unbidden on the floor. “May I never come back to this place,” he said in a jargon that hasn’t been heard on this earth in over two thousand years. 

As he floundered along he chanced upon a wild Rambutan tree. Shoving the small fruit in his mouth by the handful, he gave himself an upset stomach. He looked as though he needed all the food he could get but in all reality, he used his stomach as a guide to eat only what he needed, nothing more. He was gorging himself now not because he needed it but because it was like eating confectionery after being on a no-sugar diet.

Dazzling light, hot sun, and warmth were things he never possessed. Hobbling along the lush scenery, taking in none of it. Slowly dying of heatstroke, he found a considerable tree. Alone in a bare landscape, He collapsed in the shade and was found by vultures. 

He woke unexpectedly in agony, his bones writhing, shifting, and changing. Several minutes passed, where he lay now, as a dire wolf with the head of a sabre-toothed tiger and the wings of a griffon. It attacked the vultures but, turning to ethereal mist, they disappeared leaving it alone with its deranged thoughts.

Alone, always alone. Sitting with its deranged thoughts it clawed at anything that moved. After a while, it changed again. Writhing in pain, shifting in the most perverted fashion, transforming from an unidentifiable something back to an identifiable human. 

He lay, curled up and afraid to move in case another incident occurred. He hated the change and it was her fault, the woman with the lazy eye. 27,468 mutations have happened since he became a Torc Allta, a shapeshifter. 

It happened the day of the crash, she called upon the meteor that made him, destroyed him. Babbling more and more as the years went on this immortal being, this changeling, grew more into insanity.

As he sank further into alienation he shifted more and more. He is more of a beast than a man now. He’s now the fiend that appears only in the darkest of dreams. With every alteration causing widespread panic around him and, quite frankly, agony within. He holed up in the densest city in the world just to blend into the hubbub of it.

Still sinking further into insanity an old lady came across him in his changed state, a woman with a lazy eye. Knowing it simply couldn't be her, he suppressed the mutation. 

He was getting better at it now, he could control what he changed into now instead of it controlling him. Maybe that meant he was getting better, not more psychopathic.

As he sat with the lazy-eyed lady, they talked of years past and he came to realize that it was indeed the very lady that called this change upon him. As they talked he began to open up to her with her palsy-walsy words and reassurances. They talked for hours about the transformation and how he could reverse it. The next day he embarked on his campaign for a new life, a better life, a life without change.

On the first day, he went on a plane back to his Sumerian grotto in southern Iraq, formerly known as Mesopotamia. There he found archaeologists examining his den. He walked right past them, eliciting a lot of hullabaloo from the men examining the cavity in Shir Kuh Peak. 

Walking past them, he opened the stash of elixir that he kept safe for a rainy day. With shaky hands, he immediately took a vial, spilling some of it down the front of his toggery. He morphed immediately into something with an uncontrollable importunity for blood. A thirst ran through him so deep even The River Styx couldn't slow him.

After it caused mass chaos and the effects of the vial wore off he found himself limping with a bottle of spirits through a throng of people in the airport. He bumped into several bodies and elicited several shouts from the people. Pictures of him began surfacing and soon he became as famous as to put the Abominable Snowman to shame. 

He would, of course, try to stay hidden but, with the advancement of technology, he couldn’t stay in one place 

for too long for fear of being discovered. This was one such day. He was being followed by something vile. Ducking inside the nearest speakeasy he ordered the local Mead of Suttungr.

As the toddy scorched his throat a sense of birr overwhelmed him and he started a skirmish. As the clash intensified he sat down in the back of the pub contemplating his predicament and realised the only way out was death.

The next day he went to the lazy-eyed lady and told her of his epiphany and they agreed that this was the only quick solution. Throughout the following months they prepared to give him a fatality worthy of an immortal.

Armed with salt and black candles they removed his immortality then proceeded to cut him down with the sumerian sword he kept in his cave. He went down peacefully, almost elegantly. He died on the 28th of april in the year 2003 at the age of 4003 years. He lived a life of pain and suffering and was never married.