A Shadow Around the Sun

by Hugo Damas

  Noises whirred and clasped into place in the time it took the Circus Freak’s vision to accommodate. With his hand over his eyes, he saw that some gadgets had sprouted from the floor, showing tiny little necks and square heads with gun barrels for mouths. The Shadow was a couple of feet closer to Griff, and the Mad Genius was already pointing his mechanical arm at him, but both were frozen by the fact the old dog had a pistol to Eliza’s head.

  A dagger had cut shallowly across Griff’s shoulder, Hugo guessed it had been thrown by either the Shadow or the Hunter.

  “Nobody move!” Griff banged his cane again, and the door opened behind him. Members of the Tech Guild ran in with their own guns and took aim. “I’d prefer to do this later, but I don’t mind doing it right now.”

  Everyone was already on the same page as to the betrayal that was happening, except, oddly enough, for Eliza.

  “What are you doing, Griff?!” She asked, confounded.

  “Taking over,” Griff simply stated.

  “Is what I think is happening happening?” The phone asked, and Griff glanced at it, as if remembering that the Don wasn’t even there.

  “The Tech Guild will take care of the rest, the Shadow Conclave is no longer necessary,” Griff said out loud.

  The phone grunted disappointingly. “Yer seriously turnin’ on each other now, unbelievable. I don’t have time for you nutcases, I got monsters to stop.” The communication died.

  In reaction, Eliza spoke in an even more hurtful tone. “What are you doing, Griff?”

  “Like I said, I’m taking over. With the Kagekawa gone, with the Head Enchanter of the Magni under my control, the Wild Felids scattered and weak, and with everything retrieved in my hands, I have every major organization and asset taken care of and under my control. I’m going to win this war for everyone.”

  “You don’t got the Scavengers,” the Street Rat pointed out, arms crossed.

  “Scavengers aren’t an issue.” Griff didn’t look at the brat, clearly convinced he wasn’t a threat. He kept eyes on everyone else, though. “You can’t protect yourselves against the Beasts on your own.”

  “You’d be surprised by what we can do, wrinkle cheeks,” the Street Rat threatened, even if it sounded like a joke..

  “We’ll see,” Griff simply said.

  “But we were working together,” Eliza said, still in denial. “We’ve been working together all this time, Griff. We made the Shadow Conclave, we strengthened it, all to face the Beasts. You would throw it all away?”

  “You didn’t find it hard throwing me away, did you?” Griff accused.

  Eliza balked.

  “No…” she shook her head, “it can’t be about that.”

  And the Circus Freak made the connection. The way they looked at each other, the concerned and worried mean-spiritedness.

  Love hurts, she had said.

  “HA!” The Circus Freak broke the moment brusquely. But he didn’t care. The pain in his chest was all but subsided now, and what he saw was what he knew of people. The world was making sense again, people were making sense again. He chuckled, he giggled, he laughed. The Circus Freak all out cackled.

  “Stop that,” Griff commanded, but he couldn’t.

  It was who he was.

  “This is amazing!” Hugo screeched, beyond entertained. “This is too much! This is so funny!”

  “Someone knock out the clown, I’ve had more than enough of his lunacy,” Griff ordered.

  Three men walked across the others, who stood and watched to see what he’d do. They probably imagined he would beat the three men silly and start an escape. A high-action super-fun escape down the Tech Guild tower, filled with its traps and ambushes and hundreds of members.

  And it’s not that he couldn’t, or didn’t want to. He was just laughing too hard to even try. The Circus Freak hugged his own belly as it contracted, incapable to even breathe properly.

  The world was ending and the only hope to save it was being undone by a lover’s spat.

  Too funny!

  * * *

  The Circus Freak awoke in a cell.

  It was more by the complaint in his eyes than by some sort of natural behavior of the mind that he was snatched away from his sleep.

  Rolling over to cover his face from the bright light, Hugo quickly regained full use of his wits. Once his eyes had adjusted, he turned back around to see where he was.

  “You should have stayed asleep.”

  Hugo was accompanied in the cell, and it wasn’t very big in the first place. One could perhaps fit a bathtub and a half in it, and it was completely empty. When he saw the source of the comment, he understood why.

  “It will not be easy to go back to sleep with all this light,” she added.

  The Circus Freak smiled at the Shadow, knowingly.

  “If I want to sleep, I will.” He looked at the metallic door that was the way out of their jail cell. “It’s easy to pass out, I’ve done it a lot. You just stop breathing until it happens.”

  The Shadow faced him questioningly. “Just…stop breathing?”

  The Shadow was standing. Whether she had been standing all along, he couldn’t tell. Hugo, on the other hand, was in no hurry to stand up. The door had a small panel to see through, but it was only one way. It seemed to be made of very strong glass, or at least that’s what he could guess by the markings it contained. There was a dried drop of blood visible on its surface, revealing it had been struck multiple times. Probably the result of the Shadow’s attempts at breaking it, which in turn explained why she had her hands behind her back.

  Always trying to hide anything that could be perceived as weakness.

  “Pretty paranoid, this Griff, huh?” The Circus Freak looked around, finding no way out, not even for him. He knocked on the ground and checked that it was solid, even if it looked like it was made of plastic. It was truly solid iron.

  “He knows what he is doing,” the Shadow said. “Why he has placed you in my prison, however, I do not know.”

  “Yeah, you wouldn’t.” Hugo covered his face with his hand, but it was still so bright. Too brightL he couldn’t relax his eyes at all.

  “What do you mean by that?” She accused, seemingly offended, but the Circus Freak didn’t mind that.

  He looked up at her with a grin. “Well, o’ great shadow! As much as you like efficiency, you don’t strike me as the type to know a lot about cruelty, right? That’s why you can’t understand it.”

  The Shadow stayed silent, but her head was watching him. She looked like a completely different woman with her hair that thin and long, and dressed in all black. The light didn’t allow him to do better because it was reflecting from the ground frustratingly well. He squinted up to see that it was coming from the same kind of panels Griff had surprised them with in the meeting room.

  “They are protected by the same kind of material they used for the tiny window on the door,” the Shadow explained casually. “I have tried.”

  The Circus Freak nodded, still amused. “So, how does this work, I make a shadow for you and you’ll be able to get out?”

  She shook her head. “A shadow needs time to create…it doesn’t work that way.”

  “Well I can’t make shadows anywho. Too much light, right?” The Circus Freak asked rhetorically.

  “Indeed. We wait until they come and feed us. Maybe then, we can do something,” the Shadow suggested.

  “They carried us in here, they can probably put some food in for us to eat,” the Circus Freak stated.

  The Shadow shrugged. “We will wait and see.”

  Hugo chuckled. “You’re a lot more somber than I remember. What happened, your pet die?”

  The Shadow looked away, upset, but that didn’t bother him.

  “Hey, I had a pet die once, it was devastating. It’s what drove me crazy in the first place,” he explained.

  The Shadow looked back at him, and he couldn’t see her face, but he knew, from her movement, that she was raising a ve
ry vexed eyebrow. “What? Really?”

  “Of course not, ‘re you crazy?” The Circus Freak laughed as she “humpfed” and turned the other way. It was so easy to mess with her, he loved it.

  “You are the crazy one,” the Shadow accused, insulted.

  “Momma thought so, too. Or at least that’s what Pop always said.” Giggling, the Circus Freak noticed the little window opening.

  It seemed it opened from outside. “Step away from the door!” Someone demanded.

  “Gonna need a bigger room for that, buddy,” Hugo replied.

  “Get on the wall! Where I can see you!”

  The Circus Freak rolled his eyes and shook his head, doing as he said. “Yes, moooom.”

  The door opened to reveal three men wielding revolvers and, behind them all, Griff himself.

  “Well, well, well… if it isn’t the head cannon himself. Griff, right?” Circus Freak asked.

  One of the three men had a tray with bread and water. He carefully leaned down and placed it just by the entrance. While he was doing that, Griff began to speak.

  “Hugo, is it?” That was meant to scare him, but incurred no effect.

  “Nah, I like Circus Freak, actually,” he said, all while closing his eyes to show off his scary but funny crossed eye grin.

  Griff scoffed. “You are aware I’ve washed your makeup off?”

  Hugo jolted. “WHAT!?” He scratched at his face and found it was, indeed, naked of ink and paint. “Why would you do that!?”

  “I’ve disarmed everyone, Hugo. Your face is part of your armament,” Griff explained.

  Hugo sneered and, for the life of him, he had no idea what kind of face he was showing. It had been a very very long time since he had seen his real face in the mirror. He felt at his hair, sensing its short, curly texture. His hat was also missing!

  The Circus Freak couldn’t freak out anyone like that! Not easily, anyway.

  “You are absolutely unaffiliated with anyone or anything, Hugo. I’ve come to offer you the opportunity to live and go on your way.”

  The Circus Freak squinted suspiciously. He hoped.

  “What will you do if I let you go?” Griff asked.

  What kind of question was that? “Same I always do, Griff,” he said the name with dislike, he couldn’t help it. “What I want.”

  “And what do you want?” Griff asked.

  “To leave here,” Hugo answered.

  Griff rolled his eyes, exasperating. “What will you want…once you leave?” He asked.

  “How would I know,” Hugo asked, finding himself smirking. “I haven’t left yet, have I? I sure wanna find out, though.”

  “Okay, well.” Griff shook his head, impatient and upset all at the same time. “Then you can stay in there.”

  “What will you do with us?” That was the Shadow. The Circus Freak didn’t care to know, he wasn’t planning on letting Griff, or anyone else for that matter, do anything with him.

  “I’m being honest here, Ayane, I don’t know. I planned to have you on my side until the end. The Shadow Conclave would disband, and we’d just take over. But Falk’s ruined everything. Still, I’m confident I’ll think of something, given time.”

  Griff nodded for the door to close.

  “I always do,” he said as a farewell, and quite dramatically, too.

  The door closed, and Hugo found himself leering, murderously. He didn’t have any sort of psychopathic relationship with his make-up. It was make-up, he took it off often, his problem was being seen without it. By one of them, by the Shadow most of all. And probably by a lot more people by the time he found a way out.

  “So…”

  Hugo glanced sideways at her expressionless mask. She was, after all, right next to him. She sighed and crossed her arms, giving him a view of her scraped hand.

  “Hugo. My name is Ayane, and it seems we have time to kill.” She shrugged. “Know any good jokes?”

  Hugo smiled, his heart flaring. He could count on his fingers, his one hand fingers, the amount of times anyone anywhere had ever asked him for a joke.

  “You want me to tell you my jokes?” Hugo asked.

  “You saved my life,” Ayane reminded him, “and now you stick by me? Yes. Tell your jokes. If you have them.”

  “Ooooohhh…” Hugo near squealed, but managed to hold it in, giggling instead. Suddenly, the food and lack of make-up was now completely lost to him.

  “Do I!!”

  V

  Epilogue

  Griff, Founder of the Tech Guild

  Tac. Tac. Tac.

  It was the sound that followed every step he took, ever since old age had announced its arrival by harshly knocking his knee out of its socket during a landing. On that day, he had experienced the last hour of fresh air cutting across his cheeks, and of looking down the ledge of a rooftop without the least bit of worry.

  That was the last day he had flown.

  “So this puts us on…scenario thirty two a? Or scenario twenty b?”

  Griff scowled down at his son. Those green eyes and that clear freckled face, along with every other facial feature that bore no resemblance whatsoever with his, looked back with concern.

  “Oh my,” the boy said, adjusting his spectacles, “is it twelve c?”

  “There is one scenario, and one scenario only,” Griff told him, for the thousandth time. “We are the Tech Guild. What’s our motto?”

  “From one blueprint, everything is made,” young Adolfo said, swallowing his words. “I don’t know that I’ll ever understand that, dad. Doesn’t sound scientific, does it?”

  “It’s a motto, Adolfo, it’s not supposed to be scientific. It’s supposed to represent an idea,” Griff said, his cane tak’tak’ing away as he continued marching across the damp, steaming hot corridor. “The scenario is that the Beasts are defeated and we end up in the position to supervise and manage every civilization on the planet. And there is one plan that will get us there. We don’t have different plans because we don’t make bad blueprints. We have one plan, which is perfect. We just adjust current developments to match it.”

  Griff had come up with the words for his guild. He had come up with the rules and all the ideals it existed with. What about the others? Jamie knew only what the Scavengers had taught him. Zaniyah had discarded everything that hadn’t come from the Wild Felids. The Shadow had nothing now. Falk, the bastard villain, had only the mad ravings that came from his ego-maniacal lunacy. Only the Don could be comparable, but he was still too small minded. All the mafioso cared about was a country, and he would never put it on the line.

  And then there was Eliza.

  “I don’t understand how this setback is still part of the plan,” Adolfo mentioned, and they were still walking. Walking up to his office, at the upper-most part of the tower. It was a decision that he sort of regretted since the tower kept growing, but there it was.

  “You really need to start understanding things, Adolfo. I’m gettin’ old,” Griff said, scornfully.

  Getting old was far from ideal, but his scorn was completely directed at the sense of loss, not age and its respective ailments. His would be successor was dead, murdered indirectly by that vile excuse for human bile Mad Genius.

  “I’m learning,” Adolfo pointed out, but Griff still wondered if another of his sons should be walking with him and not Adolfo.

  Many women had Griff tried to love, and many times had he tried to enjoy their love, but the Head Enchanter of the Magni had cast a shadow over his heart that would never allow another’s light to shine on it. Part of him thought she had actually cursed him for life, with a real spell, one which would explain why all his children were boys and yet had none of his features. Only around ten had been borne across the decades, but that was still a high number, in his estimation, for that to be possible.

  However, seeing her expression upon realizing the betrayal had dismistified that. If he was cursed, it was by the Light. Not her.

  “Dad?”

 
Griff had stopped in the middle of the corridor. He should have noticed he wasn’t walking, but it was hard to keep track in the midst of all the constant noise going on. He liked the noise, it filled all the void in the world, and wasn’t that the kind of thing the Light would appreciate? Filled voids?

  “Neutralizing them was always going to be part of the plan,” Griff spoke again, resuming his walk. “Doing it now just causes a shift in the timetable, but everything is still in its place. Everyone’s weak but us, have you noticed?”

  “And the Magni,” Adolfo pointed out, casually.

  Griff scoffed. “We have their head enchanter. I don’t care how unpopular she is with them, they’ll do what we say.”

  “Is she unpopular?” Adolfo asked, and Griff scoffed harder, spitting out with distaste.

  “Of course not. You think I’d jail them all if she was unpopular? For Light’s sake, Adolfo, you gotta keep up, here.”

  Adolfo was twenty two years old. Give or take a year. He was the third oldest, which was a testament to how fast Griff had sought to console himself after Eliza made the decision to scorn his love.

  Griff thought about that night almost every day. He would think about it every hour if he hadn’t decided to take over the civilized world. That was a taxing endeavor on the mind, after all, and required a lot of constant consideration.

  “It was clear from the meetings that they saw her as the true leader, not me. I was just the sergeant who’d yell when someone needed to be yelled at. It’s the same as always, she wins people over by looking at them like they’ve never been looked at before. Like they’re special.”

  “Sounds nice,” Adolfo pointed out, and Griff was very close to smacking him.

  The smell of vapor and hard-earned smoke kept him in the present, and in reality, but mostly, it helped him be patient.

  Griff opened the door to his office and looked over at it with pleasure. A disorganized mess if there ever was one, but he knew where to find every speck of dust. It was the biggest room in the tower, so much so that he had a half-finished vehicle in the middle of the room. It was a two-wheeled automobile instead of four-wheeled that could be described as a motorized bicycle. Griff hoped to ride it one day and again feel the sharp caress of wind upon his face.