Born of the Shade

by D O Thomas

  “I don't understand why these damned things are made of glass,” cursed Noir. Silence stared at the phone for a moment. Glass makes sense, it will slip off surfaces and the screen will shatter on impact. This isn't a design fault at all, it’s genius. Create something in high demand. Make it delicate enough for a short fall to damage it and then charge to fix it.

  Noir noticed that Silence was lost in thought again,

  “Oi!” he bellowed.

  Silence slipped out of his head again and into the real world.

  “Right, I don't have much time, mate. This stuff here is yours,” said Noir. Silence peered over Noir as he hastily poked the cracked iPhone, to see a keychain holding three keys, one of which had an odd shape to it. The key had a sharp tip and jagged edges, and it looked more like a little hunting knife than a key. There was also a bowl of water with two white contact lenses floating in it, as well as a couple of Oyster cards and an envelope addressed to someone called Kristophe Jarvie.

  Noir handed the iPhone to Silence. “D’ya know how to use one of these things?” he asked. Silence didn't need to think about this answer, he did know how to use the iPhone. Who doesn’t? he thought. That's why the glass screen is so ingenious. Noir grew impatient while Silence stared blankly at him through his pitch-black eyes.

  “Oi!” repeated Noir in a tone filled with irritation. This was clearly going to be a problem, he thought as Silence came to.

  “Yeah, I do,” answered Silence.

  “This model’s a bit different, your phone is synched to mine. You will be notified as I update your schedule. This is how we will communicate workwise. Please pay attention to the phone whenever it makes a noise. When I place a location on the phone it will appear as a link to your city map so you can easily find said destination. There is also an encyclopaedia on the phone, and this will answer most of your questions about the things you will be running into. Just press and hold the middle button and you will be prompted to enquire about a subject. Ask the phone a question and it will show the most relevant information,” stated Noir.

  “That's very useful,” said Silence.

  “You don’t need to think about this for a minute or two?” asked Noir sarcastically.

  “Nope, it's pretty clear,” replied Silence, unaware of the joke.

  “Okay, if you’re sure, I'll move on.” Noir took the bowl of water and held it before Silence. “Take these contacts out of the water and just hold them near your eyes. They will do the rest of the work.” Silence did as he’d been asked. The contact lenses latched onto his black eyes and gave him natural-looking eyeballs. He now had white in his eyes, and deep brown irises. The only part that remained black was his pupils.

  “Ah, that's much better,” laughed Noir. “Now you don't look so creepy.” Noir then turned to the table, picking up the set of keys. “These are yours now, the smallest of the three opens the back door, the larger one opens the front door and the weird looking one, well, that opens something you have yet to comprehend, so don't worry about that for now.” Noir laughed, thinking about the amount of time Silence would be in a trance trying to understand the use of this key. Silence took the set of keys.

  “And the envelope?” he asked.

  “That's yours to deliver. Check your schedule.” Noir passed Silence and opened his front door. “I've gotta go, sorry.” Noir walked out of the dust-coated door but before he stepped out of the porch, he poked his head back in the house. “I almost forgot, when you see my nephew, make sure you thank him for the clothes.” Noir left Silence contemplating this and embarked on another loosely scheduled task.

  Silence took the envelope, looked it over a few times and contemplated opening it but instead he stuffed it in his pocket. After aimlessly staring at the door for a while, he took out the phone. Silence swiped the screen a few times and activated a schedule app. There was one task set for him. The screen read:

  2/12/15 - 00:15 - time limit: N/A

  Deliver letter to Dean Jarvie of the U.A.K.

  Location: University of Arcane Knowledge 69-75 Boston Manor Rd

  Brentford, Middlesex TW8 9JJ

  Notes: ask the child at the door for Kristophe Jarvie

  Silence clicked the underlined link and a map with directions from Noir’s front door to the U.A.K. popped up instantly.

  “Begin journey?” prompted the phone.

  Silence answered with a yes, but the phone didn't respond. After pressing the button on the screen, he wondered why he had tried to talk to a phone. He laughed for a second, then exited the house. Silence wandered through Noir’s front garden and noticed that the little builder gnomes had been rearranged. The foreman gnome was standing over a displaced brick staring at his blueprints, while the worker gnomes were sitting in a circle with mini cards, playing what seemed to be a game of blackjack.

  Silence paid no mind to Noir’s strange hobby and continued down his path. After half an hour’s walk, Silence's phone began to beep erratically. Silence took out the phone to try and stop its incessant beeping and was greeted with the message:

  You have arrived at your destination.

  There was a large iron gate set in a gap between the long brick wall that Silence had been following. A rather oblique sign had been fastened to the gate that read Boston Manor House, and had a few details written underneath, which Silence had no intention of reading. This is it then, he thought to himself as he gripped the gate’s handle. The gate led to a large Jacobean manor house, within a slightly secluded area of a large park. As Silence passed through the gate, he felt as if something in his mind had changed, as if he knew a little more than he had while walking down the long road adjacent to the mysterious park. The manor house was unimpressive from the outside.

  It was undoubtedly large, standing four storeys high, including the ten triangular loft installations perched perfectly above the third floor’s bright bay windows. The house was almost square in shape, with identical windows spread equally around the second and third floors. The first-floor windows were larger but seemingly identical to the rest, and they sat within the red-bricked manor next to an aged open-arched porch. When Silence reached this porch, he thought, Well, this building is huge, but how can it possibly be a university? But before he could venture any deeper into his bottomless mind, the door creaked open, drawing him in.

  Pretentious art students happening to pass by the manor might look on the exterior with a somewhat blasé attitude. The interior, by contrast, was considered inspiring by many people. It had a monochromatic theme throughout its exquisite halls, with ceiling art resembling that of the ingenious renaissance artists of Italy. Bright dots of light shone through the crystal chandeliers in the main hall and danced on the pitch-black decals embraced by the pure white walls.

  Lying belly down on the antique oaken floor was an olive-skinned boy yet to reach puberty, ungainly and draped in a set of pale purple dress robes. He was thin and gangly, with a face full of features he had yet to grow into. The boy was surrounded by papers, which were covered in odd markings and chemical equations. He finished scribbling what seemed to be an intricate equation in a book too large for his meagre arms to carry. He looked up and gave Silence a bright-eyed smile.

  “Silence,” yelped the boy in a familiar tone.

  “Have we met?” asked Silence.

  “Yes, Sire, well I met you, and umm...You just met me now...I think,” replied the confused child. Silence wasn't sure what the prepubescent boy was trying to say. How can he have met me before I've met him? thought Silence as he stared blankly into the boy’s large brown eyes.

  “Jaydon,” exclaimed the boy. “That's my name, Sire, and you’re Silence, who works for my uncle.” Silence recognised some of the features that Jaydon shared with Noir and laughed a little in his head, since they were much larger than they should be.

  “I'm supposed to thank you for my clothes,” said Silence.

  “That's funny, Sire, ’cos you picked them out yourself and now I'm getting prais
ed by you, for something you did yourself,” laughed Jaydon.

  Confusion struck Silence’s attention deficit mind as Jaydon rambled. He had to make sense of the boy.

  “How exactly did I pick out these clothes before I had even seen them?” queried Silence.

  “I remembered you buying them, Sire, when Uncle Noir asked me to take you shopping.”

  “But that didn't happen.”

  “No, no Sire, it hasn’t happened, yet…I think. Maybe it won’t happen now...I’m not sure,” Jaydon paused to think. “We will have to go to the shops at some time so you can pick these clothes out. Don’t want to damage the timeline, no, no, no, can’t have that, Sire, not at all,” laughed Jaydon.

  “How exactly can you remember something that hasn't happened?” asked Silence, holding back his anger.

  “I have a non-linear memory, Sire, it’s quite simple.” Jaydon's memory broke the barriers of time. If he was going to do something later in his life, he could remember it at least thirty years before it had happened.

  This was the case three months after his birth when he remembered how to speak. As a baby, he told tales of what he would become as an adult and was quickly sent to the University of Arcane Knowledge for study of his near psychic ability.

  “So, you can tell the future?” asked Silence as he scratched the back of his head, hoping for a viable answer.

  “You never did really understand, Sire,” sighed Jaydon. “I'm not a soothsayer, it's only my future that I can remember. ’Cos in a weird way, I've already lived it.”

  After a time, Silence grew tired of trying to understand and Jaydon grew weary of trying to explain. Jaydon had in the future, after several attempts, taught Silence the fundamentals of a time-travelling mind. However, for Silence, this was his first time hearing Jaydon's detailed ramblings of how time and space are multi-dimensional, and how his brain’s functionality related to the theory of there being at least three parallel universes in which said brain existed.

  From the abundance of words that were thrown at Silence, he managed to pick up that if you put a cat in a box and closed it, until you looked inside the box, the cat was both dead and alive. This was mainly because it was the only sentence Silence understood.

  “I’ll just take you to Kristophe, Sire,” sighed the exhausted Jaydon.

  Kristophe Rosario Jarvie, also known as the Arcane University’s Dean of Misplaced Knowledge, was one of the few wizards to be born a warlock. Raised by his mother, a witch of the highest prestige, Kristophe spent his pre-teen years studying the mystic art of witchcraft in the school founded by his mother's mages’ circle. As a male witch, or warlock, as they have come to be known, cannot study amongst the opposite sex after puberty, he was sent to his father's covent. At the age of nineteen, the highly intelligent warlock had mastered his family's art and had grown tired of the life he had been living.

  Kristophe was a kind soul and it was because of this he chose to teach the youth of his covent. But as the masculine side of witchcraft is mostly comprised of maleficent blood magic, it pained Kristophe to teach the young in its evil ways. He would often mix the teachings of feminine witchcraft in the hope that it might quell the darkness that would eventually rise in his pupils.

  After a few years of raising some of the most dangerous warlocks the world would ever see, Kristophe fell into a deep depression. Standing at the edge of a tower block, Kristophe contemplated a one-way trip to hell. He was only twenty-five and had lived a long enough life. He couldn’t take back the evil he had put in the world, but at least he could take himself out of it.

  As he dangled his bare foot over the edge as if to test the air, a voice younger than its vocabulary told him of the good he would do as a wizard. Kristophe listened to the voice and believed that perhaps he could eventually find redemption. After all, it wasn’t every day that a two-year-old climbed to the top of a forty-storey building to tell a suicidal warlock that there was still hope to be had. Eight years later Kristophe developed a type of wizardry that stemmed from the witchcraft he so easily mastered, earning him the title of Dean of Misplaced Knowledge.

  Kristophe was wearing his usual viridian robes, decorated with tea stains, accentuated with biscuit crumbs and dotted with little balls of lint. He was sitting in his antique oaken chair, at his antique oaken desk; Kristophe had a thing for antique oak. Quite like the thing a single mother on benefits had for leopard print. Sitting opposite the oak-obsessed wizard was a witch. Her light brown skin spoke of purity and youth, but the faded light in her eyes whispered tales of despair and deception. The witch’s hair curled diligently down to her shoulders and had the shine one would attempt to gain from a bottle of L’Oréal.

  Kristophe adored this woman, though not for the angelic beauty she had inherited from her father; he saw past aesthetics. His love for the witch had bloomed long before the man himself had blossomed. While in his tenth year at his mother’s witches’ circle, the seemingly young woman had joined as the deputy headmistress. She soon noticed Kristophe's intelligence and fortitude and took him under her wing.

  The thing he missed most after leaving the circle was the long nights which he and the witch would spend mastering the hardest of spells. On the day of his transfer, the witch escorted Kristophe to his father's covent and had arranged for her brother, an elder warlock and valued master, to take him as an apprentice. They kept in touch via crystal ball and over the years the care they shared as student and teacher turned into an eternal bond of love.

  “And then she fused the risen plants with the power of the blue moon,” stated the witch.

  “The alchemist’s guild would pay a fortune for that, Mie-Mie, my dear. Your niece is an ingenious witch. With a teacher like you she will surely become a master in no time.”

  There was a knock at the old oaken door.

  “Enter,” said Kristophe, with the taste of frustration on his tongue. Jaydon led Silence into Kristophe's office and became bright-eyed and excited at the sight of Mie-Mie.

  “Aunty Mie-Mie, I didn't know you were here,” cheered Jaydon, before leaping into Mie-Mie’s lap. Although his mind held the thoughts of a man over forty-years-old, his emotions and actions were still those of a child.

  “Who's this, Jaydon?” asked Mie-Mie.

  “That's Silence, Uncle Noir’s Shadow-Fiend,” replied Jaydon.

  “A Shadow-Fiend!” exclaimed Kristophe.

  “Yes, Sire, he was born today. Oh, and he has a letter for you.”

  Silence handed the letter over without questioning Jaydon's knowledge of it. While Kristophe studied the hastily-scribed letter, he went through a range of emotions, the first of which was surprise. He had studied the event of an azure moon thoroughly and thought, no, knew, there was no way of predicting the trajectory of the beam that would shoot from it. Kristophe never trusted his beloved’s younger brother; this was because when he looked back on his life, whenever something of note happened, Noir was always involved in some way.

  Of course, Noir would find the only Shadow-Fiend born from a full blue moon, thought Kristophe. Obviously, he would then have the Shadow-Fiend work for him and then just to rub it in, he would send the thing to my office. Kristophe gently folded the letter and placed it in his drawer.

  “Right, we’d best get to it, then.” He sighed, “I'm sorry, Mie-Mie, my love. Once again your brother has some ‘work’ for me to do.”

  “That’s fine, Kris. I’m sure my nephew here can entertain me for a time,” Mie-Mie kindly replied. Jaydon leapt off of Mie-Mie’s lap and grabbed her by the hand, struggling to pull her from her seat.

  “Come! Come! I can show you my new spell. It's amazing,” prattled the young genius. Mie-Mie allowed the boy to lead her out of the room but stopped for a second to whisper something in Silence's ear. What she said made Silence freeze in thought.

  “Silence, was it? Would you mind taking a seat?” asked Kristophe through the clattering of mystical instruments as he searched through his desk. Silence snapped
out of his paralytic state of thought and sat down.

  “Could I ask you something?” he queried.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I understand that this place is some kind of ‘university’ but what do you teach here?”

  “The only thing worth learning. Wizardry.” Silence had a limited understanding of what a wizard was. He knew there had been a film made based on wizardry, and it had a boy with a lightning bolt scar who wore a pair of oddly-shaped glasses.

  “So, you can cast spells through a magic wand?”

  “No, that would be witchcraft, an all too common misconception amongst the mundane.”

  “The mundane?”

  “That is how magic users refer to humans.”

  “Oh. So how does it all work?”

  Kristophe pulled up to a four-foot oak cabinet next to Silence. He opened it and took out a large leather bag full of strange medical equipment.

  “It's not exactly easy to explain.” Kristophe took a reflex hammer out of his medical kit. “You see ‘wizardry’ is the understanding of the physical and the metaphysical.”

  He gently tapped Silence's knee with the hammer, but nothing happened. “Hmm, it's a very complicated art.” He hit Silence's knee as hard as he could, and still nothing happened. “Peculiar. There are a lot of different schools of wizardry, such as conjuring, healing, enchanting, transfiguration, trans-modification, and those are just the basic skills one must learn to become a neophyte.” Kristophe flung the reflex hammer back into his bag and removed a tattered wallet from one of the many pockets on its front.

  “You see, just to conjure a simple flame you must fully understand that which allows said flame to ignite, as well as the chemical composites within your own body. And then there's the matter of putting all this knowledge to use and of course...” Kristophe unfolded the wallet; it contained parts that could be assembled into a large syringe. “How do I do this again?” After a brief moment filled with ums and ahs, Kristophe approached Silence with a long-tipped syringe. “You have to be able to control the flame.” He tapped Silence's arm to produce a vein, and again nothing happened. “It’s like you’re dead.”