Your thighs tremble with the effort as you pull them free, muscles tensing and burning until you rest them over the shadow’s shoulders. It pauses for a moment, grunting confusion and snorting hot air through its nose. This is unacceptable.

“I didn’t tell you to stop.” You practically growl. Your nails dig further into the heated core of the shadow without remorse. There’s a moment where the blurred edges of it try and melt away into the dark, to want to vanish away into the night as soon as you try to take something for yourself.

You can almost feel its rising panic, its tongue still thrashing against you. It wants to flee, to squirm away into the dark. As you hold it in place, your nails raking against it, you realise with a small laugh that there are dark corners everywhere. Especially within you.

When that thought settles, you can easily see the secret shadowed halls beneath your skin. The hollows of your lungs, the thin spaces in your bones like a dark forest, the deep and cavernous recesses of your twitching, groaning guts. Your grip on the shadow’s smoking head redoubles and you begin to pull.

Sure and weighty knowledge of the spaces the shadow can hide within you weigh it down as you force it back up your body. The barriers that had held it apart from you seem fragile and pointless as they break without much ceremony, other than a lingering heat that rakes your insides. The shadow thrashes like a fish half caught in a net, still able to sense freedom nearby but unsure how to free itself.

It’s lower jaw sinks down into your skin, it’s attempts to bite down are feeble and weightless but instinct knocks the air out of you. Breathless you watch it’s final attempt to leave you as it’s head connects with your own. Your vision becomes murky as you feel its final descent rattle your bones. You’ve never come so hard in your life, unable to scream from the intensity of it. There’s only muscles tensing and open mouthed clawing at darkness before you lose consciousness entirely.

The warmth of the dawn on your bare legs wakes you. It takes some time in silent, hunched thought to piece together the night before. The corpses nearby are of no help. But their coin and their boots will do much to get you going back on your way.

As you stand and regard the statue in the yellow dawn light you feel something stir within you. Like a fish at the bottom of dark water it pushes at the surface of you, threatening to break until you relax and let it rise. A voice grumbles from your throat, tucked away back in the safety of the darkness there.

“Helping. Want to help.”

“Yeah, you will.”

You try to swallow it back down but it whines in discomfort as you turn away and begin trying to make your way back to the main road.

“Trapped.”

“Hardly. I’m just carrying you. It’s much better than being stuck in a bit of rock.”

It has no argument for that.