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Where the Shadows Run · Original Short Story ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 2000–8000
Show rules for this event
Teach Us to Pray
After five days on her own, Lana decided that she had no other options.

She couldn’t reach any of her family on her shortwave radio, to the point that she had been desperate enough to keep hers switched on for an entire day, rather than just at the hour before sunset, as her parents had instructed.

She didn’t dare go back to the farmhouse—it was more than twenty miles behind her, and it was burning with hellfire when they had fled and were separated. The home where she grew up could offer no more safety.

The only thing left to do was to pray. And the thought of it was the most terrifying thing Lana had ever faced in all her seventeen years.

There was a hallowed ground just a few miles away, and the angel that visited the ground was almost always there. Father had told her never to approach the angel, but he was also a prudent man who knew that things seldom went to plan. He once reluctantly told her how best to get its attention, in a way that wouldn’t likely end in her death.

She’d need to present it with a live demon.

Lana had shot imps and cackles before with her .22 rifle; they were pests, like gophers and coyotes. But this time, she didn’t have her rifle, and she needed it alive.

It took all morning before she found a burrow that might belong to a cackle. When she started digging it out with her knife, the hissing and spitting sounds coming from inside confirmed her suspicions.

It had rained the night before. While that had been uncomfortable, it meant that the dirt was easily pliable, giving freely away to her bare hands and her blade. While she dug, the demon’s sputtering grew in volume.

“Fuck you!” came its coarse, shrill voice. “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Lana ignored it and continued to dig. Demons rarely were spawned knowing more than a handful of words.

Finally, she saw a glint of iridescent green among the dirt and grass roots. Her hand snaked out, as fast as she could, and she caught the cackle by the tail.

“Fuck you, no, fuck!”

“Sorry,” Lana muttered, as she pulled it out of the ground.

The cackle was a small one, barely six inches long. Half its length was in its tail, and its lizard-like neck accounted for another third of its length. Its four gossamer wings were the size of Lana’s palms. It was a tiny and frail, absolutely nothing like the hulking things that had torn down the farmhouse walls six nights ago.

The only container Lana had with her that could hold the cackle was her emptied water canteen. She did her best to force the cackle into it, but not before it managed to scratch her hand with its tiny clawed feet once or twice. Finally, she shoved the lid back on, and twisted it tightly.

“Fuck you!”

The demon’s cry reverberated through the whole metal canteen.

Lana put her injured fingers in her mouth and tasted blood and dirt. When the stinging faded away, she wasted no time making her way to the hallowed ground. There was a freshwater stream nearby, but without her canteen to hold water, the time she could spend active today was limited, she knew.

Holding her canteen in both hands, she walked through the woods, her steps punctuated by the demon’s muffled screeches.




Lana knew the angel was at the hallowed ground, because it looked like there was a new, miniature sun in front of her. Even several hundred feet away, she could feel the heat on her face, like a July afternoon. This far out, the trees were twisted, and the grass was withered.

“Fuck you!”

The cackle in her bottle redoubled its protests. Once or twice, it almost even managed to knock the canteen out of Lana’s hands. But she held onto it tightly, and continued forward with as steady a gait as she could manage.

Closer to the angel no plants grew, and the ground was cracked and dusty from the heat. Lana felt beads of sweat roll down her eyebrows and into the corners of her lips. A little tickle of thirst was just now building up in the back of her throat. She swallowed her saliva, but it didn’t really help.

Soon, there came a point where she couldn’t face completely forward anymore, because her eyes kept watering from the light. She pulled the hood of her jacket over her head and tilted her head downward, looking only at the next few paces’ worth of ground in front of her. But she didn’t need to really see where she was going; the heat made it clear where the angel was.

During the last hundred or so feet, the dusty dirt ground finally gave way to soft, fine sand—sediment that had been blasted into dry powder by the angel’s presence. Lana’s feet sank to her ankles with every step.

Now, the demon in her canteen was perfectly still and perfectly silent. If it weren’t for the weight, she would have thought that it wasn’t in the canteen anymore.

The heat was like an open oven in her face. When she couldn’t bear getting any closer, she stopped and stole a peek forward through squinted eyes.

There were skulls around the angel, in the sand. Demon’s skulls, shaped not unlike a cackle’s, but several times larger than her whole body. Skulls that might have belonged to the same kind of demons that burned down her home.

The angel itself was a shining point in space, too bright to make out any real details. But in the split second Lana tried to focus her eyes on it, she saw something like a star in its center, with something like disks spinning within and around it. Her vision quickly gave way to dark spots, and she had to turn away and spend several moments blinking before she could see again.

It didn’t seem like it had noticed her yet. Father said that angels rarely paid attention to people, the same way people rarely paid attention to birds or bugs or dirt. He said that even if they spoke to you, they’d be spending a hundredth of a billionth of one percent of their attention to do so.

But they always paid attention to demons. They hated demons.

Lana began unscrewing her canteen’s cap. Every bit of exposed skin on her face and hands stung from the sheer force of the angel’s light, and her arms kept shaking.

“Please,” said the cackle, softly.

“I’m sorry, little guy,” said Lana.

She reached inside the canteen, gripped the cackle by its throat, and pulled it out.

“Please!” screeched the cackle. It beat its wings uselessly in Lana’s grasp and clawed with all four limbs. “Please! Please!”

The cackle’s claws drew blood, and Lana felt a quickly-drying streak of it roll down her wrist. But she held the cackle up towards the angel in a firm fist.

At that moment, Lana felt the angel’s attention upon her. There was no change in the blinding heat or the scorching light, but she felt something pass through her body and through the ground, like waves of force.

Suddenly, the cackle popped, as if it were a balloon. The angel’s fourth dimensional grasp had plucked the cackle’s skin away, the same way you’d ruin a two dimensional painting by tearing the canvas.

Black blood, stringy muscle, and bones all came apart in Lana’s grasp and fell to the sand below.

It happened so quickly that Lana recoiled only several seconds later, when she had finally processed what had happened. She knew that angels sometimes did this to people, too.

The angel’s attention was still on her.

“Fear not, Lana Tollman,” said the angel.

It was the traditional way an angel opened discourse with a human. Its voice was like a knife being drawn across corrugated sheet metal—warbling and silvery.

Lana didn’t know how to pray to an angel, outside of what she had heard from stories and read online whenever the house managed to get a net connection. She swallowed her spit again, because her throat was burning, and tried to speak.

“B-blessed be me, that you would look on me,” she said. “Can I— May I ask you some questions?”

A moment passed, and the angel replied.

“Upon the seven states of perceiving rests immutable and intangible truths which underlie all perception and falsehoods.”

The sound of the angel’s voice was not loud, but it was somehow just as intense as the heat or the light. Lana’s ears stung and rang, and she covered them with her hands. But it made no difference.

“Where is my father?” she asked, assuming the angel’s previous statement was in agreement.

“Our Father which art in Heaven, hollowed be a name.” sang the angel’s piercing voice.

“No, not that father…” Lana had to work up saliva back into her mouth, because her whole throat felt dry. Speaking in this heat felt like getting car exhaust blasted into her mouth.

She tried again.

“Where is Jonathan Tollman, the farmer who has a ranch twenty or twenty-five miles from here?”

A moment passed.

“Specificity acceptance. Jonathan Tollman, fathering as defined and illustrated by the transience of Lana Tollman. Jonathan Tollman is twenty-three point five-four miles away, bearing one hundred and thirty-four point eight-five degrees by the Julian compass on the reference plane.”

Lana drew a circle in her head, and counted out the degrees. One hundred and thirty-odd degrees on a compass was… southeast. And twenty-three miles… But that was…

“That’s where the farm is? Right?” asked Lana.

“Studiously asked, and reciprocally answered,” said the angel.

“But… he can’t be at the farm!” said Lana.

“Jonathan Tollman, fathering as defined and illustrated by the mawkishly fervent Lana Tollman, is twenty-three point five-four miles away, bearing one hundred and thirty-four point eight-five degrees by the Julian compass,” said the angel.

“Why is he there?”

“Etched on this sphere are rules of physicality that both govern and define the state of being of every euclidean agent, predetermining their animation and agency.”

Lana could not understand what it meant, but there was something in its voice that made her heart sink. She didn’t know why, but she was almost too afraid to ask her next question.

“Is he okay?”

“He is dead,” said the angel. “Fear not.”

The angels words shook the inside of Lana’s head like a bell. A wave of nausea swept across her, starting from her groin and rising into her mouth. But she fought it, somehow instinctively knowing that vomiting would mean losing fluid in this dreadful heat.

The angel’s gaze was still on her, as she stumbled on her feet. Finally, she gathered herself enough to ask her next question.

“Where is Nisha Tollman, wife of Jonathan Tollman?” she said, through cracked lips.

“Nisha Tollman, humbly and steadfastly depicted upon Jonathan Tollman’s acquiescence, is twenty-three point five-six miles away, bearing one hundred and thirty-five point zero-three degrees by the blessed compass.”

“Is she alive?” said Lana.

“Prophetically asked, and respective upon the answering hark,” said the angel. “She is dead. Fear not.”

Lana didn’t allow herself to process the angel’s words. She could already feel the angel losing interest in her, and she still had one more important question to ask. She didn’t have time to compose herself, again.

“Where is Kara-Mia Tollman?” she asked. Then, remembering how the angel seemed to think, she added, “Daughter of Jonathan Tollman and Nisha Tollman.”

“Kara-Mia Tollman, four thousand days hence a cooing babe as thought of by loved ones, is twelve point zero-two miles away, bearing sixty-five point seven-eight degrees by the compass which was paid in blood.”

Lana’s eyes widened, even in this light.

“Is she alive?” she asked. She would have screamed it if she could, but her voice was almost entirely spent, and the words came out as a sandpaper scratch.

“She lives and fears and sleeps upon the paper-plane of this sphere. Fear not,” said the angel.

Lana found herself dizzy, from the heat, and from the light, and from the invasive ringing in her ears. Her footing in the soft sand was constantly unsure, and she found that she could no longer coax spit into her mouth.

“Thank you,” said Lana. “That’s all.”

The angel’s presence seemed to shimmer for a moment. Its voice rang out.

“All. All, all, all, all,
all,
all,
all,
ALL! FEAR NOT.”

And then suddenly, the world stopped vibrating in Lana’s chest. The angel retracted its billionth of a percent of attention from her, and her ears stopped stinging.

Just as Lana was about to turn away, there was a deafening crack of force, and then the angel was gone, kicking up a stinging blast of sand from where it had been.

Lana blinked, and realized it was night, despite it the fact that it had been early afternoon when she first made her way onto the hallowed ground.

She sat down hard, heaving cool air into her lungs through her mouth and nose at the same time, as her eyes adjusted to the dark.

When she could see again, she found her canteen where she had apparently dropped it, crawled to it, and picked it back up.

The freshwater creek she had visited this morning was more than a mile back the way she came. She knew that if she didn’t get water soon, she’d be in danger.

And she also knew that her little sister might not stay where the angel said she was for very long.

Lana had no time to waste. She got up, sand falling in little streams down from the places where it had accumulated on pants and in her hair.

And then she walked.
Pics
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#1 · 1
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Oh man, I'm always a fan of unknowable angels. I really like this world that you've built up here of demons raging like monsters or wild animals and angels being more their opposition than having any major care for the humans caught up in the middle. The story has a great air of desperation in big and small aspects, from Lana's need to figure out if her family is safe after her home was destroyed to the simple need for water and survival. I also just like how you wrote the angel's dialogue, I think you did a good job of making an obviously alien creature that could still be mostly understood by the audience.
#2 · 1
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It's honestly encouraging to find out that there's still some writing being done in these trying times. I can't imagine anyone really participating thanks to everything that's happening around them recently, particularly so in the States, so I definitely appreciate that there are some of us here still striving to keep the WriteOffs going in spite of the times. Everyone involved did an incredible job in getting these out, so I thought I might as well step in to do a bit of reviewing. It's the least I can do, at least until I'm done with the stuff I've piled onto myself that's supposed to be up on FimFic.

Now, personal doctrines aside, I think this story's primary plus⁠—and this extends to all the other stories as well⁠—is definitely the premise. To have the story take place during the biblical endtimes is a concept that's ripe for exploration. I really love how bleak yet mystical the atmosphere that this piece conveyed. The depiction of the angel and the scenes of it conversing with Lana especially enraptured me from start to finish. I reckoned their exchange was definitely your starting point when it comes to writing this story, dear Author? Regardless, I think you've done a great job with all that was depicted here in spite of my personal gripes with it, of which unfortunately there are quite a few.

I do find overall that the pacing of the story is a bit uneven. I'm thinking it's because there's a lot of instances of things being told to us scattered throughout the story. Not to say that it's inherently a bad thing, but I think it's the way they're structured that it impedes how it altogether flows. Some of the information being told can be condensed or moved around to help with the story's progression. Maybe a few omissions here and there too, especially if it doesn't impact the story in any major way.

The cackle's words, I found, were unintentionally hilarious. I can't say subsequent readings helped on that front. I get the idea that you're trying to go for here but I definitely think there could be a better way to depict the demons' behavior beyond them just being generically, or in this case almost comically evil. It would definitely help if the demons here were portrayed with anything more beyond screaming obscenities and setting houses on fire. Something nuanced would be interesting, especially considering our protagonist is sacrificing one of them later on.

One minor gripe I have is about Lana herself, who I find doesn't really stand out as a character. She has some personality traits I can glean from the story, sure, but whether or not they play any pivotal part in it is really the question here. As much as I can understand her desperate attempts in looking for her family, I don't really find myself rooting for her to do so. I think if we have a clearer idea of her as a character and what role she plays in conjunction to the greater premise, then it would be truly compelling. As it stands currently, I can't say I'm immersed as much as I want to be.

Another minor inconsistency⁠ I found—I say minor but it's honestly growing the more I brood over it⁠—is why Lana did not try to sate her thirst with the rain that fell last night? Why didn't she bother with stealing a few drops or even stockpiling with her canteen? On that regard, I do think the secondary conflict of her being thirst does feel a bit unnecessary. It adds a bit of desperation, sure, but I don't really sense that desperation in the writing itself. I think the story will do fine with just focusing on her family and it would still be as urgent as it is written here, personally.

In spite of all my issues, I do like and admire what this story is going for in the end. After all, since most of my advice leans towards expanding more of this and exploring more of that, it's safe to say that you're on the right track. Keep doing what you're doing.

Thanks for writing, and good luck!
#3 · 1
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Oh snap crackle and pop this was cool. Feels a bit like an alternate take to one of the bad Supernatural timelines, but somehow more hopeful because the angels aren't outright jerks. Just inconceivable creatures of heat and light.

There's a blend of mundane and divine, or maybe mundane and catastrophic, that hits my story brain just right. Sure, demons are real and might murder you, angels exist and are like tiny stars, but that doesn't mean folks don't get thirsty and tired.

I wish I knew the exact genre for this sort of story. It's like "slice of life" in that it's stuff everybody goes through, but it's the rare moments rather than the common—weddings, births, deaths, promotions, natural disasters. I think demon attack probably qualifies in this world.

At any rate, I was very happy to read this. Top contender for cool, even in a larger round I think.