"I get that everybody had a weird childhood.

You had three Moms in a town where there weren't a lot of polycules, you had a Dad that bread hounds and didn't have a lot of Furred friends, you uncle was the one that raised you because your parents were on a research mission they cold only tell you about once you became an adult, and so on. Even in my little friends group, I had one friend who had a Mother who was a Dreamer and another who's Father was in a cult.

But, if you can but dig it, I can top that. Both of my parents are Dreamers. I am a second generation non-Native, but born in Nodd. Also, I dreamt a lot as once I turned eight. Oh yes, not as a baby, not as a young child, just bam, right when I turned 8, and I kept on dreaming since then. Also my Mum turned her fashion shop into a BDSM boutique when I was nine. So yeah, plenty of people had weird childhoods, but most kids didn't trip and fall into their shadows.

The first time I fell into the ground that I was conscious for was when I fell off my Mum's rooftop garden.

It was an accident, of course, I fell, not jumped. Get this, though. I'm falling, I see my shadow getting bigger and bigger as I fall toward the cobblestones and brick of the back yard, thinking this was it, I was never gonna stare up at a big sky full of rainbow stars with my friends again, and then my wold goes dark. And not the normal darkness of a night, not the kind of darkness that happens when the lights get turned off, or clouds roll over the moon, but total blackness. It was like swimming in paint. I thought it was all over, and I waited to see if I had been granted a place on the shelf, or if I had been sent to the bad place.

Only, nothing happened. It was impossible to be in pain, because my body had become flowing ribbons. No flesh to tear, no blood to bleed, no bones to break, just tendrils of flowing darkness. I floated there for I don't know how long, being me, but not me. Are you yourself if your body is gone? If you become something else? Are you still you?

Whatever, whoever, I was, I could still hear, somehow, and I realized that when I heard Alex calling my name. Then Avid joined him. I tried to reach for them, but I had no hands to reach with. No eyes to look for them with. No mouth to return their calls, ask for help with.

A grey hand grabbed into the darkness. The fur on the hand started to splinter and become darkness, and I had to stop that. So I wrapped myself around the hand, knowing I had to protect it. I had promised Alex I would be by his side always. That I would keep him safe. And I wouldn't break that promise.

And, dig this, it worked. I somehow made a hand for myself by making my fingers fit in the spaces between Alex's fingers. Once I had something to grab with, Alex was able to pull me out of the black, into the normal darkness of night. I came up out of the ground into the arms of my best friends, and they held me while I sobbed. Kids aren't meant to handle darkness. Darkness is something that adults are supposed to deal with.

In time I learned how to control this weird power of mine, but I will never get the look on their faces out of my mind. I refuse to scare people like that anymore. If you can't keep your friends safe by being around them, the least you can do is remove yourself to keep them safe.

They're better off, now that I'm not in their lives anymore. I don't have to be able to see, or to hear, or to feel them to know that."

World: Knights of Nodd.
Characters: Craven Cheshire.
Media: Easy Paint Tool SAI and Microsoft Paint.
Art, ideas, partial design, and character © me.

-Topknot