That morning, the sunlight felt wrong.
The warmth was cold. The light was gray.
Harith woke up from sleep or maybe he had just come out of something deeper than a dream. The walls of his room were still the same, but the shadows on the floor… moved on their own. Slowly. Circled towards his feet.
He held his breath.
Aina was still sleeping on the sofa next to him, her face pale.
But the shadow under her body did not match her body position, she leaned towards Harith, as if watching.
"Don't move…" whispered a soft voice from the floor.
"I'm hungry."
The shadow was his own.
Harith grabbed the phone, turned on the screen, blue light illuminated the space. Instantly, all the shadows stopped.
But in the reflection of the closet mirror, he saw something that made his heart stop, he was there standing upright but Harith was still in bed.
"You… who?"
"Me, if you keep pretending."
The mirror cracked.
Not broken, cracked from the inside.
Harith got up slowly, his eyes heavy. "What do you mean?"
The reflection smiled, a smile he himself had never made.
"Last night you were safe because of me. But I was also because you almost died."
The shadow from the floor crawled onto the wall, then rose to the surface of the mirror.
From the crack, a black hand slowly emerged and grabbed the wooden frame as if pushing herself out into the real world.
Aina suddenly jerked, waking up with a small scream.
"Harith! Don't look at him!"
"How do you know?"
"Because I've seen him in my dreams!"
The mirror exploded, glass shards flying.
From inside, came a shadow figure of the same body as Harith, but with two colors of eyes, one white, one pitch black.
It moved without a sound, each step leaving a trail of black smoke on the floor.
"You don't deserve to live, Harith. This world only has room for one shadow."
Harith felt a strong pressure in his chest, as if his lungs were being squeezed from the inside. His shadow, which had only whispered all this time, now stood in front of him, breathing.
He tried to hold back, but his vision was blurry.
The voice in his head echoed
"Fight him… or I will take your place completely."
Aina screamed, clutching the silver pendant hanging from her neck.
A soft light came out, forming an eclipse symbol in the air, half sun, half moon.
The shadow retreated for a moment, growling like a wounded animal.
Harith shivered.
"What is that, Aina…?"
"That's not your shadow. That's the shadow you left behind when you were a child."
He didn't have time to ask any further, the shadow screamed and the room shook as if it was being pulled into a vortex of darkness.
The walls of the room began to melt, black color flowing from the ceiling to the floor, swallowing everything.
Harith tried to cling to the table, but everything was sucked into the bottomless darkness.
Before the world completely disappeared, Aina screamed
"If you want to live, call your shadow by its real name!"
"Real name…?!"
"It only bows to the name you gave it as a child!"
But Harith couldn't remember anything.
The only word that came to his mind was the name he had once said as a child, when he had talked to himself under the guava tree behind the house.
"...Rai."
The shadow stopped.
His smile changed, not anger, but relief.
"Finally you remember me, Harith."
"Now… let's be one again."
And before Harith could scream, the entire room and even the entire world was swallowed up in darkness.