The elders of the kingdom used to say that a shadow was a sign of good order.
Where there were shadows, there were people. Where there were people, there were stories. And where there were stories, there was stability. A land without shadows, they warned, was a land already dying too honest to survive, too exposed to last.
So the people learned not to fear them.
Shadows gathered in the early hours of the morning, before the city fully woke. They stretched long across courtyards and alleyways, resting beneath wooden stools and market tables, slipping into the corners of rooms where difficult conversations had once been spoken and then abandoned. They were most active in places where promises were made quickly and remembered slowly.
Children noticed them first, as children always did. They learned early where not to step, where to keep their voices low, where not to ask questions that caused the air to tighten. Their parents corrected them gently.
"Leave it," they would say. "That is not your concern."
In time, the children obeyed.
By the time a person reached adulthood in the kingdom, the shadows had become part of the landscape no more alarming than dust or cracked stone. They were swept around, not away. A sensible person did not attempt to remove what had been carefully placed.
The boy was different.
He had been different for as long as memory served him, though difference was not a thing one announced in the kingdom. Difference was a thing that revealed itself slowly, through discomfort, through mistakes made in public, through silences that stretched too long.
He first understood it in the marketplace, on a morning thick with heat and the smell of iron.
The man selling knives spoke with the confidence of one who had rehearsed his words. He praised his wares loudly, his voice carrying over the noise of bargaining and laughter.
"Steel like this does not fail," the man said. "It bends only for the worthy."
The boy stopped walking.
He did not intend to. His feet simply refused to move forward, as though the ground itself had tightened around them. He looked at the knives well-shaped, sharp enough, but imperfect in ways that mattered. He had seen blades like these snap under pressure. He had watched men bleed for trusting words that were too smooth.
A shadow lay beneath the table, thick and well-fed, pulsing faintly.
The boy felt it then the pressure behind his eyes, the familiar tightening in his chest. It was the same sensation he had felt many times before, the warning that came whenever falsehood pressed too close.
He could have walked away.
He should have walked away.
Instead, he spoke.
"That isn't true."
The words were not loud. They were not angry. They carried no accusation beyond their own existence. They were simply true.
The shadow reacted immediately.
It twisted, convulsing as though struck. Its edges frayed, its center thinning until it tore itself apart without sound, leaving nothing behind but a faint chill in the air.
The marketplace fell silent.
The knife seller stared at the empty space beneath his table, his face pale. Nearby merchants stepped back instinctively. A woman clutched her child to her chest. No one needed to be told what had happened.
A truth had been spoken.
The boy stood still, his heart beating fast but steady. He had learned long ago that panic did not help. Panic invited attention, and attention invited questions.
"Say it again," the seller demanded, his voice unsteady.
The boy met his gaze. "Your knives fail."
A murmur spread through the crowd. More shadows nearby shrank away, clinging to walls and feet as if seeking safety.
This time, the handlers arrived quickly.
They were dressed plainly, as they always were, their authority marked not by ornament but by the way people made space for them without being asked. One of them, a woman with careful eyes raised a hand.
"That is enough," she said calmly.
The boy did not resist when they took him by the arms. Resistance, too, could become a kind of lie if one pretended it might succeed.
As they led him away, he noticed something he had never seen before.
The shadows were watching him.
They questioned him gently at first.
"What did you mean by what you said?"
"Did you intend to cause harm?"
"Do you understand the consequences of uncontrolled speech?"
The boy answered each question plainly. He had no other way.
When they asked him to soften his words to say he had exaggerated, to say he had been mistaken, his body betrayed him.
Pain tore through his chest, sharp and immediate. His breath caught. Blood rose in his throat, warm and metallic. He dropped to his knees, gasping, as the room filled with the frantic movement of shadows fleeing from him.
The handlers stepped back.
This was not ignorance.
This was not defiance.
This was constraint.
"A truth-bound," someone whispered.
The word settled heavily in the room.
They had records of such people. Few, and carefully erased. Individuals whose bodies rejected falsehood as violently as poison. Individuals who destabilized environments simply by existing within them.
The woman who had spoken first studied him for a long moment.
"You will come with us," she said finally. "For your own safety."
He did not ask whose safety she meant.
The palace stood at the heart of the capital, older than the streets that surrounded it. Its stones were pale, almost gentle in the morning light, but the boy felt the weight beneath them long before he saw what lay below.
They led him downward, past doors sealed with runes, past guards who did not meet his eyes, past a hum that vibrated faintly through the soles of his feet.
The air grew warm.
Then thick.
Then alive.
The vault opened before him, vast and dim. Chains stretched across the chamber, etched with symbols that glowed faintly, not to restrain but to remind. At the center lay something enormous, its form indistinct, its presence undeniable.
A nightmare.
It breathed slowly, rhythmically, as though the world itself adjusted around it.
"This is why the kingdom endures," said the woman now Chancellor, her title finally spoken aloud. "We feed it lies. Measured ones. Necessary ones."
The boy swallowed.
"And if you stop?"
The Chancellor looked at him steadily.
"Then it wakes," she said. "And nothing you love survives."
The nightmare shifted in its sleep.
Somewhere deep within it, the boy felt recognition.
And for the first time in his life, the truth frightened him.