The day had begun like any other with the slow, routine decisions being made. He had woken at dawn before the hustle of the small town began making its rousing noises that only a dead man could sleep through. As he was throwing water on his face, he looked at himself in the small mirror he had in his bathroom. Heavy dark hazel eyes that had seen many things stared back at him, a strong jaw with a few days of stubble, and messy, long brunette hair. It was not a bad face, he decided, but the scar running through his right eyebrow meant he didn’t seem like the gentleman a well-respected lady would approach.

  That’s ok he decided long ago that he could live a quiet life alone in the middle of nowhere, in a place that no one knew him, and no one would want to know him.

  He stepped outside his quaint cottage on the outskirts of the town and looked down the road to see a lone horse running through the dusty roads with the rising sun peaking behind it. The only sounds coming from the still sleeping town were the trot of the escapee and the slow creak of the old, rusted gate to his small garden as he exited the cottage. Today, he had decided to escape even further into the wilderness, where even the horrors of his mind couldn’t reach him.

  He had packed with him only what he could carry: his rucksack and the knife on his belt. Starting down the road, he made his way to the large mountain range in the far distance, where he could see the slowly rising mist as the day started to warm up. He could already feel that the day was going to be long and hot. Stopping to double-check he had packed enough water, he took a breath and whispered,

  “One foot after the other”

  That’s what he had been doing for most of his life. Running away from everything and everyone, attempting to escape the one person that he just couldn’t seem to get away from. His thoughts wandering, he watched as a lone daisy blew in the soft breeze coming in from the coast. Moving side to side in a dance that no one could ever attempt to replicate, with a beauty that one who had practised the art for a decade could only attempt to grasp. He had known someone once who had come close. She was his living heaven, the only place that he had known a semblance of comfort, the only place where he felt at peace, the only love he had ever known, and in a single stroke, was all taken away from him.

  This cruel world, where one can experience the most profound sense of peace in the arms of another. Only for it to be stripped from you. Feeling naked with the wind blowing sharp pieces of glass at every inch of you, the pain is a continuous gut-wrenching wound that can never be healed. Those soft-spoken words whispered to each other in the dead of night, the heat of each other’s bodies, the promises of a future together all gone.

  Grey shook himself awake to find himself in complete darkness. Groping around, he searched for his torch, which he had lost in the explosion. His thoughts still in disarray, he didn’t think to question the fact that he was surprisingly uninjured. After a little searching, he finally found the torch in what felt like the corner of the room. Switching the torch on, he swung the beam around the room to check what the damage was, noticing that everything was still intact.

  After checking the room, he checked to see if he was wounded anywhere, and to his astonishment, he was uninjured. With a thumping headache, he thought of how he swore there was an explosion that knocked him out. Thinking back to what had caused the large explosion of light, he remembered the golden medallion in the small chest.

  Slowly approaching the undamaged chest, he saw that the medallion was no longer in the chest. Now truly confused as to what had happened, he decided to head back out of the tunnel. He was starting to get a weird sensation that he was being watched and was starting to feel suffocated in the small, dark room.

  Shifting the torch from his right hand to the left so he could once again check the rope was still secure, he noticed his hand was different. There was now a tattoo of a man holding two swords with his shadow walking behind him on his hand.

  At first, he was in a state of shock seeing the tattoo, and then he quickly came to the realisation that it was the same image he had seen on the medallion before it had disappeared, and he was knocked out. For a man who had seen many disturbing things in his life, this had truly freaked him out. The hair on his arms stood up, and he got goosebumps all over his body.

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  He felt a presence behind him.

  Hours of training had given him a ‘sixth sense’ when it came to noticing threats, and Grey knew he was at a disadvantageous position with his back towards whatever stood behind him. Slowly turning, he swung his torch around to confront this threat, knowing it was better to face it head-on.

  In the light, a figure stood in the beam for a split second before it disappeared in a wisp of what looked like falling smoke. He watched as the smoke moved across the torch beam and started to slowly reform on the edge of the light.

  Unable to move as his brain couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing he watched as the swirl of smoke started to reform and build vertically. It was slowly creating the figure of a man. First, he saw the legs, then the torso and arms, and then finally the face, which had no mouth, nose, or ears, only a pair of pitch black eyes that seemed darker than the night sky.

  “What the fuck are you?” he screamed at the man in pure panic.

  The human nature of fight or flight was in full effect, and his brain screamed at him to run, but he also knew if he turned his back, death would be close behind.

  The figure did not answer his question and just stood there peering into his soul with those dead eyes that didn’t seem to move from Grey's face. They stood there for what felt like an eternity, just facing each other. The longer they stood there, the slower his heart seemed to beat.

  Finally calming down to a reasonable level, he tried asking again in a shaky voice, “What are you?”

  Once again, there was no response from the figure, but it slowly lifted its right arm, holding its palm open towards him. Compelled by some exterior force, Grey found himself reaching out to grab the hand even though his body screamed at him to run. As their palms came into contact, his body went rigid, and his eyes rolled back into his head, with his mind seeming to disconnect from his body.

  His mind was being hijacked and taken on a journey through time, and Grey was aware of it. Thousands of faces passed by in a blur. He experienced thousands of lifetimes in moments, feeling all the emotions humans are capable of and more. The pain of losing loved ones a thousand times over. Watching people he cared about die repeatedly in a never-ending cycle. Thousands of wounds and thousands of battles. Victory and defeat. Triumph and sorrow, he experienced them all. In all these thousands of lives that he experienced in the briefest of moments, there was one common factor in all.

  A shadow and death.

  His eyes rolling back into his head and his head snapping forward, he looked directly into the shadow’s eyes with fear. “I don’t want this.”

  “Please, I don’t want this. You must understand.” He screamed

  A voice then projected with fury in his head, which caused a sharp pain, “You cannot change fate.”

  The voice in his head was deep and sharp. It belonged to the shadow. That’s what the figure was. It was a shadow. It was walking death, and now he was the same. He had become the next shadow of death.

  In the matter of moments, the course of his life had changed. It had become an uncontrollable river ready to burst through the dam walls, and no matter how he wanted to hold it back, the pressure to accept what he had become was bashing against the newly erected moral walls in his mind. The cracks which had already been there from him knowing his own violent nature had begun to widen and crack under the shadow’s scrutiny.

  There was a pressure in his mind that was trying to force him to accept what he had become; it was the shadows doing so, he knew, but he couldn’t understand why he had to show acceptance of his new role in the world.

  “Get out of my mind, you fucking creature”, he screamed at it.

  “We are one now. You know I cannot do that, boy.”

  Finally, remembering how the torchlight had forced the shadow to disintegrate, he swung his beam towards it. Once his beam reached the outer edge of the finger, it shifted back in disgust, but surprisingly, he also dropped the torch from the slight shock he felt in his fingers.

  “I told you, child. We are one now.”

  Even without a mouth, Grey could see the smirk those words produced in his mind from the shadow.

  “You must accept the role of death boy, or we will both perish from this world sooner than you know. I have shown you the truth. Why do you run from it?”

  “I run because before you, I was already death. I do not wish to return to that life. I know what you showed me, but if I ignore it, it is inconsequential to me.”

  “You cannot ignore it,” the shadow said with such anger that it forced Grey to grab his head with both hands.

  “They must be stopped now, or your world will cease to exist, and your cowardice will cause the death of billions.”

  Grey let out a long sigh. It was true he had seen everything the shadow had shown him. He had seen it a thousand times over if he couldn’t quite remember it all. Despite his youth, he felt old and tired.

  It could be said that Grey was no longer young. He had lived thousands of lifetimes in mere moments, and he just wanted to lie down and die. He also knew that he wouldn’t. Grey knew deep within himself that he had to accept his new role and bring death to the world lurking above his head at an unimaginable scale to satisfy the shadow.

  He looked at those dark eyes, “I know what I am. I am Death's right arm. The harbinger of the everlasting cycle. I am a shadow of death.”

  After uttering that last word, he watched the shadow walk towards him and extend its arms out from its side. Without thinking, Grey copied the gesture, and the shadow walked into his body.