These Shadows Remain by B W Powe Page B

being recreated in their image, they still preferred to watch, and comment, and hoot and applaud, and ask for encores.
    *
    Tomas unsheathed his sword and passed it to Adina.
    â€œHold this. You made it, after all.” 
    â€œYou won’t need it?”
    â€œYou might. And I have a plan.”
    The children were silent. They had broken the hypnotism of the glare below to watch and listen to the adults.
    â€œYou’re going down there.” 
    â€œYes.”
    â€œTell me what you’re going to do.”
    â€œShhh . . . ” Tomas pressed the unstill forefinger of his inhuman hand gently onto her upper lip, in the soft crevice there.
    She inhaled and then held her breath. Gabrielle and Santiago both thought that they saw her tremble.
    Adina brought her hand up and pressed her forefinger onto his upper lip, in the soft crevice there. Nodding, she echoed his almost inaudible whisper. “Shhh . . . ”
    A message moved between them. He repeated this gesture first with Gabrielle and then with Santiago but each time he did so much more lightly. A slight sad smile played on his lips. They didn’t smile back. Instead they nodded in their unspoken understanding.
    *
    Tomas slipped away from them again down towards the radiant camp.
    â€œHe could be in trouble soon,” Gabrielle said.
    Adina stood behind the girl and brought her close to her heart.
    â€œHe’ll outsmart the storm.” Santiago spoke more to the air than to the two beside him.
    â€œHow on earth is he going to do that?” Gabrielle said.
    â€œHe may never tell us. But it’s why he went without his sword.”
    Adina placed her free hand on the boy’s shoulder.
    After a moment’s thought, she removed her arm from around Gabrielle and her hand from Santiago’s shoulder. She took the sword she had herself made and handed its hilt to the boy.
    The sword quivered shifting from toon lines to steel and back again to the unsteady state and once more into solidity. The words on both sides glowed with a luminousness none had seen before. Cœur Rage.
    â€œHere,” she said to Santiago. “You may need it.”
    He eased the sword from her hands.
    â€œI’d know how to use it better than he would,” Gabrielle muttered.
    When her brother heard this, he handed the sword to her, but she refused it immediately.
    â€œWhen the time comes,” she said. 
    Another message passed between them. Gabrielle knew they had made the way ahead for their knight in the shape-shifting forest, and it was their steps that had made the path for Adina to follow. If they kept sending messages and kept their heart lines open, they would know what to do.
    *
    Down he stepped into the valley of images.
    While he made his way with caution, Tomas felt the presence again, the unseen haunting and gliding. It stepped when he stepped. It crept when he crept. It stopped when he stopped. It flitted off when he turned to face it.
    This presence wasn’t Adina’s, following him in the way she did when she followed the three in the forest. It was like the ticking of an invisible clock. Sound gave it away. The sound was a pulse he could feel around him.
    It didn’t belong to the wizard or to a reconnaissance toon out to ambush him. Nor was it a shape-shifter that the cloud had summoned and set loose, another spectacle in the metamorphosis of shadows. Nor was it a straggling human that the scavenging image horde hadn’t flattened for their delight.
    *
    Maybe it was the last of the animals. The earth had been brushed clean of creatures, the eeriest experience of all in these protean lands. The animals had reared, slithered, crept, fluttered and crawled away. They shied, loped, skittered, slunk and pounded. Their senses must have been running riot when the images made their evolutionary jump. The animals had reacted in the way they did when they sniffed the coming of tidal waves or sensed earthquake