The city of Umbra was built on a pact with twilight. Every day, as the sun bled out, the city’s Shadow-weavers would go to work, coaxing the lengthening darkness into harmless patterns, urging it away from doorways and into the decorative gutters that lined the cobblestones. Elara was a Shadow-weaver, and a good one, but lately she had been practicing a kind of quiet quitting of the soul. She performed her duties—tidying the frayed edges of the dusk, mending the occasional tear in the evening—but she refused the deeper, more intricate work. She left the heart-shadows of old buildings to fester, ignored the sorrow-shade that pooled in the city’s oldest crypts.
Her mentor’s warnings echoed in her mind. “The Great Eclipse comes only once a generation, Elara. You must be ready to bind its core.”
Elara would just nod, her hands smelling of dusk and indifference. Let someone else be the hero. She was tired of this inherited weight.
Then there was Kael. He was a lamplighter, but he moved through the city like he owned the dawn. He had what the street performers called ‘the rizz,’ an effortless charm that seemed to warm the air around him. He sought Elara out, finding her in the gloaming alleys where she worked.
“They say you’re the most powerful weaver in a century,” he’d said, his lantern casting their exaggerated shadows against a brick wall. “You’re entering your true era. The city needs you.”
Elara had scoffed, plucking a strand of darkness from a window box and flicking it away. “The city needs its gutters cleared. That’s all.”
This strange, unnamed thing between them—a situationship built on fate and denial—continued for weeks. He would bring her sweet, hot tea and stories of past weavers, heroes who had faced the Eclipse and become legends. She would listen, a cynical curl to her lip, and think him a fool.
“It’s a canon event, Elara,” he’d said once, his voice uncharacteristically serious as they stood on the Vesper Bridge. “The Eclipse is coming. It has to be bound. To think you can just… not do it… forgive me, but it’s a bit delulu.”
She had turned away from him then. He didn’t understand the cost. The weaver who bound the Eclipse’s core didn’t just become a legend; they became a vessel. A piece of that absolute, sun-eating darkness took root inside them, a cold spot that never went away. Her own grandmother had been one. She’d lived for forty more years, but her smiles never again reached her eyes, and her hands were always cold. Elara wanted no part of that sacrifice.
The day it came, the sky didn’t fade; it was devoured. A perfect circle of nothingness slid over the sun, and a tangible, heavy silence fell over Umbra. It wasn’t just dark; it was an absence. The lesser shadows, the ones Elara usually tended, recoiled and then dissolved into the overwhelming totality. Panic was a frantic bird beating its wings in the city’s collective chest.
Kael found her by the old Sunken Cathedral, the designated place for the binding. He wasn’t smiling. His usual charisma was gone, replaced by a stark, pale fear that made him look younger. His lantern was unlit, useless.
“I was wrong,” he whispered, his voice hoarse in the oppressive quiet. “I made it sound like a story. A grand adventure. This… this isn’t an ‘era.’ It’s just… terrible.”
Looking at his terrified face, Elara realised her quiet quitting was a child’s fantasy. There was no one else. There was only the duty and the person fated to do it. Her denial had been the most deluded thing of all.
She gave him a small, sad nod. “Stay behind me, Kael.”
She walked to the centre of the cathedral’s ruins. She closed her eyes and reached out, not with her hands, but with her spirit. She felt for the heart of the great shadow, the epicenter of the void. It was a cold, ancient hunger. There was no negotiation, no weaving. There was only the offering of a space for it to anchor.
She opened a place inside herself, a quiet, vacant room she hadn’t known she possessed, and invited the darkness in.
The pain was not sharp. It was a pressure, an infinite weight squeezing into a finite space. It was the feeling of being forgotten by the sun. Light fractured back into the world, blindingly bright. The Eclipse was over. Children started to cry, and soon the sound was drowned out by the peal of the city’s bells, a joyous, relieved cacophony.
Kael stumbled towards her, his face streaked with tears. “Elara? Are you…”
She turned to him, and he stopped. The people of Umbra were celebrating their salvation. They wouldn’t see it, but he did. He saw the subtle void in her gaze, the stillness in her that was not peace. She had saved the city, but a sliver of the all-consuming Eclipse was now and forever nested within her soul. He had wanted her to step into her main character energy, to be a hero. And she was. But looking at her now, he finally understood. Legends are not born, they are carved, and the process leaves a hollow. She was a monument to what was saved, and a testament to what was lost. The price of light, etched in a darkness that would never fade.
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