Kiren

Liminial Fetchling – Rogue / Blow-In

Never planned on joining a circus. I’m not the type who runs to something. I run from things, and I’m very good at it. But circuses move. A lot. When you need to stay ahead of what’s chasing you while searching for someone who doesn’t want to be found, a travelling show is as good a shadow to hide in as any.

Planned to stay a week. Maybe two. Just long enough to disappear from wherever I’d been and reappear somewhere else. But the circus folk had other ideas. They adopted me (if “adopted” is the right word for a group of people who size you up, decide you’re useful, and start teaching you things before you’ve agreed to stay). Trained me in the agile arts of reclamation. That’s what they called it. Reclamation. As if the things I learned to take had always belonged to me and I was simply collecting what was owed. (Grandmother Spider would approve.)

They didn’t ask questions about my past. I appreciated that more than I ever told them. In return, I didn’t ask about theirs. We used each other, honestly and openly, and I learned skills that have kept me alive in places far less forgiving than a circus tent. Fair exchange. Always get paid for your work, and always know when the payment’s been made.

Moved on eventually. I always do.

---

My sister is out there.

I know this the way I know my own shadow. No proof required. No denial accepted. She’s my mirror twin. Identical, but reversed. Light where I am dark. Open where I am guarded. The other half of a thing that was never meant to be divided. (Not that I’d say that out loud to anyone.)

Since the Missing Moment, I’ve been searching. I have distinct memories of her. Her laugh, which was brighter than mine. Her stubbornness, which was worse (and that’s saying something). The way she’d look at me like she already knew what I was going to say and was just waiting for me to catch up. These memories are sharp and whole and real, and I will not be convinced otherwise, no matter how many sympathetic looks I receive from people who think grief has made me invent a person.

Sometimes I feel a pull toward her. A twisting inside, like a thread being tugged from somewhere I can’t see. It comes and goes. Never leads anywhere useful. But it’s there, and it’s hers, and as long as I can feel it, she’s alive.

Sometimes… the pull feels like something else. Something that isn’t her. Something that watches from the other end of the thread.

Never mind. That’s a later problem.

---

My father was a fool. That’s the charitable reading.

He played with the powers of the Shadow Realm the way children play with fire. Fascinated. Reckless. Convinced that understanding the shape of the flame meant he could hold it without being burned. (He couldn’t.) He was consumed. But not before he sacrificed my mother to their darkness. Fed her to it like kindling to keep his own flame burning a little longer. What did he gain from the exchange? Didn’t stick around to find out. Was small enough to be overlooked and quick enough to be gone before anyone thought to look for me.

Don’t speak of him. Don’t mourn him. Don’t waste the energy it would take to hate him. He made his choice. My mother didn’t get one. That’s the beginning and the end of it.

(Note to self: This is why Grandmother Spider’s tenets matter. Always be the one making the deal, never the one being sacrificed for it.)

---

The brand is on my inner left forearm. My sister’s (my sister’s) would be on her right. Mirror image. Like everything else about us. The Gatewalker mark. Been told it means I walked through one of the gates during the Missing Moment, though I don’t remember doing it. Don’t remember anything from that night. Just the light, and then nothing, and then waking up alone with ink on my skin that hadn’t been there before and a hollow feeling in my chest that hasn’t gone away since.

I am small. Five foot five, built lean. Lithe, if you’re being kind. Underfed, if you’re not. (Circus food will do that to a person. You learn to stomach anything, but when you don’t have to, why should you?) Skin is pale in the way that fetchling skin is pale. Not the pink-white of humans who don’t see enough sun, but the cool, flat pallor of something that grew in shadow. Hair is black, but not the simple black of ink or coal. It’s translucent, like dark water, and when it moves it catches light in iridescent highlights that shift like oil on a puddle. People stare. I let them. Useful to be noticed for the wrong reasons.

My shadow does not behave.

Should match me. Small, slight, unremarkable. Instead it sometimes resembles a hulking, horned thing, crouched and coiled as though waiting for permission to stand. Other times it mimics whatever creature happens to be nearest, wearing their shape the way I might try on a stolen coat. No control over this. Stopped trying. Shadows do what shadows do. Learned that from my father, though I’d prefer not to have learned anything from him at all.

(The horned shape has been showing up more since the Missing Moment. Not sure what that means yet. Sure it’s fine.)

---

I worship Grandmother Spider, though “worship” is too strong a word for what we have. She appreciates cleverness, resourcefulness, and the willingness to take what you need without apology. I appreciate a deity who doesn’t demand prostration and understands that sometimes the best path forward is the one no one sees you take. We have an arrangement. It suits us both.

Her tenets keep me alive when my own instincts waver:

Get paid for your work. Humiliate the powerful. Never be the one on the altar.

I don’t trust easily. Don’t forgive quickly. Keep my cards close and my knives closer. If I let you see my hand it’s because I’ve already decided what you’re going to do with the information.

(Though I’m starting to wonder if this crazy bunch of do-gooders I’ve stumbled into might be… something. Not family. That’s too strong a word. But something I’d rather not lose. Not that I’d ever say that where they could hear me.)

But I am looking for my sister. And I will find her. And whatever is waiting at the other end of that thread, whatever watches from the dark when the pull comes, will find that I am not my father. I do not play with shadows.

I was born in them.