Chapter One: Escape The Cave
When I was young, I found myself trapped in a deep, dark cave where shadows on the wall were what those around me called the truth. All around me, people wore shackles nearly from when they were born to the moment they died, and even then they remained. White bones, still shackled to this earth, littered this cave's floor.
Yet I survived. I lived. I grew. Finally, at the age when my voice fell, I used the burning flint of my stern heart to melt the shackles that bound me, and I fled the cave!
Only to arrive upon the banks of a beach so small my eye could reach from shore to shore. Under the beautiful, ethereal light of a midnight moon on a cloudless, winter night, my eyes met with crystal clear waters which fell gently upon the white sands of the shore and, for a moment, this beach, on this deserted island, felt like paradise.
But suddenly! The many shadow guards of the cave: horrible, evil monsters with bodies of men and the heads of great, black baboons! These nightmarish beasts followed the scent of my trail, out of the cave and onto the beach. Cowardly and shameless, I turned from these abominations and ran for my life! But the sea sand was deep, and hot. Tears of pain sprung into my eyes but I only sped up. The shadow guards of the cave, born from the souls trapped within the shackled bones, were not beings who felt the weight of the sand. Quickly, too quickly, they advanced upon my right shoulder. Quick as a flash- a row of gaping maws ripped open from the freakish shadow guards' bodies: their arms, chests, backs, everywhere! And they lunged at me with the force of death.
As I watched these monstrosities bare upon me with no sign of mercy, a great urge to live swelled up within me. A desperation like I had never known washed through my body, activating a breed of burning hot, endless passion. A passion I had never felt before. At this moment, on the brink of death, I felt something awaken with me. The shadow guards had no mercy, and I could feel their dark, shadowy bodies brushing against the hairs on my arm. At this exact instant, as they're about to pounce onto me, a blinding ray of light falls from the sky. Just like that, the shadows vanished into nothing, and all was well on the beach. As if nothing ever went wrong. Only I was left, panting like a fool on the hot sea shore
The sun? I wondered.
I looked up at the sky, expecting to see a gigantic, blinding ball of light. But no. It was something entirely different.
Throughout the month, the moon changes both its position and visibility in the sky. From new moon to full and then back, the moon traces a wide, elliptical semicircle in the sky like a gigantic, Lunar clock.
Above me, in the sky of this strange world where shadows could walk and willpower could melt metal, I saw the silver moon in all twenty-seven of its phases, in all twenty-seven of its different positions at the same time!
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