The double takes shape.
Darkness coalesces into recognizable human form — my height, my build, my hair, rendered in shadow so dense it’s nearly opaque. When I open my eyes, I’m looking at myselfstanding three feet away. The double mirrors my movements with a slight delay, like an echo made visible, like watching my reflection in water that’s half a second behind.
“Holy shit,” I breathe. Three weeks of practice and the sight still makes the hair on my arms stand up.
Independent movement. That’s the real test.
I focus on directing the double while keeping my own body stationary by the window. The dissociation is brutal for the first few seconds — two sets of spatial awareness fighting for dominance in a brain built for one. But gradually, like learning to read two books at once, the double begins moving on its own.
It walks across the room while I stand still, its footsteps silent on the dusty floor, shadow feet not quite touching the stone.
Through the connection, I perceive what the double perceives. The room from a second angle. The dust motes floating in moonlight from a different perspective. My own body standing by the window, still and watchful, seen from the outside for the first time.
The dual vision is dizzying until my brain stops trying to reconcile the two feeds and simply accepts both.
“Let’s see how far this holds,” I whisper, directing the double toward the door.
It moves into the corridor and the connection stretches but doesn’t break. Through the double’s awareness, I see moonlit hallway, empty and silent in the late-night hours. Stone walls. Dead torches. The dust patterns on the floor undisturbed except by whatever mice have made the fourth floor their territory.
My double turns a corner toward the main staircase, and the sensory feed remains clear despite the increasing distance — I can feel the temperature drop near the exterior wall, smell the old stone and the faintest trace of cleaning solution from the floor below.
Then I see him.
A Hunter patrol guard ascending the stairs.
Silver badge catching enchanted torchlight from the third-floor landing, boots heavy on each step, hand resting casually on the alarm crystal at his belt. He’s heading directly for the fourth floor. Directly toward the corridor where my shadow double stands in the open like a confession written in darkness.
Panic hits like ice water.
The guard will reach the top of the stairs in seconds. The hallway offers nowhere to hide — no alcoves, no open doors, nothing but bare stone and my very visible, very unexplainable shadow construct.
His boot hits the top step. They’re face to face — a Hunter patrol and a shadow double that shouldn’t exist outside theoretical texts that most practitioners consider fiction.
His eyes widen. His hand moves toward the alarm crystal. “What in the — “
The command erupts from me before conscious thought can intervene.
“Walk away and forget you saw anything here.”
The words carry something that bypasses language entirely — power flowing through my shadow double and slamming into the guard’s mind with a force that feels like slamming a door. His hand freezes halfway to the crystal. His expression empties.
Not confusion. Not compliance. Absence.
Like someone reached inside his head and turned off the part responsible for the last five seconds.
“Nothing here,” he mutters to himself, voice flat and mechanical. “Routine patrol. Nothing unusual.”
He turns and walks back down the stairs with the stiff gait of someone whose muscles are following instructions their brain didn’t issue. Within moments, the staircase is empty. Silent. As if the encounter never happened.
I recall the double immediately. It dissolves on the return trip, shadow essence flowing back to me across the distance and reintegrating with a sensation like cold water poured into my chest.
My hands are shaking. My whole body is shaking.
I just controlled someone’s mind.
Reached into a man’s consciousness and rewrote his last thirty seconds like editing a rough draft. Made him forget, made him leave, made him compliant with a few words that didn’t feel like they came from my vocabulary at all.
“What the fuck was that?” I whisper to the empty room, staring at my hands like they belong to a stranger.
