The Shadows Chronicles.

Two - Loving Tears.

Liki Wolfspirit.

The quarter moon was just peaking out over the trees of the hills, casting it's glow across the island called Mushroom Isle, when the curdling howl came from the dark forest across the plains. And just before the trees, a young male wolf stood petrified in fear, his blue eyes wide in fear as he heard the howl.

He didn't want to go into the forest yet, but knowing who's howl that was made his feet move, entering the forbidden forest he rushed through with a haste he'd never felt felt before.

"UNI!!!" He yowled out in desperation, a strange feeling of nostalgia coming over him a few times as the trees flew by him. His parents had died in a forest much like this one when he had been but a small baby, he could barely remember the trees flashing by in his memory from that day...the cold and loniness as he lay in his dead mother's arms for a whole day until his Master Uriay found him. Liki Wolfspirit was a child born from loniness, and he took all attachments he made and held them dear.

And now....

Liki shook his head rapidly, eyes clentched closed and tears welling from his eyes to shine in the moonlight as he ran and yowled again, "UNIIIIIIII!"

Liki ran for a whole hour, the moon shining through the trees, it's soft glow penetrating the normal darkness Liki remembered the first time he had been in the Dark Forest. The forest was full of undead that roamed it in the darkness, but the sunlight would scare them all back into whatever hole they festered in. The young boy had to spend three whole nights in the forest, unable to sleep at night. He wasn't able to sleep at day either, he had to keep on the move in the forest so the undead would not be able to find him easily when night came. When his Master came to get him, he was so unnerved and sleep deprived, and for awhile, the horrible sight of the undead in the forest haunted his dreams.

He told his classmates in school about the experiance one day soon after; his teacher making known her displeasure at the story afterward.

He thought back to that day as he desperatly search.

_____

"Uni I'm telling you, you don't need to go in there." Liki pleaded with his friend after his teacher gave him a talking to him for his "Highly inapproiate and graphic story". They were outside the school house, overlooking the docks and sitting under the shade of a tree to get out of the sun, cross legged as they talked.

The young female Fangren, Uni, folded her arms across her already perky chest, which Liki found himself staring at before he managed to look away with a blush warming his cheek fur. Liki was starting to learn more about growing up, he was about seven now and he had already done stuff with his Master, he knew what sex was and what it meant. He knew he was more attracted to other males somehow, but a desire to continue his blood was also deeply rooted in him knowing he was last of his family and possible one of the last Shadows as well. Furthermore, something about the way Uni pouted at him right now made him feel oddly, scared yet...fascinated and curious that a female could be so straight foward. Uni was, he knew, his first crush, and he was too nervous to do anything about it.

"HEY!" Uni punched him on the arm as Liki was lost in his thoughts about her, "I'm talking to you!"

"Ah, I'm sorry!" Liki yelped and rubbed his now sore arm lightly, "What were you saying?"

"I was asking you how much did you have to move around in there to keep away from all of those things in there." Uni crossed her arms agian and her footpaw was tapping against the ground even as she was sitting cross legged waiting for his answer.

"Oh...um..." Liki didn't really like to rethink about the time he spent in there, but for Uni...

He sighed softly as he started, "I pretty much split up the forest into three parts and spent a day in each one before I moved to the next part each day. I think their den is located on the far side of the forest, towards the middle, when I was on that side there was a higher dencity of them around my camp."

"So if I stay on the side closer to town I should be fine..." Uni whispered softly, and Liki only just barely heard it, his ears twitching and perking up as he looked at her with disbelief.

"You're not going in there are you? You can't!" He whined loudly as he said it.

"Why not?" She asked hottedly and glared him down.

The young male's ears fell back as he thought, "Becuase...becuase..." He quickly made up a lie, "Becuase the undead become more aware of visitors when they know for sure that someone is in there, since I just got out they'll be hunting for awhile still, if you go in there now you're sure to be caught."

Uni scoffed and tilted up her head, eyes closed smuggly, "Humph, I'm a Paladin, unlike you being a Shadow, I don't fear the undead, they fear me."

"You're in training! This was a part of my training this isn't a part of yours!" He barked again.

"I'm strong enough! They just won't let me prove it!" She growled at him with another glare, her yellow eyes glowing softly with magical prowese.

"Yes, but-"

"No! I'm going to show them that I can take this challenge, that even a female Fangren can be strong!" With that Uni got up and marched off as Liki called out to her.

______

That night Liki stayed up outside his Master's tent, much to his Master's confusion as Liki didn't tell him what was wrong, and that the young Shadow kept his mind clouded so that Uriay wouldn't be able to use the Shadows to probe his thoughts.

The young boy would keep rolling over what Uni said: "No! I'm going to show them that I can take this challenge, that even a female Fangren can be strong!"

What had she meant by that he wondered? Was she jealous of him, of his apparent strength? He wasn't that strong, by Shadow standards he was just a trainee still. It was the Shadows that made him strong, but Uni was a Paladin, where did her own abilities lay on the way of a Paladin? Where did her powers come from? Did they come from Gaia like how his own did?

Liki stared out at the forest from where he stood, the moon shining behind it and casting quite an eirry sight.

When he saw the dark figure in the distance entering the forest, his heart skipped a beat, and he had ran to the edge of the forest across the island when the howl he heard set him on the dashing run through the forest.

_____

Liki stopped and leaned over, his hands on his knees as he panted heavily. He'd been running for the last 3 hours, dashing through every inch of the forest, dodging the few undead so quickly he didn't think the creatures noticed him at all.

Now, as he was leaning over and panting, his ears could pick up the sound of the shuffling behind him, the moaning and the groaning noises...

"Oh Gaia no..." He looked behind himself wide eyed and through the dim moonlight he saw them, the horde of undead shambling slowly after him, it could very well be the whole forest worth by now.

Liki's body glowed and he was quickly wrapped in a cloak of Shadows, entering his Shadow Demon form, his eyes started glowing a bright blue while the rest of his body become a deep dark purple, his fur smoking softly as if on fire. With the sudden rush of power the Shadows provided him, Liki took off on another run, once more calling out as loud as he could, "UNI!!!! Are you out there!?" His voice echoed a bit now as if he was deep inside the mountains.

He tripped on a stick, not paying much attention as he heart was pounding in his ears, the sound of the shambling undead behind him, his speed only just enough to give him enough distance from them, making his head race in fear.

Scrambling back onto his feet, his paws flialing as he ran on all fours for a few seconds until he stood back up, he yowled again, "UNI!!!! Where are you!?" Even in his panik driven run, the only thing he could think about was to get Uni and to get out of the hell hole with her.

It was when he dashed into a clearing that he stopped at what he saw, his heart seemed to stop in his chest and he legs became frozen as he stared at what lay close to the other edge of the bright moonlit clearing.

"N...N-no...." He breathed out softly, his muzzle slowly hanging open in disbelief. The undead behind him forgotten, Liki slowly walked across the clearing, his eyes wide with fear.

There, right in front of him, was what remained of Uni...torn apart and left in pieces, her clothing ripped and scattered to the wind around the clearing, her blood stained the grass around her corpse where a few of her limps lay apart from her torso. Both her body and the tossed body parts looked chewed and the flesh eaten, bone and guts showing here and there.

Liki fell to his knees, his Shadow Form vanishing as he lost concentration on the Shadows around him. His wavering eyes kept skipping back and forth to one part of the carnage to the next, his muzzle hanging open as his body shook, paralyzed from what he was seeing. Then, he eyes fell upon what could only have been Uni's head at one time, rolled away from the largest part of her body...an eyeball was hanging loose from it's socket in the skull. Her head fur had been torn out, her skin peeled off by the claws of the undead so that the top of her head was bald, the bone shining in the moonlight like her once flowing red fur. Her muzzle was mangled and chewed on, her tongue inside split in half by a long tear along it...

The Fangren forced himself to close his eyes at the sight, and he refused to open them again, and he remembered the undead as he heard them enter the clearing not even thirty feet behind him, but he remained still, tears streaming down his eyes and dripping from his muzzle, his lips curled up in an agonized snarl as he shivered and cried. His tears fell down to the ground, right in front of Uni's head at the tip of her torn nose.

Liki did nothing to stand up again, his legs felt like jello and he no longer wanted to run. He didn't care anymore...let him become a feast for the undead, he thought. He couldn't even protect someone like Uni. What good was he...?

Through the Shadows, which he couldn't ignore their constant feelings of alarm as they tried to warn him of the undead he already knew were there, he felt one the zombies get up close behind them, the moonlight starting to reveal them all in their Beast like bodies, pieces of body and flesh missing here and there. Their shampling arms reaching out with sharp clittering claws to rip through his back.

Just before the first Undead reached him and raised its arms up to strike, Liki felt the wind shift and his ears twitched. To him, time seemed to slow as his Master bolted out of the trees in front of him, arm reached out to grab Liki, jumping over the pile of gore between them both. Uriays paw glanced against Liki's muzzle a fraction of a second before the Undead's claws were going to tear open his back. A sudden blast of Shadow energy shoot out from behind Liki at the touch, his eyes widening in a sudden shook of pain as his Master used his own abilities to forcefully take control of his student's body and force him to act, expelling all of his energy in a single powerful burst of magic.

The Undead were flung back from Liki as the contact between his Master and his muzzle broke, and Liki fell foward onto his chest and head, his rear pointed up in the air. The sudden force of being manipulated by his Master in a matter of milliseconds left his mind in searing pain, that he felt as a throbbing headache in his forhead, and the fact that he had just been forced to expell all of his reaming energy in a single burst of Shadow energy left him drained. He was forced to stare at the gored out eye as his vision went black quickly, just as his Master landed from his jump across the gore, picked him up in strong arms, and jumped back into the trees.

_____

When Liki awoke again, he lurched up in bed to a sitting position, his dreamless sleep ending as he snapped awake in a panik, only to find himself safe and sound at the home of his adoptive family the Wolfspirits. He was inside his adoptive brother, Shadow's, bedroom. He was completely naked except for his fur, his set of tan leather armor laid close by the bed in a corner of the room.

He stared around himself for a bit before looking at his paws and clentching them tightly, eyes closing as his head flashed back to what had happened. To him, it had felt like only a second ago he had been about to die in the forest. Opening his eyes again, he looked to a nearby calander on the wall to find the marked day. He had been asleep for over two weeks, by now, every bit of Uni would be gone...

He sighed softly and his paws fell to his side, eyes closing again and he started to cry all over again as if he had never stopped between now and the forest. He had failed...failed to protect someone precious to him...failed to save Uni from the forest...

The young boy pounded the bed and howled loudly, "Why!? WHY!? WHYYY!!??" His teeth grinding against each other in another snarl of agony, lips curled up to show his pain as the tears dripped down his cheeks.

It didn't take long after his howl for his Master to enter the room slowly and kneel down at the side of the bed, his old bones creaking a bit and he gave a small grunt of effort as he settled down and put a paw on Liki's lap.

Liki didn't react, until he shook his head slowly and whispered through his clentched teeth, "Why....Why...Why Master...I'm....I'm not strong enough yet...Why did you save me...I'm useless, I couldn't save her."

"Liki..." Uriay started softly as he tried to bring up the words he had been rehershing for when his student has awaken, "You have to learn...sometimes, there's simply nothing you can do to stop someone from dying...there will be times you'll lose people...precious people, sometimes people you don't even know, in your attempts to save them. You have to learn this pain to survive your life...It is Gaia's will that-"

"FUCK GAIA!" Liki snarled and pushed his Master's paw away from him, turning in the bed and wrapping the blankets of the bed around himself tightly. He curled into a tight ball under the blanket, instantly regretting what he had just said.

"I'm sorry Master..." He whispered softly, "But...I'll just stay here for awhile..."

Uriay stayed for a few moments longer until his bones creaked as he stood up again, and his footpaws slowly padded back outside the room and the door closed slowly and softly.

Despite his exhaustion, Liki forced himself to stay away still, thinking over and over about the "Will of Gaia". Was there really nothing he could have done? Was it Gaia's will that he not be strong enough to have saved Uni? Did he have any control over his own life at all?

These thoughts and more rolled around in his head for a long while, his eyes watching the sun in the window of the room slowly crawling across the glass, the sky starting to turn orange as dusk approached. The undead in the forest would be starting to stir right about now.

The boy shivered as he slowly sat up in the bed, swinging the blanket off himself as he stepped close to the window, the chill air of the room peircing through his thin prepubecent fur coat.

Staring out the window, he had a perfect view of the other side of the island where the forest was, the wind outside was stirring the trees and making the moonlight shine off the leaves.

"Gaia...please...don't do something like this to me...if this really was your will...it's my will to stop it the next time..." He whispered to the goddess. He knew she was listening, she was the one who gave him the power over the Shadows, she was the reason he was a rogue with this magical gift. If she knew this would happen and willed it, she also knew how he would react. If this was her way of egging him on, to show him that just the Shadows wasn't enough to succeed and he needed to train as hard as like Uni had, it worked.

"You may have given me the power of the Shadows, and while they are powerful and under your will, my will is my own, if I cannot save someone using the magic you gave me, I will save them using my own body...My own will...will become more powerful than the Shadows themselves..."

Instead of going back to sleep, Liki turned with a purpose toward his armor, slowly putting it all back on. Strapping on his belt, he wiggled around in his outfit before strapping on his daggers to his waist. He opened the window and jumped out, doing a easy frontflip and landing on his footpaws in a crouch.

Standing up, Liki felt the wind blowing across his face as he took another moment to compose his emotions and feelings before he walked steadily across the fields to where he and Master lived in a small handmade tentlike home created of strong branches and thick large palm tree leaves.

A tree nearby had several scratch marks on it, from long previous hours of training that Liki spent on the tree. Drawing out his daggers, Liki stood before the tree and took his fighting stance, holding one of the daggers close to his chest and the other one low to the ground as he croached on his legs, his blue eyes staring intently at the tree, their light blue glow fading as he shut out the Shadows.

He felt his body become considerable strained as he forced out the influence of the Shadows and he was surprised. Was he really weak? His own will and body so weak? The exhaustion of the last few days really hit him hard now but he shook his head to stay awake.

His lips curled up in a snarl once more as he growled, "I will make myself stronger...I will make my will stronger so that I myself am stronger, and so that when I do use the Shadows, I'll become even stronger as their will adds to mine. Next time...I won't fail to save those precious to me."

With that, Liki jumped at the tree, even as a single misplaced tear escaped his eye and glistened in the night. The dagger at his chest raising up above his head as he started his long trail to improve his spirit's will, to learn more about being a normal rogue without the Shadows aid, so that he could try and rely on his own skill to protect those around him, and become an even stronger Shadow when he did use it.