Something Completely Different 

This week, no Emily Voss. No demons. No New York. 

Instead, you’re getting “Shadows,” a fantasy short story I wrote a few years ago. It’s different from Past Mistakes in tone, setting, and genre. It’s darker. More literary. And it has nothing to do with demon hunters. 

Why am I sending it? 

Because I wanted to show you range. Past Mistakes is urban fantasy. “Shadows” is something else entirely. 

It’s set in an alternate London during a long, grinding war. Airships bomb the capital. The government newspaper runs propaganda. And soldiers are returning from the front without their shadows. 

People don’t know what to think, but the shadowless seem like better versions of their former selves, purified by their experience at the front. They’re confident now, productive, free from doubt and hesitation. Better workers. Better soldiers. Clear-eyed and sure of themselves. 

To everyone else, losing your shadow looks like an improvement. The shadowless themselves don’t seem to care. 

William returns to his wife Amber without his shadow. He’s charismatic, self-assured, no longer burdened by fear or self-doubt. To everyone else, he seems better. To Amber, he seems like a stranger. 

What is this subtle thing that is lost, and yet makes you stronger? What compromise is made in war that gives you such conviction and assuredness, and what is taken in the process? 

The shadow in this story represents a part of ourselves we may not always like, but which is essential to our humanity, to our social inclusion, to our ability to empathise. Something I couldn’t name, but I knew I could describe if I could wrote it into a story. 

It’s about 4,000 words. Takes 15-20 minutes. Fair warning: it gets dark. 

If you liked “Shadows,” great. If you didn’t, that’s fine too. It’s not Past Mistakes. But it shows I can write more than one kind of story. 

Next week: the scene that made me rewrite everything in Past Mistakes, and what I learned about my defining weakness as a writer. 

Download "Shadows"

—Nick