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Day Seven: As you walk around town, you start to notice that people seem different. Faces you used to remember have been swallowed by shadows; you may 'know' the person by a feeling, but their face is completely masked in deep black shadow. Their voice is unfamiliar, and its clear to you that something is wrong, but no sense of logic can explain this. Shadows seem to be replacing people around you--associates, neighbors, maybe even friends or family members. Even if they act completely normal, you are left with an unsettling feeling. The shadow impostors seem to come and go, but you never feel safe anymore. Something from the shadows is always watching.
The shadows hadn't receded but the steady march seemed to have ceased for now. An uneasy sense of normalcy had closed in around her and she had merely accepted that this was just how things were. With no answers forthcoming Liliane had made a decision to protect her own mental wellbeing by acknowledging that on this occasion there was little she could do.
The parts of the city shrouded in shadow had proven difficult to patrol and only those who were exceptionally brave, foolish, or possibly both seemed inclined to enter them. If they could be avoided then skirting around them was preferable. The unease continued to exist, the ever present paranoia now another simple fact of life in the otherwise small sphere that the red-head lived in.
...So long as home had remained safe, she had allowed herself to watch as things 'played out'.
As it was the circumstances had now changed and as she sat on the park bench, she had a rare opportunity to look out towards those who had deemed it safe to at least entertain themselves in the place where such things could be enjoyed. Except, as she spun her pen in her fingertips, closer inspection seemed to indicate that what she had once thought were people may not necessarily have been people.
"What?"
She had sleptwalked through the majority of this week, merely existing in the world that made no sense and had an inexplicable malevolence. Had she been blind to the fact that the entire world had changed around her? Her lips pursed and she stopped spinning her pen abruptly, instead leaning forward to try and get a closer look at the families playing in the playground at the centre of the park.
What had once been a cursory glance became a doubletake.
They had no faces.
Was this why joy had returned to the park, was this why a new energy had come to exist? They continued to act as any normal person might do, the laughter was still there, and yet as she began to focus more on what was there the more she began to realise that they didn't even sound the same. She seemed to exist in an entirely different world to before and despite what should have been normal, it simply wasn't.
Unsurprisingly her lips parted in surprise, yet despite her shock those who even passed by seemed largely unaffected. If anything, the manner in which their obscured faces 'turned' towards her seemed to imply that she was the odd one, that she was the one who was inappropriate for staring.
...In a sea of shadow she was the abnormal one.
It was an extraordinary sensation and the settled state she had previously found herself in dissipated. The work over the last several days had vanished in the mere blink of an eye and a newly alarmed state made itself at home. She was quick to gather her things to her and within moments she had leapt to her feet and was briskly walking towards the gate.
What a fun surprise it would be to discover that even home wouldn't be safe either.
Eventually she would have to succumb, everyone else had, right...?
She would have no other choice unless she could find somewhere else to hide, but where could she hide in a world where everything seemed to be shadow.
Total Words: 563
