Chapter 1 - After Midnight

This isn't you. This breaks every law, every custom, of your family and your people. This isn't just a crime, it's treason and heresy. You'll be run into Shadow for this, you really will...

“Shut up!” He ran a hand through his untidy hair and looked around, nervously. The shadows cast by the dim glow of the lantern were long and wavering, flickering forms dancing eerily across the floor and walls. He laughed, a fast, nervous sound that hissed through his teeth, when he realized he was talking to himself. He must be going insane.

For the hundredth time, he checked the pen held in his hand. The ink wasn't leaking, the tip was in good condition, it wouldn't slip out of his fingers. Good. Then he shook his head, impatient. What could happen to a pen in ten minutes? What was wrong with him?

He pressed himself against the wall as he stepped along. This was wrong, said a part of his mind. He swallowed, trying to ignore the heavy, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. There were laws. He couldn't just do whatever he wanted. Everyone was subject to the ancient customs.

He growled to himself. Hang the laws, and hang the customs! This wasn't the old time! The age of the Creator had passed many years ago, and the age of Creation had come. It was their turn now. And if he was the only innovator, the only one who could see another way, a new way of living, well. He had never been much for playing commander, but he would take the lead if he had to.

There it was. He licked his lips as he contemplated the heavy, leather-bound tome. He stretched out his free hand. His arm was trembling as he rested his fingers on the dusty cover. His breath came faster, and he had to smother a cough as the dusty air caught in his throat. It only made him more excited. Soon, this hall wouldn't be dusty. It would be filled with the new creations of the Rapos. If the traditionalists didn't want to make their own creations, no one was forcing them to. If only they realized the potential of the creative minds there were!

He set the lantern down and stood looking down at the ancient Book. Shaking with excitement, adrenaline coursing through his blood, he curled his fingers around the cover's edge. His other hand undid the clasp, and he opened the Book of Life that the other Rapos so worshipped.

The colors on the first parchment page were impossibly vibrant for being so old. He nodded slightly, impressed. Perhaps the Creator really did exist. If he—she?--did, he or she might have done something to show it. But that was just further proof—the Creator, if there was such an entity, had left their little world for other projects.

He flipped through the pages of the book, looking at the drawings. A brilliant mind had come up with these things, he knew that, even if that mind wasn't that of a creator. His was a brilliant mind, too, and he deserved his chance at this sort of glory.

He would open the gateway.

He turned to the empty pages in the Book. It had always seemed strange to him, the few times he'd seen them, that the Book should have blank pages at the end. Hadn't the Creator completed its world? Or had it just overestimated the space the world would need in the Book?

“Not anymore,” he breathed, and pressed the pen to the page.

In the lamp's pale light, even the line of ink following the pen's track had a shadow. He outlined the image he held in his mind. The lines formed the shape of a person—not a Raposa, but something similarly designed.

When the border of his creation was finished, he set down the pen for a moment. His hand was tense, as were his shoulders; he was too nervous to relax, especially while he was committing the most terrible crime of “destroying” not only a work of the Creator's, but one that was worshipped as the thing holding the essence of Creation itself, a conduit for the Creator's power.

Something moved in the shadows.

His head snapped up. He turned, searching the darkness, backed against the pedestal on which the Book lay. Someone else was here, hiding among the shelves. “Who's there?” he demanded. His voice rasped with the coating of dust in his mouth, startling him.

A pair of white eyes blinked open and met his. He jumped, hit the pedestal, and fell. He scrambled to his feet at once, not taking his eyes off those of who- or whatever was standing five feet away from him. His hands searched for something to use as a weapon, and found only his pen and lantern.

His eyes adjusted again to the darkness and he could make out a vaguely Rapo-like shape in the darkness. The figure was still, and barely visible, but he could tell that it was no Rapo. It was the ears, of course. It had no ears. Strange.

“Well, aren't you lovely,” he said softly. “Let's have a look at you. Come into the light.”

The person he'd created stepped forwards.

He muffled a yelp with his hands. It didn't look much like the creature he'd drawn, more as if the outline had been used as a frame and covered in ink and shadows. Flecks of darkness flitted around it like insects, and its whole body was deformed and misshapen, from the top of its uneven head to the black claws of its feet. The sight was sickening.

“Now,” he mused, “what could have happened to you?”

It stared blankly at him.

“Can you speak?”

It didn't answer.

“Take that as a no,” he said. His heart rate was settling back to normal and his breath was evening out. “Follow me.”

He lifted the Book gently from its pedestal and closed it. Then he picked up his lantern and slipped outside. The monster-creation lurched along behind him. He held the heavy volume close to his chest with his free hand and sprinted across the grass to the modest house near the center of the village.

“Keep low and don't let anyone see you,” he ordered the hideous outline-thing.

Then he sat down at his desk, opened the book, and began working.

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