Shadow

  Vladimir Weise

  Proofreader Elena Sheremet

  Proofreader Irina Moiseeva

  Illustrator Alena Ronzhina

  Cover designer Anastasiia Shlokina

  © Vladimir Weise, 2018

  © Alena Ronzhina, illustrations, 2018

  © Anastasiia Shlokina, cover design, 2018

  ISBN 978-5-4493-2722-2

  Created with Ridero smart publishing system

  A strange story happened in one of the Universes in the distant past, times long before the wheel, steam engines, and a toilet with a button were devised. There were no stars, no moons at that time. I would call that era “The Time of the First-Born.” Yes, it is Firstborn. Everything that we know now in our world was created much later and under other circumstances, and that world can’t be fully understood to me or to you, it can only be imagined in your mind, see what it was, but the laws can’t be understood.

  From this moment I’ll begin my story. You should take your place more comfortable; drop the worries and sorrows of the past day.

  Imagine in your imagination a world without light, without heat and cold, without hard and soft, a world without anxieties and expectations. This world is ephemeral in nature, it can be compared to a dark-dark room, and, as usual, in any room, sooner or later dust will appear, well, there is such a property in empty rooms (it’s strange why scientists have not described “law of dust conservation”). Dust for years accumulated in the emptiness of existence. For the time being, no one touched it, but at one point a swift action appeared there piercing the emptiness of the universe, lifting the dust of times, cutting it and blowing away into the distance. It was a cycle, a game of strange essences, which I, with your permission, will call “hoki”.

  The Hoki were firstborn. How they appeared and where they came from I still do not understand (apparently, the dust gave birth to them), but it is quite certain that they were and are to this day. These beings do not have body and mind, soul and life aspirations, they simply are, are as the embodiment of action and the exchange of energy. Their whole essence and life lie in the fact that they simply dissect space, constantly exchanging energy with each other.

  Conceptually, this world was not terrifying and terrible, and if it could frighten an uninvited guest, it was only by its incomprehensibility and novelty. No matter how it can sound, we create our own fear of the unknown, giving everything new with our secret fears and putting on the mask of mystery instead of opening our soul to the new adventure.

  It so happened that the world doesn’t have the matter in the form that we know. There is dust in it – the smallest elements that do not interact with each other because they don’t have a charge, and there are the hoki, that don’t have a body and possessing energy. It is strange, absurd, but true. While I was telling you about this world, we missed one moment! It is clearly fateful for the whole universe! One of sporting hoki understood. It is UNDERSTOOD that it was.

  – Who am I?, she said.

  – What is around me and why am I separated from it? Am I dissolved in it or does it surround me? But it’s not me, and I’m not it, “she continued.

  Chaos and confusion grew inside the hoki. The panic grew in her unfathomed consciousness. – So! What to do? She thought.

  And in a panic she started to run. Although the hoki were always in a swarm and did not depart from each other, she broke her life’s instincts; she overcame the instinct of obedience to the usual course of things.

  She was rushing for a long time, as long as you can imagine. One could say that she swept past planets and stars, solar systems were behind, clusters and galaxies, but this was not so because they simply did not exist.

  Hoki just rushed without direction, purpose, and landmarks until she realized the obtuseness of her actions.

  She stopped and began to think.

  Imagine, at that time there was nothing! The thought that there was not even the “Thought” itself makes me thrill. And now, she had already realized it. She thought a year, two, and several times for the same, until she plunged into meditation definitively. She wanted to return to the Hoki, and before to do it she had to understand where she was and to understand where she was, she had to understand who she was, and to understand who she was, she had to understand much more than she could simply understand. And now the immature mind got confused finally.

  For hundreds of years, she has been thinking immovably, solving a problem that many clever people can’t find an answer throughout their smart life. Her mind wandered thought out concepts and tried to explain them. Basically, it was then when the puzzle about the egg and the chicken appeared in our life, and, to be honest, at some point our heroine worried about the chicken more than for that who she really was.

  “I am – Shadow,” said hoka, who had fled from the pack. Just imagine, she realized herself, no one told her who she was, she self-realized. And why Shadow? Not Tengri, not Perun, not Ktulhu, not the Goddess Isis, why the Shadow? Gotcha, interesting? You have to read to the end.

  Now we ourselves can plunge into meditations, build logical chains and solve secret secrets, and can continue the line of the story and bring our heroine to the next, no less important event in her life.

  So, Shadow had time to realize not only her name but also to understand that she wants to see the place where she was. The good desire for the first-realized!

  To solve the task standing before her, she began to invent her own senses. And suddenly she had two blue eyes on her head, which later migrated to the front part of her face, because it was uncomfortable to wear her eyes on the back of her head, and you had to watch where you were flying. Under the eyes, two holes opened, through which she could smell and on the sides of her eyes she made two recesses in order to hear this world.

  Mother of God! Where I was got, could the world be a little cleaner, more harmonious, could it be possible to remove all this dust, hang small glowing lights, throw white fluffy clouds, hang intergalactic congestions, and hang a disco ball in the center of the world? I came or what? She said. Oh, these women no matter that they were not beings, all about one thing, all about one thing!

  Shadow realized herself in the world, came up with thoughts and decided to create her own sense organs. No matter how it can sound, but she took the first conscious decision and comprehended the first rule of the universe, “You make yourself.”

  There were various dust particles weighed in the air, some were in size of the stone, and some could not even be seen. And now our little Shadow wanted to feel them, touch them, understand how they were in taste, but could not. Nevertheless, she studied the soaring dust particles and their fragments with extraordinary joy, these single pieces of matter in the whole world.

  Shadow realized the miracle that happened to her and tried to analyze it!

  Complex mental processes began to grow in her mind, she began to accumulate information about the world around her. You just imagine, analyze the information! Many of us do not think about the correctness of the search and analysis of information, and indeed the correct method of searching and structuring data is the guarantee of the personal success of each small earthman.

  Years passed. The shadow has become much smarter. She has already had handles and a mouth, and she already somehow remotely resembled the ghost in the canonical understanding of this image in modern pop culture.

  In the constant search and study of her world, she realized that she could not offer anything new to the world, she would not be able to find anything in it, and she was bored with it.

  Realizing this, she wanted to share the knowledge that she discovered with her family wandering in the vastness of the universe. Yeah, she decided to find her native hoki, the same ones that I told about at the very beginning. While looking for in different parts of the world for a long time she found them in the very center of the universe and was extremely surprised by what she had seen.

  Still, there was no disco ball.

  Earlier, when she was the same hoki, it seemed to her that all together they were playing, exchanging energy, but now she was looking at them in her current state, she understood their true nature. The Hoki did not exchange energy but were forcibly taken away it from each other, completely bushed and exhausted, they could simply dissolve into space, disappearing forever. So it turns out that we judge about things only having our knowledge.

  And again, as before, our heroine ran away with all her might, away from what she had seen, from her congeners, from the evil that they were making with each other, but now she ran away not as a small hoka, but as Shadow – a creature with a strong mind. She did not want to believe what she had seen, she did not want to be like that, but most of all she was afraid that one day when the mind left her, she would again become the same.

  But you know! And to this day, spiritually undeveloped persons are tormenting each other in life’s details, killing in each other the most beautiful things.

  Shadow was crying for a long time. By the way, so there was another application to the eyes, they were an emotional valve. In order not to cause a cognitive resonance between the body and the mind, an excess of negative feelings is spilled over the cheeks with a small trickle of a barely noticeable brackish solution of the soul.

  Strange, of course, but Shadow felt inside not only disgust for the Hoki, but also superiority over them. This feeling did not burden her soul, it gave her a sense of her own worth, her significance as a conscious being in the vastness of the vast universe, but this did not make her feel any better, rather, on t he contrary.

  Perhaps this is the feeling, the very link between you and the universe, which can both raise you, make you better, and destroy, closing your thoughts on yourself and feeling this in yourself.

  It is a gift from the universe, but, like every gift, if it is misused, it can be a punishment. What did you think? You were given direct support from the Universe, and you relaxed, let everything go in its own way, they say, and so everything is fine. No friends, it does not work that way. Work, work, and only work over oneself, over circumstances, will allow us to maintain support from above. This is not one of the techniques, but it is still need to grow to others.

  So I told you, you will now know this, but Shadow did not know, she had no one to tell. It was a problem with teachers and prophets at that time. They simply did not exist, everything had to be invented.

  So we came to the topic of the vital meaning of the teacher and mentor, but I can tell this part of my knowledge later and in another place, if you have a special interest to it.

  So, Shadow did not know about the payment that the universe sends for excessive consumption of a sense of its own importance. Pride came to her. And pride does not come alone, it comes with posturing, ponies, and arrogance.

  Our heroine was lucky again since no one except her could appreciate her greatness, pride was gone, giving another portion of existential discoveries.

  Shadow realized that everything that is happening needs to be done, that the existing world does not suit her, and she needs a new world, the construction of which she will take up in the near future…

  At first, there was an inner confusion: how to begin, what to start first?

  “I must start with the collection of raw data,” she decided.

  “What is this world like, what is my role in it and what can I personally do?”

  Without waiting, our heroine began to reflect on what she had seen and experienced, she needed to analyze and systematize a large amount of information, and in those distant times, it was a hard work full of discoveries and conclusions. She did not have parchment and ink to write smart thoughts, so she memorized important information by heart, and memorized less important hastily. And in that, and in another case, she gave this information emotional coloring, so it was easier to remember this or that moment. At the end of the first brainstorm, she linked the unconnected and saw the invisible, she opened a closed world and the algorithm of knowledge, knowledge as a universal and final constant of being was unraveled, and, to put it more simply, she understood much and realized much …

  And she accepted the world in which she lived, and she didn’t want to cry and be sad anymore, there was confusion after all, this world gave birth to her, and in it she realized herself.

  Shadow realized what she wanted. She does not want to build a world on the ruins of the former, she wanted to fix it, and, yes, still hang a disco ball in the center of the world.

  The initial data were collected fully, the site for the construction of a new world is defined.

  What to do next? She had no plan, and could not have, because planning is the result of the activities of our civilization.

  At first, she wanted to make the world white and airy, but, what about the disco ball? It will be hard to see. Then I will make the world very dark, thought Shadow so that the sphere of lights would be strong, and in every corner of the universe its light could be seen. But how the lovers of white and fluffy could live? I should think…

  She thought and thought, and suddenly she was distracted by an unrealistically large speck of dust. This speck of dust was azure white with rounded edges. It soared in the air, barely spinning and moving very slowly in the opposite direction from our heroine. Watching the tenacity with which the particle of the universe hovered ahead, Shadow guessed that every speck of dust can be given their own world by giving life and creatures inhabiting it.

  “It’s cool, how cool, uhh, what an opening, there’s a field to clear out!” the heroine chattered.

  “Let the whole universe know what I will do with it,” she repeated joyfully.

  How much initial zeal, how many ideas are to be realized? Our heroine remained of this in an easy confusion, and the anticipation of the result intoxicated her mind with a smell of indispensable success. It seems that Shadow is a girl.

  If only she knew what would be an adventure she’s getting into …

  Discarded the emotions, cleared her mind and after taking her sit comfortably, she decided that it will be more convenient to create on a cloud of dust. It took a long time to bring down the dust in the likeness of a small cloud.

  Frankly, a more epic spectacle could not be imagined. Our demiurge sits in a lotus pose on a cloud of intergalactic dust. The pathos of last resort. If only she could see herself from aside …

  Well, all right. An hour passed – she was thinking, she was sitting two hours – a year she was sitting and thinking and at last she sank into a reverie. She was thinking a lot, so that from the strain on her forehead one more eye came out (like eyes sprouting on a potato that was not touched for a long time), later she would call it “the third eye” because it was the third.

  Her internal power grew, and the mind drew one world after another. And each new one was more complicated than the previous one. The set of conditions, variables, laws in each new world was bigger, it was more complicated. Over time, she began to add a touch of chaos, so that the worlds were not boring. Thoughts and forms were already born in her consciousness that could outshine the imagination of any living person. Many of the worlds created by her managed to become boring even unfinished, and she threw them, moving on to the next. So lifeless planets were formed, and the planets, which received life in her fantasies, perished without attention and refinement of the creator. Over time, she reached the point where she began to group planets into systems, linking them with invisible threads.

  How much time she devoted to the Great Plan can’t be counted. Time passed, she immersed in the worlds more and more, they have been living their lives already. Some of the planets have withered away, but somehow the evolutionary flywheel has been spinning wildly. Our Shadow was no longer interested in the real world, it completely immersed in the virtual colonies created by her. The heroine was delighted with the worlds she had created, she admired their beauty and harmony, every nuance, and every detail was in its place, which made them unique.

  And so!

  Pause.

  (Further read EPICALLY!)

  Silence in the Cosmos!

  There was a feeling. It grew in the lower part of her abdomen with a soft, warm glow.

  This warmth filled Shadow with good, which made her feel confident, calm, able to comprehend and be incomprehensible.

  Once, waking from meditations, she discovered that more than one thousand years had passed. And a fervent fire is blazing in her breast, which has already begun to cause her discomfort, preventing her from doing the usual things. It was not that tore her to pieces or stabbed with red-hot needles, it tore itself out and, therefore, lingering her tickled inside, stretched to one side or the other. However how painful it can be to her, this flame endowed her with the mighty power of creation, the power to change the world around her.

  The shadow delayed until the last with the beginning of some actions to this new formation, she thought that it would disappear, as it had come, thought that this would temporarily resolve itself, as it had appeared. She had no previous experience of having anything. She did not know what was in her! Maybe it’s a thought, a feeling, maybe an insult or a new surprise, which the Universe presented to her.

  No, there was no fear of the unknown. Rather, she did not want to waste time, she wanted to continue building the worlds, she wanted to create the ideal model that ultimately realizes in the world around her.

  Time after time, Shadow plunged into the design work, completely disregarding the flight of her thoughts from the outside world, taking her mind to the new undescribed, into the virtual universe of project creation. And the more she created, the farther away from her was her original goal – to change the world around her.

  But every time she was brought back to reality by a feeling of incompleteness, and, of course, discomfort that was delivered by an internal flame. Shadow did not want to get rid of him just by extinguishing, because he felt his positive vibrations. At some point, it seemed to her that she did not torment her at all but just wants to be released into this world.

 

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