Once upon a time ... there was a small group of Shadow People. They were made of the tokens plucked from Orion's belt, the shattered moonlight through broken glass, the blue of a stormy sky, the trail of rain down a pane of glass, the spiderdust from basement walls....

The Shadows were very, very lonely, very isolated, for they were made of the stuff no one paid attention to. They were made of different things than were the Mundane People. And the Mundane peopled the world in which the Shadows lived.

Sometimes it was possible for the Shadow People, while moving through the herds of the Mundane, to glimpse another shadow shining like the feather of a crow. They weren't many. They were hard to come by then.

To the Shadows, life was not a celebration of hurtful things, it was a celebration of the sublime. These things made their eyes gleam, their hearts swell. They stole songs from the tinkle of voices in the night woods; they made instruments from the bones of very small spiders. They moved through the molasses of the Mundane People with mundane faces and their grey lives and ... the Shadows celebrated. Life was delicious then. They celebrated painful things, sublime things.

When the Mundane People began to take notice of the Shadow people terrible things sometimes happened. The Mundane People could not know about the things the Shadows experienced or felt, the quality of life they lived.

So it was that when the Mundane did take notice of the habits of the Shadow people, it made them hateful and misunderstanding in their grey sort of way. They never asked questions for they would not feel curiosity.

The Shadow people frightened the grey ones. It was a dark spectrum the Mundanes had never seen. So they showered their primitive fears of the dark onto the Shadows: Primitive "God things" with no acknowledgment that the Shadows weren't of the Mundane's substance. They were exempt from such fears.

The Shadow selves slipped into buildings and cracks in the sidewalks with delight to escape the accusations they were too shy to answer to. Even if they had been given the chance to answer.

The Tinys' saw what happened to the Mundane People when they saw a Shadow. And the Tinys felt envy for the first time. They were so tiny that they were frequently stepped on and no one could hear the squeek of their tiny voices.

So, with the same reasons as the Mundane, but with very different intentions, they dipped their hands into the shadows and poured it onto themselves. And they grew with the big - ness of what the Shadows felt. They came to be seen and heard. And their lust for visibility grew too so that the shadow became opaque and hard and shiny like the back of a beetle. The armor hid the Tinys deep down in the gut of the creature while they feasted on bloody props and all horrors of the Mundane. They thirsted unquinchably for visibility.

The Mundanes continued their chants of threat and their scathing accusations without even knowing the breed had changed. The fingers pointed, the hinged jaws snapped open and shut, squeeking with grey fears that made the Tinys only bigger. Only stronger. The reasons for their Need became the smallest particle in the Tiny's until it was nothing at all. And when that happened - the Tiny's were only consumers of the hatred and fear of the Mundane.

The Shadows knew then that their hue had been saturated. Tainted. They were saddened by existing in cracks and splinters. They missed the terrain they had traveled before. They missed the freedom of moving untouched through a crowd.

They spent many nights weaving together; weaving cloaks that would make them invisible to the Mundane and the Tinys and to all eyes but their own. Their Hue became more milky blue, more intensely the eye of the stormy sky that they delighted in. And the objects they found above slipped through their fingers into a blistering thread that they knew would protect them.

They move along the end of this century with ease, a different sort of shadow now; still with their preternatural delight in elevating the senses. They mourn watching the Tiny's and their horrorshow with the Mundanes. The things the shadows once loved, paraded like puppets on the facade of the Tiny's until the meaning had fallen off and been cracked and shattered underfoot.