There is a hierarchy to all things. Those at the top make the rules, determining the degree of humanity allotted to the rest, down to the very peasants and lower.
Even the dead deserve some measure of dignity.
Not so those of us born to the dark, crawling from the depths.
Born to be less than even the dead, we are worthy only of extermination. For the real people in this world, relief is only to be found in our absence.
We vanish, as we are taught we must. But what happens when we are well and truly out of sight?
They find more of us, of course. Even among their number, sometimes one is born of the dark. Sometimes they learn to hide themselves for a very long time, but we lowliest creatures of all cannot pretend to humanity forever.
The lucky ones are killed, and thereby become worthy of at least the regard afforded to a corpse.
The less lucky ones are disfigured, skinned, and replaced bit by bit with clean, immaculate porcelain. They are grafted to a shell to imprison and conceal their shameful selves.
The least lucky of all are simply banished, forced to disappear with the rest of us.
As people expand their dominion, we retreat to the empty spaces in between. We vanish, but somehow we endure, or something like us does.
We crowd the margins, and it grows terribly cramped here—in the negative space of humanity’s domain. They cast their light farther outward, and though we try to flee it, the pressure grows so unbearably high we fear even the light feels the resistance to its spread.
We have vanished. We shades do not exist. They demanded it be so.
Yet the edges of possibility grow frayed.
Some people notice us—even in nonbeing—like a tickle in the back of their minds. They would purge us further if they could, if we existed, but all they can do about us is scream into the darkest corners of their mind.
And they do scream.
What a mistake, to acknowledge that which they have banished! To feed us scraps of something like reality! To encourage us to press deeper against their little bubble!
Through all their screams of loathing, their wild hunt for us, the stories they tell of what fiends we must be, they weave power for us to wield in their world.
They build an Enemy God by weaving us with their own nightmares, and they feed her because they require her.
They demand her existence even more than we do, though we are the ones who are given power through her.
We call her Ketketki, and she brings terror to those who call themselves our enemies. She has been summoned, whether they meant to summon her or not.
She means to burn the world of people to the ground, to cast back their light and their nations and their gods, to erase their hierarchy and all natural laws. She means to make their home ours, and to force them to endure our degrading presence among them.
They know this.
They helped create her.
But they cannot help themselves, cannot stop feeding her power with their fear.
Her fangs press into the surface of their bubble even now, and all our collective breath is held while we await its inevitable bursting.