Page 13 of Shadow Lord

The cold eases, reluctantly, though I can feel it still coiled and watchful, unconvinced.

“Brian,” Felix says again, and this time there’s an actual question buried somewhere inside the flat delivery, “chosen one of what, exactly.”

Magdalene straightens, drawing herself up to her full, not very considerable height, kaftan swaying. She delivers the next part with the theatrical relish of someone who’s been waiting decades for an audience worthy of the material.

“The prophecy,” she says, “of the Rising Dark and the Unbroken Light. An age old battle, foretold before any of us were born, where darkness rises to consume everything, and only the Light, born pure and chosen from birth, can meet it. Match it. End it, proper end it.” She turns to me, eyes glistening, and reaches out to cup my face in both hands like I might dissolve if she doesn’t hold on properly. “You, m’love. My Brian Almighty. You are the Light.”

The silence that follows is the sort you could genuinely hear a spoon drop into, and somewhere near the window, a spoon does exactly that, for the second time.

“I’m sorry,” Adam says, faintly, “the light. As in. An actual, literal one.”

“Embodiment,” Magdalene supplies helpfully. “Yes. Precisely that.”

I close my eyes for a second, feeling my whole carefully cheerful morning collapsing gently in on itself like a poorly stacked pastry display. Felix and Adam are never going to be dissuaded by claims that High Priestess Magdalene is simply a batty old hippy, because, well, they are Felix and Adam, and they have seen things.

“I was going to tell you,” I say, to Felix, to Adam, to the room in general, though mostly, if I’m honest, to the floor. “Eventually. When it seemed relevant. I didn’t think it was going to become relevant quite this fast.”

“You…” Felix says. Not accusing, exactly. Just working through it, slowly, the way you’d work through a maths problem you strongly suspected had been rigged against you from the start. “This whole time. You knew you were the chosen one of some ancient prophecy and you just. Didn’t mention it. While making flat whites.”

“It felt like a lot to bring up during a coffee order,” I say.

“Bunny,” Felix says.

“I know,” I say.

“You are literally the embodiment of light,” Adam says, in the tone of someone still catching up to the sentence even as he says it out loud, “and you let me think your biggest secret was that you grew up somewhere with goat yoga.”

“To be fair, the goat yoga is quite a big thing,” I say.

Magdalene, entirely unbothered by the chaos she’s just detonated across my workplace, has already moved on to admiring the pastry case, tapping one ringed finger against the glass thoughtfully.

“Do you hand make the almond croissants, m’dear,” she asks, “or has capitalism ruined those too?”

I stare at her. Behind me, I feel my shadow shift again, closer this time, solid and present at my back in a way that isn’t subtle anymore, isn’t hiding, just there, steady, the one thing in the entire shop right now that doesn’t feel like a confrontation. The one person who I know, without any doubt whatsoever, has my back. Quite literally.

“Magdalene,” I say, very carefully, “I think you need to sit down. And explain the goats properly. From the beginning.”

She beams at me, delighted, like this is exactly the invitation she came for.

“Well,” she says, settling herself onto the nearest stool with the satisfied air of a woman finally getting to deliver a speech she’s been rehearsing for forty years, “it started with the full moon.”

Felix, still standing behind the counter with a half-made latte cooling in his hand, looks at me with an expression that says, very clearly, we are absolutely finishing this conversation later, and then, with the particular professionalism of someone who has decided the show must go on regardless of supernatural developments, turns back to the queue that’s still formed at the till, customers either uncaring or entirely oblivious to the fact that the world may or may not currently be ending. “Can I help who’s next,” he says, faintly, to the shop at large.

Adam pulls out the stool beside Magdalene’s, sits down heavily, and looks at me the way you’d look at a friend who has just revealed they’re secretly royalty. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. I need you to just, talk me through this slowly. Because I’ve fallen in love with a shadow prince, and my best friend captured a former shadow king, and I once watched shadow beings nearly destroy this building, and I thought I’d sort of hit my ceiling for what I could be surprised by anymore, and apparently that ceiling did not account for you.”

“It’s a lot,” I agree.

“You’re really. The Light,” Adam says.

“Apparently,” I say.

“Like, capital L, prophecy Light,” Adam says.

“That’s the one,” I say.

Magdalene, delighted to have an actual audience rather than thirteen goats and an increasingly sceptical congregation, launches properly into it, hands moving as she talks, rings catching the light.

“Forty years ago,” she says, “before any of you were born, I received the prophecy directly. In a dream, in the old barn, three nights before the harvest moon. A darkness rising, ancient and hungry, that would seek to consume the world entire, unless it was met by its opposite. Light, unbroken, born of an ordinary vessel, raised in preparation without ever being told the full weight of what they carried.” She pauses meaningfully. “We didn’t tell you the full weight, Brian. That was deliberate. A soul that knows its own destiny too young grows arrogant. Or afraid. We wanted neither for you.”