Something dead approaches. In its hollowed-out insides, there is an event horizon that swallows light, sound, and all knowing. Why do we find missing items, where we already looked, only after we’ve accused our loved ones? Is there a silhouette on the other side of the shower curtain? We can’t leap out of the shower at every imagined sight. What hides behind that acceptance? Ignore the writing on the fogged mirror. Why are we running, in the streets, from a feeling? This is silly. Cold hands pull us down. We scream. No one helps. They just walk by. What in the Twilight Zone fuck is going on? The Mekhet are often quiet, often invisible, and yet they see everything. Spies and prophets, they go where they will and learn what they want to. No secret is safe from the Mekhet. “We are the Y incision cut into this dark, dark world,” whispers a voice. “Shall we loosen our stitches?” They are the Shadows. It is difficult to know where they are standing right now and harder still to know where they’ve been. Decaying pages and sandstone glyphs nervously mutter hints. Stories echo down, out of ancient Egypt, of secret cults and walking cadavers with dissected souls. The Cherokee named the silence ka’lanu ahkyeli’ski, the Raven Mockers, who cut out the hearts of the sick and devoured their remaining years, unseen even as the victim’s fellows sat in the same room. In Eastern Europe, men called dhampir claimed to be half-vampire, traveling from village to village hunting the hungry dead. They gazed through their coat sleeves, like a telescope, then wrestled fiends only they could see. Some called them con artists. Time passes, first in sighs and then in riddles. The Shadows remain. They flock to mysteries and murk like anti-moths. In the age of information, the Mekhet curse creeps along whole new vectors. Let the other clans tromp through their Requiems like drunk elephants. The Mekhet will… well, no one will know exactly what it is they’re doing. What was that? It was only in your head. Yes. They are inside your head. ---- The stars plot their courses across the sky. A foul odor is carried on the air from the depths of the city's core. Whispers in back alleys but no voices to utter them. Dragons consult charts of ley lines. The endless twilight beneath the plates leaves bleary-eyed humans who jump at unexpected noises. People look over their shoulders even when they know they're alone. A seething, roiling, lurking **something** is out there. Unseen, unfelt, but sensed the way a thunderstorm just beyond the horizon can be. Something in Paradi City is very, //very// wrong and the Shadows don't know what it is. The Shadows should know. They can read the minds of those around them, sense the untold history of things with a mere touch, and hear the Beast whisper hidden truths in their minds. The most advanced Mekhet can leave their bodies altogether and travel unimpeded by the limits of physicality. They can be undetected, they can smell you coming from half a mile away, and nothing should escape their notice. Something does. Something is waiting out there. For what? For whom? The Shadows don't know, and for a clan of secrets, that's intolerable. They seek and make hidden deals with wizards and Others, but if anyone's found what they're looking for, they haven't said it... or they haven't come back to share it. The Shadows don't share this among the other clans. Telling your fellow predators that you're not as omniscient as they may fear you to be shows weakness. They don't like to discuss it among themselves too much either. None can ignore it however, and as the years tick by, the shadow of that impending something grows longer over their unlives.