There was once a man named Virgil who lived at the edge of a desert where the sun never set. The light there was so constant and bright that no one had seen a proper shadow in decades. People wore wide hats, painted their windows black, and dreamed in bright white.

But Virgil was different. He lived in a stone hut, alone, and claimed he could still speak to shadows.

“Lunacy,” the townspeople whispered. “Too much sun’ll bake your brain.”

But every evening, as the heat shimmered and the air went still, Virgil would sit behind his hut and whisper into the dry earth.

One day, a child named Lila grew curious. She crept to the back of his hut and saw him speaking to the bare sand. His eyes were closed, his voice low and melodic, as if reciting poetry to the wind.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m listening,” Virgil said, opening one eye. “They’re quiet today.” The eye closed. “But they remember everything.”

“Who?”

“The shadows.”

Lila blinked. “There are no shadows.”

“Not now,” he said, smiling. “But they never left. They’re just . . . hiding.”

Lila sat with him for hours. And though she saw nothing, she swore she heard faint echoes — like whispers in a tunnel. When she told her parents, they forbade her from going back.

But, soon, she returned anyway.

Night after night, she sat with Virgil. And slowly, she began to see them — the faint outlines cast by stones, the shimmer beneath her own feet. Not dark, exactly. But a kind of absence. Like the memory of darkness.

Then one night, Virgil did not come out.

Lila waited. And waited.

When she crept into his hut, she found only a coat, a hat, and a note that read:

Gone walking with the old ones.
Don’t fear the sun — it only tells one side of the story.
Keep listening.
–V.

And behind the hut, where once the sand had been flat and unbroken, there was a perfect silhouette of a man sitting cross-legged, etched deep into the ground — darker than night, cooler than shade, whispering still.

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© Secret Agent Man
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