The bottoms of your feet itch.

That's not such a strange occurrence, but as you stand there, under the full and punishing August afternoon sun, you can't help but feel as though something is wrong. There is, you feel, something more, whispering at the edges of your senses, beneath the high-pitched buzzing of insects in the trees and the sounds of city life.

You're missing something, and it isn't your heartbeat. Not this time.

Your friends call you over into the park, and you let your weight fall heavily on your feet, hoping to drive out the itch with each impact. You try to remember if these socks have made you feel like this before, or if you should blame it on some combination of sweat and heat and your shoes wearing out. You'll need to go shopping for the new school year sometime soon.

The park is green and cool, the grass still wet from the last run of the sprinklers. You think your one friend (the technophile, not to be confused with the goth) might have been here, then. He's wet, too. He doesn't deal with heat well, unlike your other friend (the goth, not to be confused with the technophile), who never seems to sweat, and you who really doesn't sweat. But, for you, the real draw of the park is the shade.

You all lay there, for a while, but then you hear the ice cream truck on the other side of the park, and without even conferring, the three of you make your way across the park. You know your order before you get there, comfortable with a ritual that has been more or less the same since you were in middle school.

Your feet still itch.

You pay for your ice cream, after all three of you have gotten tired of the teasing attempts to mooch off of one another, and go back. The feeling of something being wrong intensifies as you look over the park. Something is off, something is definitely off.

Or are you just being paranoid?

Other than this feeling, and your itchy feet, you can't see anything wrong, you can't feel anything wrong. The chill that accompanies the city's less canny visitors is absent. No one is screaming. No one else, including your friends, seems alarmed.

You go back to rest in the shade. It doesn't seem as comforting or as deep as it did before.

.

When you get home, you go up to your room and take off your shoes. Your house is a 'shoes on' house. Too many experiments taking place on the kitchen table. And in the living room. And the downstairs bathroom. And in the master bedroom. It just isn't safe to walk around barefoot, is the point. You only take off your shoes in your own room, and sometimes not even then.

But there's nothing strange in your shoes, not that you can see, and your feet are still itchy, so you strip off your socks, too.

The bottoms of your feet are the absolute velvety black of a starless sky.

The division between the black and the pasty paleness of your normal skin is razor sharp, as if it was painted on with a knife.

You touch it, the tips of your fingers brushing against the arch of your foot. It itches, and you pull away. You examine your fingers for changes, but find none.

This, you decide, deserves pacing. You stand and walk back and forth across the length of your room, trying to work out what kind of a curveball your body has decided to throw you this time. You stop.

Something is wrong.

Something is wrong with the shadows in your room. The ones you have always known. They're too light. They're transparent.

You look down. Does the black on your feet reach higher?

You step through the barrier between life and death. You are wearing boots, now, and you sit in the air as you take them off, too. The black is still there.

You decide you need help.

.

The place you usually go for help is your sister and friends, but you doubt they know what this is. The other nearby option is Vlad, which is bleh. You don't want to go there.

Depending on where the islands and portals have drifted lately, you have other options. They're hard to get to, though. That will take you all night.

It's the middle of the summer. You don't need to wake up early.

You do need to write a note to your sister, and send a text to your friends, so they'll cover for you, on the off chance your parents decide this is a family dinner night.

.

Shadows don't work right in the Ghost Zone. Everything there glows. There are darker spaces, and lighter spaces, but there's nothing like the sun, nothing like the moon, to cast the light that makes shadows sharp.

You feel… hungry.

Which is strange. You did just eat an ice cream. But you think… you think you think you might be hungry for something else.

You can put two and two together. You've been eating shadows. Through the bottom of your feet, no less. You kind of hate that. You hope that you haven't broken the laws of physics in Amity Park any more than they've already been broken. You hope the shadows recover.

A shape rises up through the brilliant mist. Elysium. Not your first choice, but the Far Frozen is even further and Clockwork's place is weird about when it shows up.

You touch down at the mouth of the maze. The Labyrinth. You've solved it before. It's easy.

The lights of Elysium flicker as you enter.

You're greeted at the end of the maze. You talk. You explain.

They don't know what's wrong, either. But they're sure that someone in Elysium does. You ask around.

You're empty, they say, that's the problem. Empty, like shadows are empty. You're trying to fill yourself. Fix an absence.

You don't feel empty. You didn't feel that way this morning, lying in the shade with your friends.

You don't know what you're missing.

You have no idea.