Nightday

Nightday is the third episode of Foribus Mentis Saga 2

## **Summary**

While Ryland and Hira were going into the rural areas of Tennessee, after the snowfall, they come across a small dog that seemed very happy to meet humans, they stay a while watching him while he chases his own tail as they find it funny. Suddenly, the dog seems to be terrified by something he sees in the sky and runs away to the opposite side from where he came from. Then, Ryland notices that up ahead, an area of the forest is covered under total darkness while the other part is in daylight. This immediately puts them on alert and Hira directs his gaze towards the sky, where he sees a strange formation near the sun that could be creating this eclipse. This formation is shaped like bars that seem to be "imprisoning" the sun, which immediately alarms the boys. Suddenly, the dark part begins to affect the plants and some animals that were around leaving them unconscious, Hira and Ryland begin to run to the opposite direction to avoid being hit by the part without light that turns out to be an entity originated by the anomaly.

In the central part of town, Marina was on her way to drink a coffee. She doesn't seem to have noticed that part of the town is dark and the other half keeps the sunlight. She also doesn't see that her shadow seems to come to life and tries to detach itself from the ground to try to get closer to her, Then, she senses that something bad is about to happen and turns her head back. As she does this, there seems to be no trace of the anomaly happening behind her, as the shadow had returned to its normal form before Marina noticed it. Despite this, she does notice that there is something strange still going on and watches as some shadows of some pedestrians, who were also on the spot, begin to attack the people who were directly underneath the sun. Marina watches in horror as the shadows seem to pull and drag their owners towards themselves, as if they were some sort of portal to another world, tearing chunks of skin off their faces as they trap them. She too is almost trapped by her own shadow but manages to enter the roofed room amidst the chaos and desperation of the other people. Marina's shadow finally decides to attack her and she tries to climb into a cooler inside the store. She quickly realizes that being in a place with a roof, where the sun does not project directly, will be useless, since it seems that shadows can maintain their appearance regardless of the volume or distance of a body in relation to the sun. This makes it more difficult for her to escape.

Ryland questions how there could be an entity made of shadow under the sun if there is nothing to produce it, but later realizes that it was created by small fragments of solid black material that were bound together. The bars surrounding the sun seemed to absorb the sunlight and this, when emitted through the dark bars, released these fragments. In this way, the entity was able to create more shadow entities as the eclipse increased in size.

Finally, Ryland and Hira remember the little dog chasing its tail that they saw hours before and try to put one last plan into action. They decide that the only way to defeat the entity is to make it chase its own shadow so that it will either extinguish itself or be trapped in some sort of infinite loop from which it can't get out.

Once the goal is achieved, they watch as the object in the sky that caused the eclipse begins to mysteriously disintegrate.

## Additional data:

* This episode is directly related to the episode "Eclipse" from Saga 1 where the characters must escape from a strange eclipse that occurs in the southern hemisphere and turns the inhabitants of a small town into rock. This indicates that both sagas occur at the same time and in the same universe, just different places on the planet.
* When the protagonists see the eclipse, Hira confuses the word "astrology" with "astronomy" by saying that although he is not an expert in astrology, he believes that this phenomenon is called an eclipse, to which Ryland corrects him.