2. shadow people
hi, i tried to write up a fairly comprehensive beginner post to shadow people since they're one of the main inhabitants of the umbra and probably the one that people are most acquainted with as well as one of the entities that people may want to work with. if anyone wants to know anything more in depth feel free to just ask since i'm an incarnated shadow person and a lot of this info is just coming directly from my own experiences and knowledge, i just didn't want to get too technical or long winded on this post lol. maybe another time
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shadow people are one of the primary inhabitants of the umbra. as a whole they're 7-8 feet tall, thin, pitch black humanoids with bright red eyes. a lot of "demons" etc. that people see are actually just shadow people since umbra energy can be very visible even to people who don't generally see energy and also feels very uncomfortable to people who aren't also umbra. likewise, a lot of "shadow people" are just entities that people interpreted as a dark shadowy figure. on top of this the umbra plane intersects and anchors to this plane a lot which causes a lot of shadow people just walking around on their plane to be seen unintentionally. a lot of the time a shadow person walking through your house is just doing their own thing on the umbra and your house is just in the way at the time lol. they’re just as surprised to see you as you are them.
anyway, shadow people are pretty much the energy equivalent of facultative carnivores. this is similar to energy vampirism and i guess would count as some kind of vampirism? but honestly i feel like labeling it as such would be like labeling every animal that eats meat as a vampire so it... ehhh doesn’t really fit. when i say that they’re carnivores i mean that shadow people require specifically the life force energy of an entity, dead or alive, and in the umbra, farming livestock and hunting animals is how everyone is kept fed. they also have sharp carnivore teeth and claws instead of fingernails and although they do still eat plant matter for the taste, it's just not the most nutritionally filling.
related to the “dead or alive” part above, the part i would actually call similar to energy vampirism is the fact that shadow people can also survive by feeding off of the life force energy of animals. this is found most often in emotional energy including “negative energy” (which tastes a little gross but it’s still going to keep a shadow person alive) but pretty much any energy that gets created by a living being is fair game. shadow people living on this plane tend to resort to passively crowd-feeding for energy. attempting to feed off of plant life just doesn’t really do anything for shadow people also despite plants also being alive.
shadow people actually have four eyes (one pair on top of the other) although usually they'll just use one pair in day to day life, the bottom pair. the top pair sees nothing but pure energy and the bottom pair sees everything normally. opening both pairs of eyes allows them to see both the plane they're on and the energy of it at the same time which can be useful but also fairly disorientating. some shadow people use both pairs at once all the time but it’s not very common tbh.
communication-wise shadow people speak mostly in imprints (mental images and emotions etc) and out loud conversations are generally short, very vague, and almost incomprehensible to anyone who can’t read the imprints being used at the same time. they can definitely speak full sentences and do often with other species, they just don’t on the umbra between each other since it saves time. written communication on the umbra is similar, it’s short and heavily imprinted.
internally, shadow people have 5 main energy points: the crown point, the mind point, a point in the mouth, the core in the chest, and the sacral. there's smaller points directly in their palms and something similar to but isn't a throat point, kind of like the partial point attached to the core. a smaller less developed point attached to the bottom of the core exists, most likely it used to be a stomach core, which they lack. there’s technically a functioning root point but it’s not really necessary especially if you live on the umbra since you’re constantly connected and having your umbra recycled through your feet passively. like there’s a tiny partial point there and it’s more fully formed than the throat and stomach points but it’s barely if at all used and usually becomes tiny and completely nonfunctional over time. it’s probably only gonna be used by shadow people who live in planes that are very incompatible with umbra which is a very small minority as most planes have the umbra anchored to them.
their energy body is made up of a mix of primarily base umbra (the stuff you find everywhere in shadows) and red/blood umbra which is basically just their version of blood underneath the surface of their body. usually the energy of the points in their palms is blood umbra. i’ll go more into the different strains of umbra in a different post, this is already getting kinda long.
finally since this seems important to note, some shadow people will have thin, long wings. angels of nyx (one of the larger deities on the umbra), including fallen angels, will have these as an essentially useless status marker as they're too thin to actually allow flight, although in small communities of mostly angels (fallen or not) they’re used pretty extensively with body language and occasionally fighting. some fallen angels will continuously trim their wings off but they grow back with time.