Uncanny Valley
This world is not short of things to be afraid of. Just a week before the cluster was attacked by a bear that somehow no one managed to see coming. Everyone had their hair up for days after, and since nothing in life comes alone, there was also the cold. The winter has just started but the freezing weather is already sinking deep into everyone’s bones, the adults are split between taking care of the infant and the old, and praying that they see another summer.
Lu is scared of wild beasts, but he can fight bears, not alone, of course, and not without almost dying a couple of times; he isn’t really the greatest fighter of the cluster, he is also scared of frostbite but can survive the cold; the animals provide skin to cover up and meat for a warm soup. Even surviving through it all, he is still terrified of death, it doesn't matter how much the elders tell that death is only the start of someone’s soul’s journey, it's still scary.
There is something, though, that he doesn’t tell. What is scared of the most isn’t hunger or cold, not even wild animals or death itself, but silhouettes. Silly, he knows, it’s so silly and childish, a thing one would expect of a kid too young to come of age. Yet, he would rather fight a sleuth of bears by himself than meet, under the weak moonlight, an unknown silhouette. It’s not the size that is unsettling, it’s the form, it’s the familiarity of it that makes his blood run colder than the harshest of the winters. When he sees one walking closer, he tries to calm his heart and to find anything not familiar in it; inhumane. He can’t. The silhouettes walk over two legs as almost everyone else, they are as tall as an adult, and, in the dark nights, by the time he can tell whether it is a human or not it’s way too late.
