Three Words for What We’ve Lost
dark academia with medieval folklore - a fabulism story for spooky season
Three Words for What We’ve Lost
by Laura Vogt
previously published in The MacGuffin literary magazine
Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Bavaria - Medieval Crime Museum
Spring 2021, dusk
Old Norse doesn’t have a word for nothingness.
I see two of me: one in the water, another cast across stone. My reflection, a shadow. I press the lid onto my water bottle with a snick, enclosing my mirrored image inside. The museum closes in moments. After nightfall, I’ll perform my nightwatchman tour, and after another day is done, I’ll retreat to my flat for dreamless sleep.
I flick the lights off above the kiosk, veiling the exhibition room with darkness. The eroded relics seem monstrous and animate in their rectangular, glass boxes. Glow from the skylights slinks along the cases’ edges and disappears into the artifacts. Lost histories, forgotten stories. My boots echo as I cross over the wood floor and a draught chills my neck.
“Autoscopy?” A voice sounds behind me.
I yelp and spin, my hand grasping my throat. A tourist grimaces and raises his palms in something resembling an apology. He’s lean, hair tousled in effortless disarray, gray hoodie pooled about his neck. An American, from his articulation and ease.
“I didn’t see you,” I say.
“Clearly.” I think he smiles. Above his mask, crinkles fan beside his temples.
I rub an eyelid. “What was it you asked?”
“Ah.” He shifts his weight and points to an object label with the definition of autoscopy.
autoscopy (noun): Greek, literally self watcher. 1. the phenomenon of perceiving your surroundings from a different perspective, from outside your own body 2. perceiving your double as a separate being
“It’s a double.” I nod to an elaborate sixteenth-century engraving featuring witches and distortions. “In the Middle Ages, they believed your shadow was detachable. A mimic.”
“Like a ghost?”
“Not quite,” I say. “The apparition is a duplicate of a living person. The shadow had its own independence and soul and form.” A shadow wobbles on the ground below the exhibition case. “Such that there are two of everyone.”
“A detachable shadow.” He squints. His eyes are a crisp silver, as if powered by the otherworld.
“Mmm.” I dig my keys from my purse.
To most, these archaic beliefs seem bizarre, but I wonder about their worldview of humans being constructed of many parts. I’ve never felt as just one, definable self. I change with the days and the seasons and the hours.
In the Middle Ages mostly it was the ill who had visions, but today, who is healthy? With the pandemic, humanity seems untethered, souls rambling about, as if autoscopy befalls us all. In affliction, with fever, we see what isn’t tangibly there. We’re breaking, all of us, becoming a society of ghosts, our souls walking as shadows.
I rub a dry spot on my wrist. “We’re closing.”
He nods and follows me into the corridor. I see myself in a window, delicate and pale, wraithlike, resembling someone who’s forgotten how to sleep, who ranges about a dreamworld, awake.
We exit the museum, and I lock up. The afterglow smells of Rothenburg’s legendary powdered snowballs, of sugar and dough and memory. Of all we’ve lost, these years. He hovers there, as I lift the hood of my cloak and step into the smear of darkness cast by the vanished sun.
I speak across the cobblestone courtyard. “You’ll be alright?”
He studies me, monochrome eyes above the purple blur of dark circles, then steps backward and fades into the gloom beyond a soot-stained archway, his white trainers like sparks in smoke. I shiver and remove my mask. I follow him into the haze, just another lost soul surviving the modern world.
draumstolinn (noun): Icelandic. someone whose dreams have been stolen
Market Square, after sunfall
As I wait to begin my nightwatchman tour, I swipe through some Instagram reels, the glare kaleidoscopic and jarring beneath the flickering amber flame of the oil lantern. I navigate to my page and scan past versions of myself.
One, a time-lapse self-portrait in my nightwatchman costume. I roam Rothenburg’s winding boundary wall, saffron-red roofs below, evergreen valley beyond. My artfully uncombed hair waves from my hood, white skirts foaming, medieval lantern gleaming in the twilight. It’s melodramatic, sure, but it’s also evocative. Twenty thousand views, which I guess means something in this era.
I close the app and shove my phone in my cloak. I prop a boot against the ivy-covered wall behind me and close my eyes. It’s like a speck of my soul slips from my body every time I gaze at myself reflected on social media.
I fiddle with the necklace chain holding my bone horn and wait for nightfall to ooze through the courtyard. In moments, I’ll begin my tour of Rothenburg’s streets and this town’s rich folklore of hauntings. A crowd gathers: reorganizing bags, zipping coats, feeding children granola bars, adjusting masks, if they choose to wear one. I do not speak, do not interact—as nightwatchman, perception is everything.
The American man from earlier exits the alley with a couple others and joins my tour. I catch his eye, and he lifts a hand in hello. Without his mask, in the gloaming, his face is the colorless hues of ash and water. I lift my hood over my white-blond hair and glide across the courtyard, passing beneath the wide arch of the castle tower, holding my lantern and halberd before me. I rise onto a central wooden bench and watch, mirroring the guards’ vigil of times past.
I see two of myself again. Firelight echoes on a puddle, and there in the water, my likeness wavers. My shadow stretches and distorts, the form separating from the shape of myself in corporeality. I twist the wooden pole of my halberd so the blade will loom across the cobbles, but I cannot tell if my shadow mimics. I wait for the sky to thicken from hazed violet to black, until there’s ill-ease in the crowd. The clocktower chimes, the music brittle in the windless air.
“Darkness prowls Rothenburg ob der Tauber,” I begin. “Stories rove from fireside to fireside.”
Then I lead the tourists on a journey through medieval Rothenburg, my stories casting a spell, history slipping between perception and lore. We twist through nebulous alleys and past candy-colored buildings muted in nightfall, through darkness and into spirals of moonglow.
I speak of legends and ghouls, magic and depravity, all the while lofting my lantern and halberd before me, the wide cuffs of my gown draped over my wrists.
We halt where village becomes garden and the valley falls away below. You can see distances, beneath the waning moon and threadbare clouds. I end my production and press back my hood, shifting from fantasy to reality, from this bygone character to myself as historian.
After a time the crowd and their questions dissipates, just a few families scattered faraway throughout the terrace. And then it’s just me and the air stretching thinner and thinner as night presses down from above.
The American approaches. “That was unbelievable.”
“And yet,” I say, “it’s all truth.”
His gaze flicks between my eyes, like he’s trying to figure me out. But I’m not even sure what I mean. I’m stuck in that space between performance and truth, past and future, unsure of what I am or who I want to become. I wonder if we’re all just meandering vapors, if anyone is formed, or if we’re all just trying out different interpretations of ourselves each day. Most moments I barely even register anymore what realm I’m wandering.
He rubs his clavicle, where the stretched neck of his white t-shirt shows sallow skin. “I’m headed to a bar, Refugium. Care to join?”
The wrinkled shadow of an alder trembles across the sparse grass. I’ve no space for voices. Every day I feel as if I slip more and more away into obscurity, less sure the purpose of it all. I thank him and decline.
He nods and melts backward, his frame easy and light, the bridge to a genuine connection crumbling. I don’t want to go, yet I’m exhausted with being awake only in the past.
A copy of myself reflects once again, this time bound in a silvered mirror. I lose myself a moment, unspool further from the earth. My soul aches, bruises the underside of my skin. I didn’t know that existence could be a blooming agony that presses and presses and will not go. My reflection shifts forward, almost as if she’s going to take a step. Did she move? I rub my palms over my face—of course not.
I raise my hood and walk across the garden toward my home, toward sleep, toward that hidden moment in the deep of night when it’s no longer today but not yet tomorrow, the moment when magic rouses, when horrors awaken and doubles begin walking.
Aways down the path, across a carven wood bridge, the tourist with white trainers passes beneath a pointed archway. A breeze whips through my cloak and rattles the flower baskets on a timber-framed home. With his hoodie and his ease, the tourist is shockingly modern in this ancient town. I follow him through twisting streets awhile, as the bar Refugium is nearby my flat. He strolls at a distance behind his mates, never talking with them. Oddly, I don’t recall him ever interacting with them.
The alley curves, smoke-smudged stones shaded by longago flame. Mist roams above ground, as if this night I walk the borderlands to myth. One moment, and the man is gone.
I halt, startled. I blink.
His friends turn the corner out of sight, but it’s as if he dissolved into clouds. Cold frosts up my forearms and horror settles in my stomach. He must have slipped through a doorway. But there’s not one on this pathway.
As I walk, my shadow strikes across a worn wooden door, intransient and dreamlike. I thought I was the one becoming a phantom, but—I study the terrain where the man disappeared, running my palms along soil and rock, searching for a passageway or trapdoor, for something to explain this illusion.
A thousand years ago those that existed on these same cobbles believed that in moments of weakness or distraction your double could free from your form and step away. Fog gusts into the alley, coiling off the rooftops. The man wasn’t an American after all, but a shadow exploring beyond his sire’s form.
I tug my cloak tighter, unsure if my double is still bound to me. I’m not sure which one I am anymore, the body or the spirit.
From afar, the glow of lantern flame warms my knuckles. I look for my shadow, and there—she’s smudged along the wall, squished with other shades of daydreams. She’s still here.
My bones feel liquid, my body weightless. She seems to yank and throb, as if she wants to run away. I reach out a hand, and my shadow responds. To touch someone means so much, these days. How long, since I’ve touched another? I’m aware, as I lift my hand and walk forward, that I’m reaching for something beyond my flesh, for a version of me linked with the otherworld. There’s always another cosmos, endless renditions of reality.
I press my trembling fingers against the stone, reuniting with my shadow self. The wall is sharp and old, smelling of age and air and metal. “Come on,” I speak, then turn toward the long, dark alley. I raise my torch and walk on.
ecstatics (noun): Greek, literally straying of the spirit. someone who goes outside of themselves and sees that which remains hidden from ordinary mortals
Copyright Laura Vogt 2025
Originally published in The MacGuffin literary journal, summer 2025 volume
Photo Credits: TK
Special thanks to Dr. Markus Hirte from The Medieval Crime Museum in Rothenburg who helped me with research, way back in 2022.
My debut novel In the Great Quiet is forthcoming March 2026 from Lake Union. You can now preorder, read the ARC on Netgalley, or add to your Goodreads.
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