Into the Darkness: Chapter Nine - Previous Chapter
Chapter 10.
The room breathed in measured clicks and sighs.
Fluorescent light hummed above the stainless tables, turning every surface—metal, tile, skin—into the same pale reflection. Oslo’s winter pressed against the windows, a long white dusk that never quite became night.
She moved through her routine with a mortician’s grace: washing, combing, sealing, painting. The woman on the table was almost perfect. Youth had frozen her mid-gesture, the faint smile of someone who had never expected to be interrupted. Even under the harsh light, her body looked serene, beyond vanity or grief.
The mortician paused. Her own reflection stared back at her from the curve of an instrument tray—tired, freckled, human. She looked again at the still face before her and felt something tight coil behind her ribs. Envy, perhaps, or reverence.
Without thinking, she brushed her gloved fingers across the woman’s cheek. The skin was cool, unresisting. Her hand lingered, tracing the jaw, the throat, the small constellation of freckles near the collarbone.
She leaned closer and, with a delicate touch, lifted one pale eyelid.
The eye beneath was a clouded pearl. Its milky sheen caught the light, and for a moment it seemed to look back—empty yet knowing. The mortician’s breath hitched. Every hair on her arm rose as if responding to static.
Her mind whispered a wordless question. Her body answered with hunger.
She reached for the small silver instrument on the tray. The handle felt heavier than it should, the air around her thicker. She hesitated—then began to work, as carefully as she might pick a flower.
When it was done, she lifted her hand and held the thing near her own gaze. The world tilted. In that suspended moment, she thought she saw her own reflection blink inside it.
She lifted the eye, holding it just beneath her gaze. It seemed impossibly small, yet heavy with the world it had seen. Her breath caught. The urge surged, a pulse she could not resist.
Without thinking, she parted her lips and brought it to her mouth. A shiver ran through her as she felt it touch her tongue, cold and strange. Her teeth closed around it… the eyeball popped, and then squelched as she chewed…
Elsewhere in Oslo, Damien stirred in a café on Karl Johans gate.
Steam curled from his coffee, ghosting the window. For no reason he could name, a shiver climbed the back of his neck. The street outside looked ordinary, but for an instant every passer-by seemed to turn their head toward him—like a roomful of eyes catching the same thought before looking away again.
She dropped the empty shell of the eye onto the tray. For a heartbeat the room felt heavier, as if the air itself had thickened around her. The fluorescent hum moved with her pulse.
Her hands trembled; she steadied them against the steel edge. The corpse remained unchanged—serene, embalmed—but her vision had shifted. Light cut harder; edges read like engravings. Shadows clung in places they had not before, and she could feel the absent gaze—those thin, stubborn echoes of memory and feeling she had swallowed.
A thrill ran up her spine with a trace of nausea. She closed her own eyes and saw flashes: the woman’s last small scenes—a street lamp guttering, curtains snapping in the wind, the dull mirror of rain on asphalt. The hunger that followed was patient and sure. One pair of eyes would not sate it.
She left the morgue with the instruments wrapped in a towel, a relic tucked against her chest. Night folded over the city in dull, wet layers. Her steps fit the geometry of the alleys she had watched for weeks—routes learned like the lines of a favourite book.
She watched from doorways while the city forgot them: a thin man curled under a plastic sheet, a woman slumped with a cigarette stub between fingers. They were not prey in any theatrical sense. They were the overlooked, the living folded into their private smallness. She moved like someone performing a rite—calm, economical, precise. Her hands were ritual; her face a smooth, unreadable surface.
When she approached there was no struggle. A cloth to a mouth, a steadying hand at shoulders, a breath that stilled. She worked the moment like a seam: find the weakness, ease it, part it.
At the body she was as tender as she had ever been with the dead. Her tools lay silver and ordered beside her. She lifted the lids as she had a thousand times; her fingers moved with embalmer’s certainty. The eye that met her was a tiny globe of streetlight and private sorrow. She held it up as if reading scripture.
She tasted it—brief, decisive—and everything shifted. Where others might have recoiled, she smiled inwardly as if someone had handed her a map. Images slid across her mind: a laugh that never reached morning, a child’s quick hand, the last slow twitch of a lamp. Hunger folded itself into strategy. One experiment; now a plan. The night around her seemed full of patient things.
She left the alley the way she had come: unseen, unspeaking.
Daylight had thinned to gray, but the city felt alive in a different key. Damien walked into the gallery because the heat of the café had made him restless and because, for reasons he could not name, he wanted to be among images that did not demand speech. The modern space smelled of paper and polish; walls were white and patient, and the paintings hung with a neutrality that asked nothing but attention.
He moved from frame to frame with the polite, slow attention of someone who wanted to forget a private jolt by replacing it with public stillness. A portrait caught him—large, cropped close: an anonymous face rendered in pale, precise strokes, eyes rendered with a kind of still intelligence that kept returning his look. For a second there was nothing unusual; then, as if the light in the room had slipped a fraction, the painted pupils seemed to reconfigure themselves and a blink he had not owned washed through him: the same reflected blink that had stopped him the day before.
He put his palm against the cool wall, steadying himself. The gallery murmured—other visitors shifting, a chair creaking—ordinary life. But the sensation sat under his sternum like a small stone. He felt watched and, inexplicably, intimate with some distant human flicker. The painting did not change. He had. He took a step back and noticed the tiny smudge of something on the frame, a fingerprint perhaps, and for a moment imagined it was the margin of a real eye’s film.
He left the gallery without finishing his route. The city reassembled around him—tram bells, a vendor calling—and yet his thought kept returning to the brief, borrowed blink. He did not know why it felt important; it only felt like an unclosed door.
By the time morning broke, Oslo’s streets were stirred with muted unease. The first two victims had been found in alleys hours apart, their absences catalogued in clinical coroner’s reports: clothing intact, no robbery or sexual assault, only a startling void where the eyes should have been. Officers exchanged tired, uneasy looks, running fingers along notes that spelled nothing comprehensible to ordinary minds.
Detectives traced patterns in maps and timelines, but the gaps between the bodies were murky, urban, and mundane enough to frustrate logic. Still, the press had already taken hold. A junior reporter, searching for narrative, attached a name to the void: The Eye‑Eater. Headlines appeared in yellowed fonts across online feeds: EYELESS VICTIMS FOUND IN OSLO — WHO IS THE EYE‑EATER? Tweets and discussion threads spun speculation into mythology. Television segments debated psychology and motive. Oslo’s citizens began to murmur about evening walks, alleys, and the shadows behind closed curtains.
To the mortician, these ripples were background noise. She listened to none of it. She walked the city streets knowing that her hunger, her compulsions, had names in the mouths of others—but they did not own her desire, nor could anyone yet grasp the rhythm that guided her steps.
Night had folded the streets in dark velvet. The third victim was easy to find, a presence almost radiating in its loneliness. The woman leaned against the wet brick of a backstreet near the club district, cigarette stub glowing faintly like a distant ember. The mortician saw her and the pull was immediate, uncompromising. This was not choice; it was a magnetic certainty. The city around them blurred.
She moved as though the air itself had carved a path, folding alleys into doors, shadows into conduits. Her approach was calm, measured—hands like ritual instruments, face unreadable. When the woman slumped—whether from exhaustion, surprise, or some invisible weight—it read to passersby as sleep. To the mortician it was an opening. She bent over her, patient and deliberate, receiving the private flashes of a life she would never return: laughter that had once carried through taxis, perfume drifting through winter air, a half-forgotten argument. She catalogued them inside herself and stepped away, leaving the alley neat, her own heartbeat quiet beneath the city’s hum.
A short walk from the alley brought her to the edge of the nightclub parking lot. Neon smeared across wet asphalt, crowd noise spilling into side streets. There, by the glint of a Range Rover, she saw him: young, charismatic, a local football hero whose face filled television screens and barroom conversations. Recognition struck like a chord: the compulsion was instant, a magnetic pull drawing her forward, quickening her steps.
She smiled, subtle and seductive, lifting her hand in greeting. The footballer’s eyes met hers. A flirtatious energy passed between them; he stepped closer. “Want some fun?” he asked, taking her hand and guiding her toward his car.
Her voice dripped with warmth, slow and intimate. “Your eyes… they’re impossible,” she murmured, leaning close. “Bright, alive… I could lose myself in them.” He laughed, charmed, unaware of the weight behind her words. The mortician let herself be led, the hunger inside her sharpening, pulling her focus like a lodestone.
Beneath the faint glow of club lights, they kissed. The music and laughter faded to a muffled hum, a backdrop to her single-minded compulsion. Her lips brushed his ear. “I want to see the world… through you,” she whispered, sultry and certain.
The moment stretched, taut and fragile. She tasted the shimmer of his life before it was gone—the warmth, the pulse, the echo of what had looked back at her. The city seemed to tilt slightly under her gaze; shadows deepened, light sharpened, and a thousand fleeting fragments of his existence spilled into her mind. Then, the act was complete.
When she finally stepped away, the footballer was gone. The night remained indifferent, but she carried the imprint of his sight inside her, a new layer added to the hunger that had already begun to name itself in whispers: unseen, inexorable, and alive.
Days had passed since the shiver in the café, and the city had grown restless under the weight of The Eye‑Eater headlines. Damien moved along Karl Johans gate, the pedestrian crowd a blur of coats and umbrellas. He wasn’t seeking a gallery this time; he had wandered into the Botanical Gardens, the muted green of winter plants and skeletal trees offering a fragile calm.
The crisp air carried scents of soil and frost, but something else threaded through it—an echo, subtle and insistent. He paused by a glasshouse, staring at a frost-rimmed fern, and the shiver returned, sharper this time. It was not fear, exactly; it was recognition, a faint resonance of someone else’s gaze reaching him across the city. He pressed a hand to his temple, blinked, and saw a flicker of something in the reflection of the glass: a shadowed figure, unseen, moving with intent.
The sensation lingered like a low hum in his chest, threading into the rhythm of the city. Children passed by, a tram rattled on iron rails, a dog barked somewhere distant—and yet he felt the pull, as if the world itself carried fragments of the nights’ events, and the echoes were pressing into him, personal, intimate, impossible to ignore.
Damien exhaled, slow and steady, trying to anchor himself. The Garden seemed peaceful, yet the resonance refused to fade. Somewhere, unseen, a life had been taken, consumed in a way that left traces in the air, and Damien could not unsee it, could not unfeel it. The city’s hum, the pedestrians’ chatter, the distant squeal of tires—it all seemed sharper now, tinted with the same unnatural precision he had first felt in the café.
Detectives huddled over case files in the cramped station, maps and notes scattered across the table. The first two victims had left no trace, no motive, no pattern they could pin down. Days of interviews, alley sweeps, and neighbourhood canvassing yielded nothing beyond frustration. Officers rubbed temples and shared weary glances; the city outside carried on, oblivious to the shadows that had passed through it.
One officer flicked the station TV on, hoping for background noise while scanning a witness statement. The room hummed with chatter until the anchor’s voice cut through, sharp and urgent.
“…and in a shocking development tonight, local football hero Erik Haldersen was found dead in his Range Rover in a nightclub parking lot. Authorities confirm that his eyes are missing. Police are investigating a possible connection to the so-called Eye‑Eater, the nickname given to the perpetrator behind a series of mysterious disappearances in Oslo.”
The station went quiet. Pens hovered above paper, coffee cups stilled mid-air. Every officer instinctively leaned closer, eyes drawn to the screen. Murmurs rippled through the room—fear, disbelief, and a sudden spike of urgency. Detectives exchanged grim looks; the pattern they had been chasing for days now had its first high-profile victim, and the implications were immediate.
The headlines were already shaping the narrative. Social media erupted, hashtags and posts buzzing with speculation. Talk shows dissected the story. Oslo’s citizens shivered collectively, recognising that the quiet series of disappearances was no longer confined to the invisible, the marginalised. The Eye‑Eater had claimed the city’s attention—and its most visible face.
The news anchor’s voice droned from the small screen in her apartment, but she barely heard the words. The image of the Range Rover flashed across the screen—empty eyes, lifeless body, headlines screaming EYELESS FOOTBALLER FOUND DEAD. She tilted her head, and something inside her shifted. Her pupils dilated, heart quickening.
Eyes were more than organs. They were gateways. Knowledge, memory, the pulse of life itself—all compressed in those tiny orbs. The realisation struck with the precision of a scalpel: through eyes, the world could be read. Through eyes, she could see, and through seeing she could hold power. The thought made her lips curve into a faint, private smile.
Her phone buzzed on the table. She picked it up and saw an invitation from a well-known social circle in Oslo—a formal gala, glittering names attached, prominent figures, politicians, even the prime minister of the city. The kind of event where appearances mattered, where influence and authority gathered under crystal chandeliers and polished floors.
She stared at the message, feeling the pulse of compulsion tighten in her chest. The invitation was more than opportunity—it was a conduit. Eyes to observe, eyes to touch, eyes to consume. The hunger inside her shifted, folding seamlessly into strategy.
A low laugh escaped her lips, soft and almost musical, as the city outside her window flickered in streetlight and rain. She had moved quietly through alleys, through shadows, through streets where the invisible were her companions. Now, she would step into the light, among the powerful, and her eyes would follow, always, unblinking.
The mortician set her phone down, fingers lingering over the sleek glass. For the first time, she felt untethered. The rules the city believed in—the laws, the morality, the expectation of restraint—were irrelevant. She had a new horizon: a stage where influence and desire could intersect, and the gateway of the eyes could open further than she had ever dared imagine.
The apartment was dim, lit only by the cool white of her vanity lights. She moved with ritual precision, brushing hair until it fell like dark silk, smoothing skin until it gleamed just so. Her eyes lingered on herself in the mirror, calculating, rehearsing the subtle shifts of expression, the sway of posture.
The dress she chose was scandalous in the most deliberate way: black silk, clinging and low-cut, cut to command attention without shouting it. Every curve, every shadowed line, had a purpose. Tonight, she would be seen. Not just looked at—measured, catalogued, devoured with the mind before anything else.
She applied her makeup with the same care she once reserved for the dead, sculpting eyes to be impossible to forget, lips to draw invitation and curiosity. The heels she selected clicked softly against the floor as she practiced the glide she knew would turn heads the instant she entered the room.
Her pulse quickened as she imagined the crowd: influential figures, politicians, power brokers, their gazes brushing over her like invisible maps she could read. And then, the thought that made her heart race: the one she was drawn to next—the target that the city itself had not yet realised existed—would be here. Eyes would meet eyes. She would be impossible to resist, irresistible in her design, and tonight, she would cross the line she had only skirted before.
Meanwhile, Damien knelt over the worn chessboard in Vigeland Park, the winter sun low and sharp across the sculpted figures of bronze. Opposite him, an older man with a patient, calculating stare moved a pawn, then leaned back, fingers steepled.
Damien’s mind, however, was not entirely on the board. He felt it again: that low, insistent thread running along his spine, faintly tingling behind his eyes. A presence, distant yet intimate, brushing past the edges of perception. The sensation was lighter than the day in the gallery, yet undeniable—like footprints in frost that only he could see.
He blinked, focusing on the chessboard, but a whisper of awareness remained. The chess master’s hand hovered over a rook, and Damien realised he had no real sense of the pieces, only of the pull tugging at his consciousness, a reminder that the city was no longer entirely ordinary.
She entered the ballroom like a shadow given silk and light. Heads turned; murmurs passed through the crowd, but she noticed nothing beyond the rhythms of desire and attention that pulsed toward her. Her eyes swept the room with the precision of a predator. Then they landed on him: the Prime Minister of Norway, commanding yet approachable, eyes sharp and wide.
A coy smile curved her lips; she bit her lower lip ever so slightly, letting the smallest flicker of invitation pass. A passing waitress offered a chute of champagne, and she accepted it with a graceful tilt of her hand, letting the glass catch the light just so.
He approached, introducing himself with a practiced charm. She laughed at his jokes—even the bad ones—letting her amusement drip with sultry cadence. Leaning close, she whispered something in his ear, a voice like velvet. His eyebrows rose, a flash of curiosity, and he offered her a quiet retreat—a room nearby where their conversation could continue unobserved.
Inside the dim room, the tension between control and compulsion thickened. The mortician moved with the calm certainty of one accustomed to being obeyed, her impulses sharpening. She pushes him firmly into a chair and straddles his legs, as she discreetly produces a small vial, waving it in front of his nose, the world tilted as the Prime Minister succumbed to sleep.
What followed was a private rite, unobserved, the act itself unrecorded and unspoken, yet the effect reverberated through her very being. When she stepped back, she carried more than a name—she carried power. Her chest rose and fell with exhilaration. From her purse she withdrew a scalpel, ripping open his shirt: carving her claim into legend.
“My name is Oculus Regina,” she whispered, letting the syllables hang in the air like a brand. The city outside remained blissfully unaware, but she felt the weight of her new identity pressing against her consciousness. She had crossed a threshold. The hunger was no longer hidden; it was sovereign, undeniable, and mythic.
The winter light in Vigeland Park was pale, filtered through the skeletal trees, but Damien barely noticed. His mind had been elsewhere for hours—pulled, tugged, stretched by something he could not name. And then it hit him: a presence, vast and undeniable, a pulse of consciousness that made the air hum around him. It was her—the mortician—but no longer constrained by alleyways or shadow. She had become something else. Something sovereign. Oculus Regina.
Every instinct in him screamed, but more than instinct: psychic awareness, subtle yet undeniable. He felt her reaching outward, stretching into the city, bending perception, threading life itself into her will. A shiver coursed through his spine, stronger than any before, a premonition of what she had claimed.
The old chess master, whose gaze had been quietly observing the board, spoke suddenly, breaking the taut thread of Damien’s focus:
“If eyes are the window to the soul, then dreams are the back door to the heart.”
Damien blinked, snapping back to the park, staring at the man. “Sorry?” he asked, still half-lost in the echo of her presence.
The chess master’s eyes gleamed. “If eyes are the window to the soul, then dreams are the back door to the heart,” he repeated, voice low and measured. Then, with a slight, knowing tilt of his head, he added, “The Infernal Games.”
Before Damien could respond, the distant wail of police sirens cut through the crisp air. Figures in uniform emerged from the street, boots crunching on frost‑rimmed paths. One officer, tall and imposing, stepped forward.
“Mr. Damien Beckett?” the man called, voice carrying authority and urgency. “I am Chief of Police. Anathema told us to find you… we need your help.”
The thread of psychic resonance still pulsed through Damien, sharp and insistent. He looked between the officers, then back toward the park’s edge, where shadows gathered in hints and whispers.
Damien’s hand hovered over the chessboard for a heartbeat longer, then he moved a piece decisively.
“Checkmate.”
The old chess master leaned forward, studying the board with narrowed eyes, then a slow smile curved his lips. “You won with ‘The Scholar’s Mate.’ Nice move, Sir.” He extended his hand, and Damien shook it firmly, a brief, grounding ritual before chaos swallowed the day.
Damien turned toward the Chief of Police, whose gaze was sharp and impatient. “Let’s go,” he said, his voice steady despite the ripple of dread coursing through him.
They strode toward the waiting cruiser. Damien slid into the front passenger seat, fastening his seatbelt, already scanning the city streets in his mind. Just as the Chief started the engine, the radio crackled sharply.
“Another victim, Sir… it’s the Prime Minister,” the dispatcher’s voice reported, urgent and strained.
The Chief’s eyes met Damien’s. No words were needed. “Buckle up,” he said. He slammed the siren switch, the wail tearing through the park’s quiet morning. Foot on the accelerator, the cruiser lurched forward, tires gripping the frost-lined asphalt as they tore into the streets.
The city had tipped into chaos. Damien felt the pulse of her power even now, stretching through the streets, threading life and perception into her will. The Infernal Games had begun—and every second counted.
The cruiser skidded into the hotel’s front entrance, tires crunching over frost and gravel. Officers had already cordoned the street, lights flashing red and blue, but the Chief moved with authority, cutting through the chatter. Damien leaned forward, senses stretched, the pulse of her presence threading through the walls.
Inside, an officer met them at the main entrance, his expression taut. “Sir, we’ve locked the hotel down. No one has left since the Prime Minister was found. We’ve secured all floors.”
“Take us to the room,” the Chief said, urgency in every word. The officer led them silently through the marble hallways, past terrified staff and hushed guests. The elevator doors opened, and the weight of stillness pressed around them.
The room door swung open, and Damien stepped inside. The body slumped on a chair, pale under the sterile hotel lighting, eyes absent. Letters were carved into the chest: Oculus Regina. Damien’s eyes narrowed, analysing, noting angles, pressure, and the precision of the markings.
He leaned closer, careful not to touch. “Surgical instrument,” he murmured. “Used to remove the eyes… precise. The letters carved into the chest—scalpel work. Whoever did this… knows exactly what they’re doing.”
The coroner, standing nearby, glanced at the Chief of Police, eyes wide. Without a word, he mouthed: Who is this guy?
Damien didn’t look at him directly, voice calm but carrying authority. “Damien Beckett,” he said, letting the words hang in the room. “At your service.”
The Chief’s jaw tightened. “Then we’re counting on you, Mr. Beckett. This… this isn’t ordinary.”
Damien allowed a faint, measured nod. “Nothing about this… is ordinary.”
Damien’s eyes flicked over the room one last time. A pulse, subtle but insistent, thrummed in the walls, the air, and even through the floorboards beneath their feet. She was moving again—Oculus Regina. The compulsion radiated outward, sharp, urgent. A foreign dignitary… and she would not hesitate.
He snapped upright, voice sharp. “Chief, follow me!”
Without waiting, he dashed from the room, boots clicking against the polished floor, scanning the corridor frantically. “Left… right… kitchen—where is it?” he barked, the psychic thread guiding his steps as much as sight or memory.
The Chief hurried after him, hand resting briefly on Damien’s shoulder to keep pace. “This way, Mr. Beckett,” he said, voice taut with tension, guiding him down a service stairwell that led toward the hotel’s restricted corridors.
Damien’s pulse raced, each step syncing with the distant, almost imperceptible pull of her presence. She was close. Too close. And he could feel the inevitability of her compulsion, a predator threading through human flesh, bending the rules of reality itself.
“We’re running out of time,” Damien muttered under his breath, eyes scanning every door, every shadow, every corridor intersection. The city outside remained oblivious, but inside these walls, the Infernal Games were reaching another apex.
The kitchens were quiet except for the clatter of pots and the faint sizzle of sauces. The foreign dignitary had strayed where he shouldn’t have been, sampling dishes, curious and unsuspecting. He didn’t hear her approach—Oculus Regina was already there, the air around her folding, drawing attention and desire without effort.
Her heels clicked softly against the tile, and when he finally looked up, she was there, a shadow of silk and intent. She smiled, slow and deliberate, letting her gaze linger, letting the weight of her presence press in.
“Curious taste,” she murmured, voice low and teasing, “but some flavours… are better shared.”
He laughed nervously, caught in the pull of something magnetic he could not name. The compulsion wrapped around him like a tide, soft but irresistible. He stepped closer, entranced by the grace, the dark invitation in her eyes.
She leaned in, voice like velvet against his ear, and the moment compressed into one perfect, inevitable decision. Time narrowed, and the world tilted, obeying her hunger and certainty.
Then came the sound: footsteps, rapid and determined, echoing through the kitchen corridor. She paused, letting the dignitary falter slightly, and in that instant, she dissolved into the shadows. A whisper of silk, a flicker of dark light—and she was gone.
Damien and the Chief of Police arrived seconds later, breath visible in the cold air, eyes scanning the empty kitchen. The dignitary was gone, leaving only the faintest traces of what had occurred, and a pulse of dread lingering in the tiles. They had arrived too late. Oculus Regina had struck again, untouchable, unseen, sovereign in her hunger.
Damien’s gaze snapped to the corner of the kitchen. A shadow, faint but alive, moved against the light—one that was not his own.
“Sorry, Chief… you won’t like this,” he said, voice low, eyes narrowing.
The Chief frowned, confusion furrowing his brow. Damien hunched his shoulders, a ripple running down his spine. Slowly, impossibly, shadow tendrils unfurled from his back, dark and sinuous, twisting across the kitchen floor and walls. They flared outward, reaching, searching.
Oculus Regina’s eyes widened. She backed toward the corridor, sensing the sudden, unnatural extension of Damien’s presence. Her calm, predatory control faltered for the first time.
A tendril lashed out, wrapping around her waist with a speed that made the air hiss. She screamed—half surprise, half disbelief—as she was lifted, slammed against the ceiling, then dropped to the floor in a controlled, terrifying display of force.
“There is your killer, Chief!” Damien’s voice echoed through the room as the tendrils retracted, folding back into his shadow and vanishing.
The Chief sprinted forward, eyes wide. “But… she’s a woman!” he shouted, disbelief mixing with adrenaline.
Another officer rushed in, freezing at the sight: the foreign dignitary slumped in the corner, and the woman sprawled on the floor, eyes sharp and calculating even in defeat.
“Check her handbag!” Damien barked, voice sharp.
The officer hesitated, then obeyed, unzipping the sleek leather bag. Inside were instruments of precise cruelty: a tool for removing eyes, a scalpel, and small vials, all arranged with methodical care.
Damien’s eyes met the Chief’s, calm but resolute. “This is who we’re dealing with,” he said, letting the weight of the discovery settle. “And we need to move… fast.”
They slapped the cuffs on with a dull, final clack.
Her hands protested, wrists reddening beneath cold steel. Around her, uniforms moved with efficient, studied pity; questions were barked, wrists were held, statements taken. She muttered as they guided her out—fragments at first, then a steady refrain: “Their eyes… their eyes… my sight—my sight—” Her voice threaded into mania. “They’re mine. I see with them. I see everything.”
She fought with the animal ferocity of someone refusing to yield a treasure. Her nails scraped leather and cuff, her body arced and twisted. They sedated her gently, then not so gently—the pharmacopeia of containment—and she went quiet, then slack, then breathing small.
The institution smelled of antiseptic and regrets. White corridors led to a room with one narrow window and bars on the inside of its blinds. They moved her there like a dangerous specimen, locked the door, and left a note on the bedside: High Security — Psychiatric Containment. She slept in the way the world gives prisoners sleep—brief, drugged, and shallow.
Days later, the sleep cracked.
Damien emerged from the folds of shadow at the corner of the room like a remembered scent. He did not walk; he unfolded himself into the light, a presence that did not quite belong to the fluorescent glare. Her eyes opened at the sound—wild, aware, the same hungry focus she’d carried through alleys and ballrooms.
“I’ll take your eyes,” she snarled, the promise more threatening than a plea. Her voice had a cracking edge, the compulsive certainty still flaring through the sedation’s residue.
Damien stepped forward slowly, every motion measured. “I am,” he said, low and almost amused, “what some call the Rex Umbrarum.” The words were a seal and a warning.
His palm brushed her brow like a winter wind. The touch was nothing, impossibly light, and everything changed.
Her pupils contracted, then widened in panic, and a gray film leapt over the irises as if night itself had been breathed into them. “I can’t see—” she gasped, voice shredding on the sentence. Her hands clawed at her face, as if physical sight were a thing she could tear back into being.
“What have you done?” she screamed.
He simply watched her panic, expression even, almost mournful. “No longer will you see,” he said, voice steady. “But the souls you stole will keep their sight alive inside you.” He let the sentence hang like a verdict.
Her screams filled the room, raw and animal. Images—snatches of the lives she had taken—spooled behind her eyelids, raw and unconsenting. The sedatives were useless against the onslaught; the new punishment was all memory and sound. She clawed at the sheets, tried to flay the visions away, but they multiplied like ghosts.
Damien stepped back into the shadow near the door, the edges of him already blurring. “Remember them,” he said quietly, and then the darkness took him, folding him whole.
Her last, long scream stretched into nothing as the door closed and the corridor returned to its antiseptic hush. In that silence, the institute’s watchers took notes and checked monitors. They would call it psychosis, or trauma, or a rare neurological phenomenon. The truth—an eye for conscience, a blindness repaid in haunting—would be something only a few would ever name.
Chapter 10.
The room breathed in measured clicks and sighs.
Fluorescent light hummed above the stainless tables, turning every surface—metal, tile, skin—into the same pale reflection. Oslo’s winter pressed against the windows, a long white dusk that never quite became night.
She moved through her routine with a mortician’s grace: washing, combing, sealing, painting. The woman on the table was almost perfect. Youth had frozen her mid-gesture, the faint smile of someone who had never expected to be interrupted. Even under the harsh light, her body looked serene, beyond vanity or grief.
The mortician paused. Her own reflection stared back at her from the curve of an instrument tray—tired, freckled, human. She looked again at the still face before her and felt something tight coil behind her ribs. Envy, perhaps, or reverence.
Without thinking, she brushed her gloved fingers across the woman’s cheek. The skin was cool, unresisting. Her hand lingered, tracing the jaw, the throat, the small constellation of freckles near the collarbone.
She leaned closer and, with a delicate touch, lifted one pale eyelid.
The eye beneath was a clouded pearl. Its milky sheen caught the light, and for a moment it seemed to look back—empty yet knowing. The mortician’s breath hitched. Every hair on her arm rose as if responding to static.
Her mind whispered a wordless question. Her body answered with hunger.
She reached for the small silver instrument on the tray. The handle felt heavier than it should, the air around her thicker. She hesitated—then began to work, as carefully as she might pick a flower.
When it was done, she lifted her hand and held the thing near her own gaze. The world tilted. In that suspended moment, she thought she saw her own reflection blink inside it.
She lifted the eye, holding it just beneath her gaze. It seemed impossibly small, yet heavy with the world it had seen. Her breath caught. The urge surged, a pulse she could not resist.
Without thinking, she parted her lips and brought it to her mouth. A shiver ran through her as she felt it touch her tongue, cold and strange. Her teeth closed around it… the eyeball popped, and then squelched as she chewed…
Elsewhere in Oslo, Damien stirred in a café on Karl Johans gate.
Steam curled from his coffee, ghosting the window. For no reason he could name, a shiver climbed the back of his neck. The street outside looked ordinary, but for an instant every passer-by seemed to turn their head toward him—like a roomful of eyes catching the same thought before looking away again.
She dropped the empty shell of the eye onto the tray. For a heartbeat the room felt heavier, as if the air itself had thickened around her. The fluorescent hum moved with her pulse.
Her hands trembled; she steadied them against the steel edge. The corpse remained unchanged—serene, embalmed—but her vision had shifted. Light cut harder; edges read like engravings. Shadows clung in places they had not before, and she could feel the absent gaze—those thin, stubborn echoes of memory and feeling she had swallowed.
A thrill ran up her spine with a trace of nausea. She closed her own eyes and saw flashes: the woman’s last small scenes—a street lamp guttering, curtains snapping in the wind, the dull mirror of rain on asphalt. The hunger that followed was patient and sure. One pair of eyes would not sate it.
She left the morgue with the instruments wrapped in a towel, a relic tucked against her chest. Night folded over the city in dull, wet layers. Her steps fit the geometry of the alleys she had watched for weeks—routes learned like the lines of a favourite book.
She watched from doorways while the city forgot them: a thin man curled under a plastic sheet, a woman slumped with a cigarette stub between fingers. They were not prey in any theatrical sense. They were the overlooked, the living folded into their private smallness. She moved like someone performing a rite—calm, economical, precise. Her hands were ritual; her face a smooth, unreadable surface.
When she approached there was no struggle. A cloth to a mouth, a steadying hand at shoulders, a breath that stilled. She worked the moment like a seam: find the weakness, ease it, part it.
At the body she was as tender as she had ever been with the dead. Her tools lay silver and ordered beside her. She lifted the lids as she had a thousand times; her fingers moved with embalmer’s certainty. The eye that met her was a tiny globe of streetlight and private sorrow. She held it up as if reading scripture.
She tasted it—brief, decisive—and everything shifted. Where others might have recoiled, she smiled inwardly as if someone had handed her a map. Images slid across her mind: a laugh that never reached morning, a child’s quick hand, the last slow twitch of a lamp. Hunger folded itself into strategy. One experiment; now a plan. The night around her seemed full of patient things.
She left the alley the way she had come: unseen, unspeaking.
Daylight had thinned to gray, but the city felt alive in a different key. Damien walked into the gallery because the heat of the café had made him restless and because, for reasons he could not name, he wanted to be among images that did not demand speech. The modern space smelled of paper and polish; walls were white and patient, and the paintings hung with a neutrality that asked nothing but attention.
He moved from frame to frame with the polite, slow attention of someone who wanted to forget a private jolt by replacing it with public stillness. A portrait caught him—large, cropped close: an anonymous face rendered in pale, precise strokes, eyes rendered with a kind of still intelligence that kept returning his look. For a second there was nothing unusual; then, as if the light in the room had slipped a fraction, the painted pupils seemed to reconfigure themselves and a blink he had not owned washed through him: the same reflected blink that had stopped him the day before.
He put his palm against the cool wall, steadying himself. The gallery murmured—other visitors shifting, a chair creaking—ordinary life. But the sensation sat under his sternum like a small stone. He felt watched and, inexplicably, intimate with some distant human flicker. The painting did not change. He had. He took a step back and noticed the tiny smudge of something on the frame, a fingerprint perhaps, and for a moment imagined it was the margin of a real eye’s film.
He left the gallery without finishing his route. The city reassembled around him—tram bells, a vendor calling—and yet his thought kept returning to the brief, borrowed blink. He did not know why it felt important; it only felt like an unclosed door.
By the time morning broke, Oslo’s streets were stirred with muted unease. The first two victims had been found in alleys hours apart, their absences catalogued in clinical coroner’s reports: clothing intact, no robbery or sexual assault, only a startling void where the eyes should have been. Officers exchanged tired, uneasy looks, running fingers along notes that spelled nothing comprehensible to ordinary minds.
Detectives traced patterns in maps and timelines, but the gaps between the bodies were murky, urban, and mundane enough to frustrate logic. Still, the press had already taken hold. A junior reporter, searching for narrative, attached a name to the void: The Eye‑Eater. Headlines appeared in yellowed fonts across online feeds: EYELESS VICTIMS FOUND IN OSLO — WHO IS THE EYE‑EATER? Tweets and discussion threads spun speculation into mythology. Television segments debated psychology and motive. Oslo’s citizens began to murmur about evening walks, alleys, and the shadows behind closed curtains.
To the mortician, these ripples were background noise. She listened to none of it. She walked the city streets knowing that her hunger, her compulsions, had names in the mouths of others—but they did not own her desire, nor could anyone yet grasp the rhythm that guided her steps.
Night had folded the streets in dark velvet. The third victim was easy to find, a presence almost radiating in its loneliness. The woman leaned against the wet brick of a backstreet near the club district, cigarette stub glowing faintly like a distant ember. The mortician saw her and the pull was immediate, uncompromising. This was not choice; it was a magnetic certainty. The city around them blurred.
She moved as though the air itself had carved a path, folding alleys into doors, shadows into conduits. Her approach was calm, measured—hands like ritual instruments, face unreadable. When the woman slumped—whether from exhaustion, surprise, or some invisible weight—it read to passersby as sleep. To the mortician it was an opening. She bent over her, patient and deliberate, receiving the private flashes of a life she would never return: laughter that had once carried through taxis, perfume drifting through winter air, a half-forgotten argument. She catalogued them inside herself and stepped away, leaving the alley neat, her own heartbeat quiet beneath the city’s hum.
A short walk from the alley brought her to the edge of the nightclub parking lot. Neon smeared across wet asphalt, crowd noise spilling into side streets. There, by the glint of a Range Rover, she saw him: young, charismatic, a local football hero whose face filled television screens and barroom conversations. Recognition struck like a chord: the compulsion was instant, a magnetic pull drawing her forward, quickening her steps.
She smiled, subtle and seductive, lifting her hand in greeting. The footballer’s eyes met hers. A flirtatious energy passed between them; he stepped closer. “Want some fun?” he asked, taking her hand and guiding her toward his car.
Her voice dripped with warmth, slow and intimate. “Your eyes… they’re impossible,” she murmured, leaning close. “Bright, alive… I could lose myself in them.” He laughed, charmed, unaware of the weight behind her words. The mortician let herself be led, the hunger inside her sharpening, pulling her focus like a lodestone.
Beneath the faint glow of club lights, they kissed. The music and laughter faded to a muffled hum, a backdrop to her single-minded compulsion. Her lips brushed his ear. “I want to see the world… through you,” she whispered, sultry and certain.
The moment stretched, taut and fragile. She tasted the shimmer of his life before it was gone—the warmth, the pulse, the echo of what had looked back at her. The city seemed to tilt slightly under her gaze; shadows deepened, light sharpened, and a thousand fleeting fragments of his existence spilled into her mind. Then, the act was complete.
When she finally stepped away, the footballer was gone. The night remained indifferent, but she carried the imprint of his sight inside her, a new layer added to the hunger that had already begun to name itself in whispers: unseen, inexorable, and alive.
Days had passed since the shiver in the café, and the city had grown restless under the weight of The Eye‑Eater headlines. Damien moved along Karl Johans gate, the pedestrian crowd a blur of coats and umbrellas. He wasn’t seeking a gallery this time; he had wandered into the Botanical Gardens, the muted green of winter plants and skeletal trees offering a fragile calm.
The crisp air carried scents of soil and frost, but something else threaded through it—an echo, subtle and insistent. He paused by a glasshouse, staring at a frost-rimmed fern, and the shiver returned, sharper this time. It was not fear, exactly; it was recognition, a faint resonance of someone else’s gaze reaching him across the city. He pressed a hand to his temple, blinked, and saw a flicker of something in the reflection of the glass: a shadowed figure, unseen, moving with intent.
The sensation lingered like a low hum in his chest, threading into the rhythm of the city. Children passed by, a tram rattled on iron rails, a dog barked somewhere distant—and yet he felt the pull, as if the world itself carried fragments of the nights’ events, and the echoes were pressing into him, personal, intimate, impossible to ignore.
Damien exhaled, slow and steady, trying to anchor himself. The Garden seemed peaceful, yet the resonance refused to fade. Somewhere, unseen, a life had been taken, consumed in a way that left traces in the air, and Damien could not unsee it, could not unfeel it. The city’s hum, the pedestrians’ chatter, the distant squeal of tires—it all seemed sharper now, tinted with the same unnatural precision he had first felt in the café.
Detectives huddled over case files in the cramped station, maps and notes scattered across the table. The first two victims had left no trace, no motive, no pattern they could pin down. Days of interviews, alley sweeps, and neighbourhood canvassing yielded nothing beyond frustration. Officers rubbed temples and shared weary glances; the city outside carried on, oblivious to the shadows that had passed through it.
One officer flicked the station TV on, hoping for background noise while scanning a witness statement. The room hummed with chatter until the anchor’s voice cut through, sharp and urgent.
“…and in a shocking development tonight, local football hero Erik Haldersen was found dead in his Range Rover in a nightclub parking lot. Authorities confirm that his eyes are missing. Police are investigating a possible connection to the so-called Eye‑Eater, the nickname given to the perpetrator behind a series of mysterious disappearances in Oslo.”
The station went quiet. Pens hovered above paper, coffee cups stilled mid-air. Every officer instinctively leaned closer, eyes drawn to the screen. Murmurs rippled through the room—fear, disbelief, and a sudden spike of urgency. Detectives exchanged grim looks; the pattern they had been chasing for days now had its first high-profile victim, and the implications were immediate.
The headlines were already shaping the narrative. Social media erupted, hashtags and posts buzzing with speculation. Talk shows dissected the story. Oslo’s citizens shivered collectively, recognising that the quiet series of disappearances was no longer confined to the invisible, the marginalised. The Eye‑Eater had claimed the city’s attention—and its most visible face.
The news anchor’s voice droned from the small screen in her apartment, but she barely heard the words. The image of the Range Rover flashed across the screen—empty eyes, lifeless body, headlines screaming EYELESS FOOTBALLER FOUND DEAD. She tilted her head, and something inside her shifted. Her pupils dilated, heart quickening.
Eyes were more than organs. They were gateways. Knowledge, memory, the pulse of life itself—all compressed in those tiny orbs. The realisation struck with the precision of a scalpel: through eyes, the world could be read. Through eyes, she could see, and through seeing she could hold power. The thought made her lips curve into a faint, private smile.
Her phone buzzed on the table. She picked it up and saw an invitation from a well-known social circle in Oslo—a formal gala, glittering names attached, prominent figures, politicians, even the prime minister of the city. The kind of event where appearances mattered, where influence and authority gathered under crystal chandeliers and polished floors.
She stared at the message, feeling the pulse of compulsion tighten in her chest. The invitation was more than opportunity—it was a conduit. Eyes to observe, eyes to touch, eyes to consume. The hunger inside her shifted, folding seamlessly into strategy.
A low laugh escaped her lips, soft and almost musical, as the city outside her window flickered in streetlight and rain. She had moved quietly through alleys, through shadows, through streets where the invisible were her companions. Now, she would step into the light, among the powerful, and her eyes would follow, always, unblinking.
The mortician set her phone down, fingers lingering over the sleek glass. For the first time, she felt untethered. The rules the city believed in—the laws, the morality, the expectation of restraint—were irrelevant. She had a new horizon: a stage where influence and desire could intersect, and the gateway of the eyes could open further than she had ever dared imagine.
The apartment was dim, lit only by the cool white of her vanity lights. She moved with ritual precision, brushing hair until it fell like dark silk, smoothing skin until it gleamed just so. Her eyes lingered on herself in the mirror, calculating, rehearsing the subtle shifts of expression, the sway of posture.
The dress she chose was scandalous in the most deliberate way: black silk, clinging and low-cut, cut to command attention without shouting it. Every curve, every shadowed line, had a purpose. Tonight, she would be seen. Not just looked at—measured, catalogued, devoured with the mind before anything else.
She applied her makeup with the same care she once reserved for the dead, sculpting eyes to be impossible to forget, lips to draw invitation and curiosity. The heels she selected clicked softly against the floor as she practiced the glide she knew would turn heads the instant she entered the room.
Her pulse quickened as she imagined the crowd: influential figures, politicians, power brokers, their gazes brushing over her like invisible maps she could read. And then, the thought that made her heart race: the one she was drawn to next—the target that the city itself had not yet realised existed—would be here. Eyes would meet eyes. She would be impossible to resist, irresistible in her design, and tonight, she would cross the line she had only skirted before.
Meanwhile, Damien knelt over the worn chessboard in Vigeland Park, the winter sun low and sharp across the sculpted figures of bronze. Opposite him, an older man with a patient, calculating stare moved a pawn, then leaned back, fingers steepled.
Damien’s mind, however, was not entirely on the board. He felt it again: that low, insistent thread running along his spine, faintly tingling behind his eyes. A presence, distant yet intimate, brushing past the edges of perception. The sensation was lighter than the day in the gallery, yet undeniable—like footprints in frost that only he could see.
He blinked, focusing on the chessboard, but a whisper of awareness remained. The chess master’s hand hovered over a rook, and Damien realised he had no real sense of the pieces, only of the pull tugging at his consciousness, a reminder that the city was no longer entirely ordinary.
She entered the ballroom like a shadow given silk and light. Heads turned; murmurs passed through the crowd, but she noticed nothing beyond the rhythms of desire and attention that pulsed toward her. Her eyes swept the room with the precision of a predator. Then they landed on him: the Prime Minister of Norway, commanding yet approachable, eyes sharp and wide.
A coy smile curved her lips; she bit her lower lip ever so slightly, letting the smallest flicker of invitation pass. A passing waitress offered a chute of champagne, and she accepted it with a graceful tilt of her hand, letting the glass catch the light just so.
He approached, introducing himself with a practiced charm. She laughed at his jokes—even the bad ones—letting her amusement drip with sultry cadence. Leaning close, she whispered something in his ear, a voice like velvet. His eyebrows rose, a flash of curiosity, and he offered her a quiet retreat—a room nearby where their conversation could continue unobserved.
Inside the dim room, the tension between control and compulsion thickened. The mortician moved with the calm certainty of one accustomed to being obeyed, her impulses sharpening. She pushes him firmly into a chair and straddles his legs, as she discreetly produces a small vial, waving it in front of his nose, the world tilted as the Prime Minister succumbed to sleep.
What followed was a private rite, unobserved, the act itself unrecorded and unspoken, yet the effect reverberated through her very being. When she stepped back, she carried more than a name—she carried power. Her chest rose and fell with exhilaration. From her purse she withdrew a scalpel, ripping open his shirt: carving her claim into legend.
“My name is Oculus Regina,” she whispered, letting the syllables hang in the air like a brand. The city outside remained blissfully unaware, but she felt the weight of her new identity pressing against her consciousness. She had crossed a threshold. The hunger was no longer hidden; it was sovereign, undeniable, and mythic.
The winter light in Vigeland Park was pale, filtered through the skeletal trees, but Damien barely noticed. His mind had been elsewhere for hours—pulled, tugged, stretched by something he could not name. And then it hit him: a presence, vast and undeniable, a pulse of consciousness that made the air hum around him. It was her—the mortician—but no longer constrained by alleyways or shadow. She had become something else. Something sovereign. Oculus Regina.
Every instinct in him screamed, but more than instinct: psychic awareness, subtle yet undeniable. He felt her reaching outward, stretching into the city, bending perception, threading life itself into her will. A shiver coursed through his spine, stronger than any before, a premonition of what she had claimed.
The old chess master, whose gaze had been quietly observing the board, spoke suddenly, breaking the taut thread of Damien’s focus:
“If eyes are the window to the soul, then dreams are the back door to the heart.”
Damien blinked, snapping back to the park, staring at the man. “Sorry?” he asked, still half-lost in the echo of her presence.
The chess master’s eyes gleamed. “If eyes are the window to the soul, then dreams are the back door to the heart,” he repeated, voice low and measured. Then, with a slight, knowing tilt of his head, he added, “The Infernal Games.”
Before Damien could respond, the distant wail of police sirens cut through the crisp air. Figures in uniform emerged from the street, boots crunching on frost‑rimmed paths. One officer, tall and imposing, stepped forward.
“Mr. Damien Beckett?” the man called, voice carrying authority and urgency. “I am Chief of Police. Anathema told us to find you… we need your help.”
The thread of psychic resonance still pulsed through Damien, sharp and insistent. He looked between the officers, then back toward the park’s edge, where shadows gathered in hints and whispers.
Damien’s hand hovered over the chessboard for a heartbeat longer, then he moved a piece decisively.
“Checkmate.”
The old chess master leaned forward, studying the board with narrowed eyes, then a slow smile curved his lips. “You won with ‘The Scholar’s Mate.’ Nice move, Sir.” He extended his hand, and Damien shook it firmly, a brief, grounding ritual before chaos swallowed the day.
Damien turned toward the Chief of Police, whose gaze was sharp and impatient. “Let’s go,” he said, his voice steady despite the ripple of dread coursing through him.
They strode toward the waiting cruiser. Damien slid into the front passenger seat, fastening his seatbelt, already scanning the city streets in his mind. Just as the Chief started the engine, the radio crackled sharply.
“Another victim, Sir… it’s the Prime Minister,” the dispatcher’s voice reported, urgent and strained.
The Chief’s eyes met Damien’s. No words were needed. “Buckle up,” he said. He slammed the siren switch, the wail tearing through the park’s quiet morning. Foot on the accelerator, the cruiser lurched forward, tires gripping the frost-lined asphalt as they tore into the streets.
The city had tipped into chaos. Damien felt the pulse of her power even now, stretching through the streets, threading life and perception into her will. The Infernal Games had begun—and every second counted.
The cruiser skidded into the hotel’s front entrance, tires crunching over frost and gravel. Officers had already cordoned the street, lights flashing red and blue, but the Chief moved with authority, cutting through the chatter. Damien leaned forward, senses stretched, the pulse of her presence threading through the walls.
Inside, an officer met them at the main entrance, his expression taut. “Sir, we’ve locked the hotel down. No one has left since the Prime Minister was found. We’ve secured all floors.”
“Take us to the room,” the Chief said, urgency in every word. The officer led them silently through the marble hallways, past terrified staff and hushed guests. The elevator doors opened, and the weight of stillness pressed around them.
The room door swung open, and Damien stepped inside. The body slumped on a chair, pale under the sterile hotel lighting, eyes absent. Letters were carved into the chest: Oculus Regina. Damien’s eyes narrowed, analysing, noting angles, pressure, and the precision of the markings.
He leaned closer, careful not to touch. “Surgical instrument,” he murmured. “Used to remove the eyes… precise. The letters carved into the chest—scalpel work. Whoever did this… knows exactly what they’re doing.”
The coroner, standing nearby, glanced at the Chief of Police, eyes wide. Without a word, he mouthed: Who is this guy?
Damien didn’t look at him directly, voice calm but carrying authority. “Damien Beckett,” he said, letting the words hang in the room. “At your service.”
The Chief’s jaw tightened. “Then we’re counting on you, Mr. Beckett. This… this isn’t ordinary.”
Damien allowed a faint, measured nod. “Nothing about this… is ordinary.”
Damien’s eyes flicked over the room one last time. A pulse, subtle but insistent, thrummed in the walls, the air, and even through the floorboards beneath their feet. She was moving again—Oculus Regina. The compulsion radiated outward, sharp, urgent. A foreign dignitary… and she would not hesitate.
He snapped upright, voice sharp. “Chief, follow me!”
Without waiting, he dashed from the room, boots clicking against the polished floor, scanning the corridor frantically. “Left… right… kitchen—where is it?” he barked, the psychic thread guiding his steps as much as sight or memory.
The Chief hurried after him, hand resting briefly on Damien’s shoulder to keep pace. “This way, Mr. Beckett,” he said, voice taut with tension, guiding him down a service stairwell that led toward the hotel’s restricted corridors.
Damien’s pulse raced, each step syncing with the distant, almost imperceptible pull of her presence. She was close. Too close. And he could feel the inevitability of her compulsion, a predator threading through human flesh, bending the rules of reality itself.
“We’re running out of time,” Damien muttered under his breath, eyes scanning every door, every shadow, every corridor intersection. The city outside remained oblivious, but inside these walls, the Infernal Games were reaching another apex.
The kitchens were quiet except for the clatter of pots and the faint sizzle of sauces. The foreign dignitary had strayed where he shouldn’t have been, sampling dishes, curious and unsuspecting. He didn’t hear her approach—Oculus Regina was already there, the air around her folding, drawing attention and desire without effort.
Her heels clicked softly against the tile, and when he finally looked up, she was there, a shadow of silk and intent. She smiled, slow and deliberate, letting her gaze linger, letting the weight of her presence press in.
“Curious taste,” she murmured, voice low and teasing, “but some flavours… are better shared.”
He laughed nervously, caught in the pull of something magnetic he could not name. The compulsion wrapped around him like a tide, soft but irresistible. He stepped closer, entranced by the grace, the dark invitation in her eyes.
She leaned in, voice like velvet against his ear, and the moment compressed into one perfect, inevitable decision. Time narrowed, and the world tilted, obeying her hunger and certainty.
Then came the sound: footsteps, rapid and determined, echoing through the kitchen corridor. She paused, letting the dignitary falter slightly, and in that instant, she dissolved into the shadows. A whisper of silk, a flicker of dark light—and she was gone.
Damien and the Chief of Police arrived seconds later, breath visible in the cold air, eyes scanning the empty kitchen. The dignitary was gone, leaving only the faintest traces of what had occurred, and a pulse of dread lingering in the tiles. They had arrived too late. Oculus Regina had struck again, untouchable, unseen, sovereign in her hunger.
Damien’s gaze snapped to the corner of the kitchen. A shadow, faint but alive, moved against the light—one that was not his own.
“Sorry, Chief… you won’t like this,” he said, voice low, eyes narrowing.
The Chief frowned, confusion furrowing his brow. Damien hunched his shoulders, a ripple running down his spine. Slowly, impossibly, shadow tendrils unfurled from his back, dark and sinuous, twisting across the kitchen floor and walls. They flared outward, reaching, searching.
Oculus Regina’s eyes widened. She backed toward the corridor, sensing the sudden, unnatural extension of Damien’s presence. Her calm, predatory control faltered for the first time.
A tendril lashed out, wrapping around her waist with a speed that made the air hiss. She screamed—half surprise, half disbelief—as she was lifted, slammed against the ceiling, then dropped to the floor in a controlled, terrifying display of force.
“There is your killer, Chief!” Damien’s voice echoed through the room as the tendrils retracted, folding back into his shadow and vanishing.
The Chief sprinted forward, eyes wide. “But… she’s a woman!” he shouted, disbelief mixing with adrenaline.
Another officer rushed in, freezing at the sight: the foreign dignitary slumped in the corner, and the woman sprawled on the floor, eyes sharp and calculating even in defeat.
“Check her handbag!” Damien barked, voice sharp.
The officer hesitated, then obeyed, unzipping the sleek leather bag. Inside were instruments of precise cruelty: a tool for removing eyes, a scalpel, and small vials, all arranged with methodical care.
Damien’s eyes met the Chief’s, calm but resolute. “This is who we’re dealing with,” he said, letting the weight of the discovery settle. “And we need to move… fast.”
They slapped the cuffs on with a dull, final clack.
Her hands protested, wrists reddening beneath cold steel. Around her, uniforms moved with efficient, studied pity; questions were barked, wrists were held, statements taken. She muttered as they guided her out—fragments at first, then a steady refrain: “Their eyes… their eyes… my sight—my sight—” Her voice threaded into mania. “They’re mine. I see with them. I see everything.”
She fought with the animal ferocity of someone refusing to yield a treasure. Her nails scraped leather and cuff, her body arced and twisted. They sedated her gently, then not so gently—the pharmacopeia of containment—and she went quiet, then slack, then breathing small.
The institution smelled of antiseptic and regrets. White corridors led to a room with one narrow window and bars on the inside of its blinds. They moved her there like a dangerous specimen, locked the door, and left a note on the bedside: High Security — Psychiatric Containment. She slept in the way the world gives prisoners sleep—brief, drugged, and shallow.
Days later, the sleep cracked.
Damien emerged from the folds of shadow at the corner of the room like a remembered scent. He did not walk; he unfolded himself into the light, a presence that did not quite belong to the fluorescent glare. Her eyes opened at the sound—wild, aware, the same hungry focus she’d carried through alleys and ballrooms.
“I’ll take your eyes,” she snarled, the promise more threatening than a plea. Her voice had a cracking edge, the compulsive certainty still flaring through the sedation’s residue.
Damien stepped forward slowly, every motion measured. “I am,” he said, low and almost amused, “what some call the Rex Umbrarum.” The words were a seal and a warning.
His palm brushed her brow like a winter wind. The touch was nothing, impossibly light, and everything changed.
Her pupils contracted, then widened in panic, and a gray film leapt over the irises as if night itself had been breathed into them. “I can’t see—” she gasped, voice shredding on the sentence. Her hands clawed at her face, as if physical sight were a thing she could tear back into being.
“What have you done?” she screamed.
He simply watched her panic, expression even, almost mournful. “No longer will you see,” he said, voice steady. “But the souls you stole will keep their sight alive inside you.” He let the sentence hang like a verdict.
Her screams filled the room, raw and animal. Images—snatches of the lives she had taken—spooled behind her eyelids, raw and unconsenting. The sedatives were useless against the onslaught; the new punishment was all memory and sound. She clawed at the sheets, tried to flay the visions away, but they multiplied like ghosts.
Damien stepped back into the shadow near the door, the edges of him already blurring. “Remember them,” he said quietly, and then the darkness took him, folding him whole.
Her last, long scream stretched into nothing as the door closed and the corridor returned to its antiseptic hush. In that silence, the institute’s watchers took notes and checked monitors. They would call it psychosis, or trauma, or a rare neurological phenomenon. The truth—an eye for conscience, a blindness repaid in haunting—would be something only a few would ever name.
