Into the Darkness: Chapter Two - Previous Chapter
Chapter 3
The night was thick with haze and heat when Damien reached the source of the sound — a heartbeat of bass rising from the cracked pavement like something alive. The club’s sign sputtered in red neon: The Velvet Spine. It hissed faintly, as though exhaling the town’s sins.
Inside, the world became motion and pulse. The air vibrated, soaked in sweat, perfume, and the bite of cheap alcohol. Strobe lights fractured the dark into shards — flashes of skin, lips, eyes, teeth — all moving to the rhythm of something primal. Laughter rose and broke like waves; bodies collided, merged, separated again. The music wasn’t just heard; it crawled along the skin, inside the chest, a second heartbeat.
Damien drifted through the crowd, a black coat cutting through sequins and silk. Around him, chaos reigned in exquisite abandon. Women clung to strangers, their fingers tracing promises they had no intention of keeping. Men leaned close, shouting offers, their hands finding hips, shoulders, rejection. Every motion was both invitation and denial — a cycle of hunger fed but never sated.
A girl appeared in front of him — dark eyes, glittering lips, a predator’s smile. She moved like smoke, hips rolling to the beat, hair brushing against him as if testing his reaction. Her hands rose, one finger tracing a slow path down her throat in silent invitation. Damien’s gaze flicked over her once, calm and detached, and then he stepped aside. The rejection was wordless, almost gentle, but final. She watched him go with a smile that curdled into something colder.
He reached the bar. The counter was slick with spilled drink and condensation, the wood sticky beneath his palm. Behind it, a bartender in a half-buttoned shirt barely looked up before asking, “What’ll it be?”
“Whiskey. Straight.”
The glass hit the counter with a dull clink. The liquid inside caught the light like melted gold. Damien lifted it, the scent sharp and warm, and for a moment the chaos around him blurred into background noise — a hive of lust and loneliness, humming and blind.
Then the air shifted. The temperature seemed to change.
A voice slipped through the music, low and close to his ear. “And what might your name be, stranger?”
He turned his head slightly. She was there — the woman in silver. Her dress shimmered like liquid metal, catching every errant beam of light. Up close, her beauty was both precise and unsettling, the kind that demanded attention rather than asked for it. Her eyes held no drunken blur, only calculation.
Damien said nothing at first. The ice in his glass cracked softly between them.
Her lips curved. “Silent type, then.”
She leaned in, her perfume strange — not sweet, but ancient somehow, like smoke and rain on stone. “That’s all right,” she whispered. “The quiet ones always have the loudest secrets.”
Damien finally met her gaze, and in that instant, the noise of the club seemed to recede again — as though the two of them stood outside time, caught in the slow spin of something neither could name.
The music built to another fever pitch. Someone screamed in delight. Glass shattered. But Damien didn’t look away.
The woman in silver regarded him with a smile that did not belong to the mortal world. It was too measured, too knowing — as if she were reading not his expression but the slow currents beneath it. Around them, the nightclub continued its delirious pulse, yet for Damien, sound had grown distant, muffled, like he stood underwater.
She tilted her head. “You don’t dance,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Most men do. Even the ones who pretend they don’t.”
Damien’s gaze flicked toward the crowd. “Most men,” he murmured, “aren’t me.”
She laughed, and even that seemed choreographed — low, resonant, carrying a vibration that brushed his spine. “No,” she said softly. “You’re not.”
Her hand hovered near his arm, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from her skin. There was something magnetic in that nearness — a pull just beyond reason, the suggestion of gravity itself bending toward her. For a second, he felt an ache in his chest, a faint rush in his blood as though the air itself conspired against him.
Then he blinked, and the feeling was gone.
“You’ve built yourself a fortress,” she said, eyes narrowing. “But even fortresses fall when someone knows the gate.”
The lights flickered overhead. For the briefest instant, the club changed. The dancing bodies became smudges of shadow, faces dissolving into shapes without form. A blackness pulsed behind the strobes — a presence, immense and unseen. And just as quickly, it was gone, replaced by the clamour of laughter and bass.
Damien frowned. “Power outage?”
She smiled again, slow and sharp. “Just the lights misbehaving. They always do when I’m around.”
He studied her more closely. The shimmer of her dress seemed almost alive — shifting hues that didn’t quite exist on the colour spectrum. She caught him watching and stepped closer, voice now barely a whisper.
“I own this place,” she said. “Every heartbeat in here owes me something. A glance, a kiss, a secret whispered in the dark. I take care of them… and in return, they keep me alive.”
Her fingers brushed the rim of his glass, and the whiskey darkened slightly, like ink spreading through water. Damien’s pulse faltered. He felt a slow dizziness that wasn’t from the drink.
“You should be careful,” she continued, her tone light, playful. “This place has a way of drawing out what people crave most.”
“What if I don’t crave anything?”
Her smile faltered — just for a heartbeat, but enough for him to see it. “Everyone craves something,” she said, too quickly.
The music throbbed again, louder than before, the bass now almost painful. Around them, the crowd swayed as one, as if the entire room were a single organism breathing in unison. The air thickened, shimmered, pulsed — and in the reflection behind the bar mirror, Damien thought he saw her shape blur, her silver glow expanding, tendrils of light snaking outward into the dancers.
When he turned to look directly, she was as she had been — elegant, human, perfectly still.
“You’re different,” she said, voice low and curious now. “I can feel it. You resist, even when you don’t mean to. That’s… rare.”
Damien looked at her, unblinking. “Maybe I just don’t dance to someone else’s rhythm.”
Her laugh returned, softer this time, but tinged with frustration. “We’ll see.”
The lights flared, the crowd cheered, and she vanished into the motion of the room — silver dissolving into smoke and rhythm — leaving Damien alone at the bar with an untouched drink.
Damien’s gaze wandered through the chaos of the floor until he found her — the woman in silver — standing at its center like the eye of a storm. The crowd seemed to bend around her, their movements slowing, drawn into the gravity of her poise. She lifted a hand and beckoned, a curl of her finger that said everything words could not.
Something inside him shifted. Thought fell away, replaced by a strange compulsion that felt older than will. The music pulsed through him like blood as he stepped forward, each stride heavier, slower, drawn by a rhythm that wasn’t his own.
When he reached her, she didn’t speak. Her eyes caught him — dark mirrors filled with light — and for a heartbeat the world stilled. Then he cupped her face, gently, as if she were made of glass, and kissed her. It was a deep, consuming thing, not born of choice but of gravity, the pull between two celestial bodies fated to collide.
The crowd erupted around them — laughter, screams, movement — but it all blurred into the low, humming silence of his pulse. She drew back, smiling, her breath cool against his cheek. Her fingers traced the outline of his jaw as she began to move again — a slow, deliberate dance that seemed to bend the air itself.
Her hips swayed, her body a line of molten rhythm, and every motion seemed choreographed for him alone. The lights flickered, painting her in alternating silver and shadow. She circled him, drawing closer, closer still, until he could feel the heat of her body against his.
Her eyes locked on his, unblinking. The space between them shimmered, thin as a thought.
He felt her power then — subtle at first, a thrum under his skin — and realised too late that the music wasn’t coming from the speakers anymore. It came from her, a low, resonant vibration that wound around his heart and whispered to his mind.
Desire and dread mingled in his veins, indistinguishable.
When she leaned in, her voice barely brushed his ear. “You see?” she murmured. “You do crave something.”
And then, as the lights flared white and the crowd dissolved into a swirl of motion, Damien felt the edges of his consciousness slip — not into pleasure, but into something darker, something that tasted like surrender.
The bass had slowed to a heartbeat. The air felt heavy, perfumed, electric. The woman in silver took Damien’s hand without a word, her touch feather-light but absolute in its command.
“Come,” she breathed, her voice more vibration than sound.
He followed. Each step up the narrow staircase was a descent into sleep. The music dimmed behind them until it was only a pulse beneath his ribs. The lights grew softer, warmer, the shadows longer. By the time they reached the landing, his body moved as if through water, obedient yet uncertain, a marionette caught between gravity and will.
The private room waited — curtains drawn, a faint incense in the air, mirrors catching slivers of amber light. A bed stood at its center, dressed in black silk that gleamed like a midnight lake. She guided him there, and he sank into it, his head swimming.
She stood above him, every motion deliberate, her silver dress rippling like quicksilver with each step. “You feel it, don’t you?” she whispered. “The pull between us.”
Her fingers traced the line of his jaw, then down the column of his throat. The touch was gentle, reverent, but beneath it hummed a hunger that belonged to something older than desire. Her power coiled around him, soft as fog and twice as inescapable.
He tried to speak but the words dissolved before reaching his tongue. The room seemed to breathe with her; the air itself leaned closer.
She smiled — and behind that smile was revelation. “You’re not like the others,” she said. “There’s something vast inside you. A spark I’ve hunted lifetimes to find.”
Her eyes flared faintly, mercury bright. “If I take it — just a taste — I will become what I was meant to be.”
The world tilted. Time stretched thin. Her hand pressed against his chest, and heat flooded through him, dizzying and cold at once. Outside, dawn was creeping up the horizon, pale light spilling through the cracks in the curtains.
She leaned closer, lips almost touching his ear. The air shimmered, the walls bending like the surface of water.
And then —
A voice.
Soft, clear, undeniable. It spoke not to his ears but inside his skull. Annabeth.
The name struck like a bell in the dark.
Damien exhaled the word without meaning to. “Annabeth.”
The woman in silver froze. The glow in her eyes flickered, guttered, died. The power that filled the room drained away like air from a punctured lung. She staggered back, confusion replacing hunger.
“What did you say?” she whispered, voice trembling.
Damien blinked, the haze lifting from his mind. The mirrors around them no longer shimmered; the incense burned low. He sat up slowly, the remnants of her spell falling from him like dust.
“Annabeth,” he said again, steadier this time.
The name hung between them, sharp and clean, a blade of memory cutting through the fog. The woman in silver shuddered, her expression cracking into something almost human — fear, disbelief, longing.
Outside, the first ray of dawn split the skyline, piercing the curtains. The light touched her dress, and the silver dulled to gray.
She turned away from him, voice breaking into a whisper meant for no one. “That name should not exist anymore.”
Damien stood, his pulse slow, his mind clear for the first time since entering the club. Somewhere in the back of his thoughts, the name echoed again, softer now, but alive — Annabeth.
He looked toward the door, then back at her, uncertain which of them had truly broken the spell.
The woman in silver dropped to her knees. The arrogance that had carried her through centuries was gone; in its place, a frantic, terrified hunger.
“Please,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “Give me your essence. I can’t live without it. I need what’s inside you… please!”
Her hands reached for him, trembling, her eyes wide and bright with desperation. She looked less like a temptress now and more like a dying creature begging the stars for mercy.
Damien stared down at her, confusion warring with revulsion. Something in him stirred — not pity, not anger, but an old instinct that whispered of truth. His breath came out cold.
“No,” he said quietly. Then louder, firmer — “No, Annabeth.”
The name struck the air like thunder.
She froze. Her mouth opened in silent disbelief as her eyes flooded with light. Then came the crack — faint, crystalline — the sound of stone breaking through flesh.
Her skin hardened, silver fading into marble, her limbs stiffening mid-reach. The transformation spread in waves, creeping up her arms, across her throat. She screamed once — not in pain, but in defiance — before her voice broke into dust.
In seconds, she was motionless.
A statue stood where she had been — perfect, eternal, a figure of beauty and terror carved by divine hands. The silver gown slid soundlessly from her petrified form, pooling at her feet. She looked like a goddess from an age long dead, caught forever between supplication and despair.
Damien stumbled backward, his heart pounding. “What the hell…” he breathed. “What the fuck…”
The room began to distort, the air thick with decay. The silk curtains frayed, mirrors cracked, and the scent of incense curdled into dust. The illusion peeled away layer by layer until the truth emerged: peeling wallpaper, rotting floorboards, and the bitter stench of neglect.
He turned, pushing out the door — and froze.
The nightclub below was unrecognisable. The dance floor that moments ago pulsed with light and life now stood in ruin. The people — the dancers, the lovers, the lost — had begun to unravel.
One man screamed as his skin withered in seconds, his youth collapsing into age and then ash. A woman clutched her face, her reflection in a shattered mirror showing nothing but hollow eyes. All around, the sound of bodies falling — not in death throes, but in release.
Damien stood at the edge of the stairs, watching as centuries of illusion crumbled. Each dying figure left behind only dust and echoes. The club was no longer a temple of desire but a tomb.
He descended slowly, each step crunching over what remained of those who had danced too long in Annabeth’s dream. The bass had fallen silent. Only the wind remained — low and mournful through broken glass.
At the door, he looked back one last time. The statue above gleamed faintly in the dawn light filtering through the cracks — sorrow carved in stone.
He exhaled, stepped into the morning, and the door closed behind him like the end of a spell.
Damien stumbled out into the dawn. The street lay quiet and pale, mist clinging to the edges of broken pavement. Behind him, The Velvet Spine stood hollow and gray, its neon sign dead at last. He crossed the road and sank onto a bench that had seen better years, his breath clouding faintly in the cold morning air.
His hands still trembled. He didn’t know whether from fear or exhaustion. The world felt thinner now, stretched taut after what he’d seen — as if something fundamental had been torn open.
From the corner of his eye, a shape lurched closer. A woman — old, clothes torn, eyes bright with the glazed film of drink. She staggered past him, then stopped, staring hard.
“Looks like you seen a ghost,” she slurred, the words rolling out heavy but not unkind.
Before he could answer, she shoved something against his chest — a half-empty bottle of vodka, the cheap kind that burned like acid.
He blinked, startled. “I don’t—”
She waved him off, already swaying away down the street, her laughter thin and cracked. “Keep it. You’ll need it more’n me.”
Damien watched her go until she vanished into the fog. He sat in silence for a long while, the bottle cold against his palm. Then he twisted the cap, took a long pull, and winced as the bitterness clawed at his throat.
“That was too close…”
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere — melodic, smooth, threaded with something ancient.
He froze. “Who’s there?”
A faint shimmer of sound, almost a sigh. “You ask a question you already know the answer to.”
He stared at the ground, jaw tightening. “Annabeth,” he said quietly. “Who was she?”
The reply was soft, but it carried the weight of centuries. “Annabeth of Love and Lust. Once a muse, then a goddess. She fell when her desire outweighed her devotion. She learned too late that hunger devours the hand that feeds it.”
Damien’s knuckles whitened around the bottle. “And what did she want from me?”
A pause — the kind that felt like a smile withheld. “Not you, Damien but your seed… for that is what gave her power...”
He looked up sharply, scanning the empty street. But the voice was gone, fading like a dream before waking.
He leaned back against the bench, the first light of the sun creeping over the rooftops. The bottle hung loose in his hand. His reflection stared back at him in the glass — eyes dark, tired, but alive.
The last of the vodka burned a trail down Damien’s throat. He swallowed hard, the warmth spreading for a fleeting moment before settling into the dull ache behind his ribs. With a soft clink, he set the empty bottle on the pavement beside the bench — a small, fragile monument to another night survived.
The world had gone still again. The fog was lifting, though not entirely. Above him, the clouds shifted in slow procession, their bellies bruised with the colours of dawn. He loosened his tie, pulled his jacket tighter across his chest, and let himself sink into the cold iron of the bench.
The quiet pressed close. The city’s heart still beat somewhere beyond — faint hum of traffic, a distant shout, the creak of waking life — but here, at this forgotten corner, everything felt suspended.
He watched the clouds drift, pale against a sky too bright for what he carried inside. His eyelids grew heavy. The exhaustion came not from the body but the mind — the kind that no sleep could mend, only delay.
As he hovered at the edge of dreams, a faint tremor rippled through his thoughts. Echoes of the woman in silver. The whisper of her plea. The name that had saved him. Annabeth.
He turned on his side, curling against the morning chill. The last thing he saw before sleep claimed him was a gull gliding across the rising sun, its cry thin and solitary — a sound that somehow felt like warning.
Then the world faded, and Damien drifted into an uneasy, shadowed sleep beneath the watchful sky.
Chapter 3
The night was thick with haze and heat when Damien reached the source of the sound — a heartbeat of bass rising from the cracked pavement like something alive. The club’s sign sputtered in red neon: The Velvet Spine. It hissed faintly, as though exhaling the town’s sins.
Inside, the world became motion and pulse. The air vibrated, soaked in sweat, perfume, and the bite of cheap alcohol. Strobe lights fractured the dark into shards — flashes of skin, lips, eyes, teeth — all moving to the rhythm of something primal. Laughter rose and broke like waves; bodies collided, merged, separated again. The music wasn’t just heard; it crawled along the skin, inside the chest, a second heartbeat.
Damien drifted through the crowd, a black coat cutting through sequins and silk. Around him, chaos reigned in exquisite abandon. Women clung to strangers, their fingers tracing promises they had no intention of keeping. Men leaned close, shouting offers, their hands finding hips, shoulders, rejection. Every motion was both invitation and denial — a cycle of hunger fed but never sated.
A girl appeared in front of him — dark eyes, glittering lips, a predator’s smile. She moved like smoke, hips rolling to the beat, hair brushing against him as if testing his reaction. Her hands rose, one finger tracing a slow path down her throat in silent invitation. Damien’s gaze flicked over her once, calm and detached, and then he stepped aside. The rejection was wordless, almost gentle, but final. She watched him go with a smile that curdled into something colder.
He reached the bar. The counter was slick with spilled drink and condensation, the wood sticky beneath his palm. Behind it, a bartender in a half-buttoned shirt barely looked up before asking, “What’ll it be?”
“Whiskey. Straight.”
The glass hit the counter with a dull clink. The liquid inside caught the light like melted gold. Damien lifted it, the scent sharp and warm, and for a moment the chaos around him blurred into background noise — a hive of lust and loneliness, humming and blind.
Then the air shifted. The temperature seemed to change.
A voice slipped through the music, low and close to his ear. “And what might your name be, stranger?”
He turned his head slightly. She was there — the woman in silver. Her dress shimmered like liquid metal, catching every errant beam of light. Up close, her beauty was both precise and unsettling, the kind that demanded attention rather than asked for it. Her eyes held no drunken blur, only calculation.
Damien said nothing at first. The ice in his glass cracked softly between them.
Her lips curved. “Silent type, then.”
She leaned in, her perfume strange — not sweet, but ancient somehow, like smoke and rain on stone. “That’s all right,” she whispered. “The quiet ones always have the loudest secrets.”
Damien finally met her gaze, and in that instant, the noise of the club seemed to recede again — as though the two of them stood outside time, caught in the slow spin of something neither could name.
The music built to another fever pitch. Someone screamed in delight. Glass shattered. But Damien didn’t look away.
The woman in silver regarded him with a smile that did not belong to the mortal world. It was too measured, too knowing — as if she were reading not his expression but the slow currents beneath it. Around them, the nightclub continued its delirious pulse, yet for Damien, sound had grown distant, muffled, like he stood underwater.
She tilted her head. “You don’t dance,” she said. It wasn’t a question. “Most men do. Even the ones who pretend they don’t.”
Damien’s gaze flicked toward the crowd. “Most men,” he murmured, “aren’t me.”
She laughed, and even that seemed choreographed — low, resonant, carrying a vibration that brushed his spine. “No,” she said softly. “You’re not.”
Her hand hovered near his arm, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from her skin. There was something magnetic in that nearness — a pull just beyond reason, the suggestion of gravity itself bending toward her. For a second, he felt an ache in his chest, a faint rush in his blood as though the air itself conspired against him.
Then he blinked, and the feeling was gone.
“You’ve built yourself a fortress,” she said, eyes narrowing. “But even fortresses fall when someone knows the gate.”
The lights flickered overhead. For the briefest instant, the club changed. The dancing bodies became smudges of shadow, faces dissolving into shapes without form. A blackness pulsed behind the strobes — a presence, immense and unseen. And just as quickly, it was gone, replaced by the clamour of laughter and bass.
Damien frowned. “Power outage?”
She smiled again, slow and sharp. “Just the lights misbehaving. They always do when I’m around.”
He studied her more closely. The shimmer of her dress seemed almost alive — shifting hues that didn’t quite exist on the colour spectrum. She caught him watching and stepped closer, voice now barely a whisper.
“I own this place,” she said. “Every heartbeat in here owes me something. A glance, a kiss, a secret whispered in the dark. I take care of them… and in return, they keep me alive.”
Her fingers brushed the rim of his glass, and the whiskey darkened slightly, like ink spreading through water. Damien’s pulse faltered. He felt a slow dizziness that wasn’t from the drink.
“You should be careful,” she continued, her tone light, playful. “This place has a way of drawing out what people crave most.”
“What if I don’t crave anything?”
Her smile faltered — just for a heartbeat, but enough for him to see it. “Everyone craves something,” she said, too quickly.
The music throbbed again, louder than before, the bass now almost painful. Around them, the crowd swayed as one, as if the entire room were a single organism breathing in unison. The air thickened, shimmered, pulsed — and in the reflection behind the bar mirror, Damien thought he saw her shape blur, her silver glow expanding, tendrils of light snaking outward into the dancers.
When he turned to look directly, she was as she had been — elegant, human, perfectly still.
“You’re different,” she said, voice low and curious now. “I can feel it. You resist, even when you don’t mean to. That’s… rare.”
Damien looked at her, unblinking. “Maybe I just don’t dance to someone else’s rhythm.”
Her laugh returned, softer this time, but tinged with frustration. “We’ll see.”
The lights flared, the crowd cheered, and she vanished into the motion of the room — silver dissolving into smoke and rhythm — leaving Damien alone at the bar with an untouched drink.
Damien’s gaze wandered through the chaos of the floor until he found her — the woman in silver — standing at its center like the eye of a storm. The crowd seemed to bend around her, their movements slowing, drawn into the gravity of her poise. She lifted a hand and beckoned, a curl of her finger that said everything words could not.
Something inside him shifted. Thought fell away, replaced by a strange compulsion that felt older than will. The music pulsed through him like blood as he stepped forward, each stride heavier, slower, drawn by a rhythm that wasn’t his own.
When he reached her, she didn’t speak. Her eyes caught him — dark mirrors filled with light — and for a heartbeat the world stilled. Then he cupped her face, gently, as if she were made of glass, and kissed her. It was a deep, consuming thing, not born of choice but of gravity, the pull between two celestial bodies fated to collide.
The crowd erupted around them — laughter, screams, movement — but it all blurred into the low, humming silence of his pulse. She drew back, smiling, her breath cool against his cheek. Her fingers traced the outline of his jaw as she began to move again — a slow, deliberate dance that seemed to bend the air itself.
Her hips swayed, her body a line of molten rhythm, and every motion seemed choreographed for him alone. The lights flickered, painting her in alternating silver and shadow. She circled him, drawing closer, closer still, until he could feel the heat of her body against his.
Her eyes locked on his, unblinking. The space between them shimmered, thin as a thought.
He felt her power then — subtle at first, a thrum under his skin — and realised too late that the music wasn’t coming from the speakers anymore. It came from her, a low, resonant vibration that wound around his heart and whispered to his mind.
Desire and dread mingled in his veins, indistinguishable.
When she leaned in, her voice barely brushed his ear. “You see?” she murmured. “You do crave something.”
And then, as the lights flared white and the crowd dissolved into a swirl of motion, Damien felt the edges of his consciousness slip — not into pleasure, but into something darker, something that tasted like surrender.
The bass had slowed to a heartbeat. The air felt heavy, perfumed, electric. The woman in silver took Damien’s hand without a word, her touch feather-light but absolute in its command.
“Come,” she breathed, her voice more vibration than sound.
He followed. Each step up the narrow staircase was a descent into sleep. The music dimmed behind them until it was only a pulse beneath his ribs. The lights grew softer, warmer, the shadows longer. By the time they reached the landing, his body moved as if through water, obedient yet uncertain, a marionette caught between gravity and will.
The private room waited — curtains drawn, a faint incense in the air, mirrors catching slivers of amber light. A bed stood at its center, dressed in black silk that gleamed like a midnight lake. She guided him there, and he sank into it, his head swimming.
She stood above him, every motion deliberate, her silver dress rippling like quicksilver with each step. “You feel it, don’t you?” she whispered. “The pull between us.”
Her fingers traced the line of his jaw, then down the column of his throat. The touch was gentle, reverent, but beneath it hummed a hunger that belonged to something older than desire. Her power coiled around him, soft as fog and twice as inescapable.
He tried to speak but the words dissolved before reaching his tongue. The room seemed to breathe with her; the air itself leaned closer.
She smiled — and behind that smile was revelation. “You’re not like the others,” she said. “There’s something vast inside you. A spark I’ve hunted lifetimes to find.”
Her eyes flared faintly, mercury bright. “If I take it — just a taste — I will become what I was meant to be.”
The world tilted. Time stretched thin. Her hand pressed against his chest, and heat flooded through him, dizzying and cold at once. Outside, dawn was creeping up the horizon, pale light spilling through the cracks in the curtains.
She leaned closer, lips almost touching his ear. The air shimmered, the walls bending like the surface of water.
And then —
A voice.
Soft, clear, undeniable. It spoke not to his ears but inside his skull. Annabeth.
The name struck like a bell in the dark.
Damien exhaled the word without meaning to. “Annabeth.”
The woman in silver froze. The glow in her eyes flickered, guttered, died. The power that filled the room drained away like air from a punctured lung. She staggered back, confusion replacing hunger.
“What did you say?” she whispered, voice trembling.
Damien blinked, the haze lifting from his mind. The mirrors around them no longer shimmered; the incense burned low. He sat up slowly, the remnants of her spell falling from him like dust.
“Annabeth,” he said again, steadier this time.
The name hung between them, sharp and clean, a blade of memory cutting through the fog. The woman in silver shuddered, her expression cracking into something almost human — fear, disbelief, longing.
Outside, the first ray of dawn split the skyline, piercing the curtains. The light touched her dress, and the silver dulled to gray.
She turned away from him, voice breaking into a whisper meant for no one. “That name should not exist anymore.”
Damien stood, his pulse slow, his mind clear for the first time since entering the club. Somewhere in the back of his thoughts, the name echoed again, softer now, but alive — Annabeth.
He looked toward the door, then back at her, uncertain which of them had truly broken the spell.
The woman in silver dropped to her knees. The arrogance that had carried her through centuries was gone; in its place, a frantic, terrified hunger.
“Please,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “Give me your essence. I can’t live without it. I need what’s inside you… please!”
Her hands reached for him, trembling, her eyes wide and bright with desperation. She looked less like a temptress now and more like a dying creature begging the stars for mercy.
Damien stared down at her, confusion warring with revulsion. Something in him stirred — not pity, not anger, but an old instinct that whispered of truth. His breath came out cold.
“No,” he said quietly. Then louder, firmer — “No, Annabeth.”
The name struck the air like thunder.
She froze. Her mouth opened in silent disbelief as her eyes flooded with light. Then came the crack — faint, crystalline — the sound of stone breaking through flesh.
Her skin hardened, silver fading into marble, her limbs stiffening mid-reach. The transformation spread in waves, creeping up her arms, across her throat. She screamed once — not in pain, but in defiance — before her voice broke into dust.
In seconds, she was motionless.
A statue stood where she had been — perfect, eternal, a figure of beauty and terror carved by divine hands. The silver gown slid soundlessly from her petrified form, pooling at her feet. She looked like a goddess from an age long dead, caught forever between supplication and despair.
Damien stumbled backward, his heart pounding. “What the hell…” he breathed. “What the fuck…”
The room began to distort, the air thick with decay. The silk curtains frayed, mirrors cracked, and the scent of incense curdled into dust. The illusion peeled away layer by layer until the truth emerged: peeling wallpaper, rotting floorboards, and the bitter stench of neglect.
He turned, pushing out the door — and froze.
The nightclub below was unrecognisable. The dance floor that moments ago pulsed with light and life now stood in ruin. The people — the dancers, the lovers, the lost — had begun to unravel.
One man screamed as his skin withered in seconds, his youth collapsing into age and then ash. A woman clutched her face, her reflection in a shattered mirror showing nothing but hollow eyes. All around, the sound of bodies falling — not in death throes, but in release.
Damien stood at the edge of the stairs, watching as centuries of illusion crumbled. Each dying figure left behind only dust and echoes. The club was no longer a temple of desire but a tomb.
He descended slowly, each step crunching over what remained of those who had danced too long in Annabeth’s dream. The bass had fallen silent. Only the wind remained — low and mournful through broken glass.
At the door, he looked back one last time. The statue above gleamed faintly in the dawn light filtering through the cracks — sorrow carved in stone.
He exhaled, stepped into the morning, and the door closed behind him like the end of a spell.
Damien stumbled out into the dawn. The street lay quiet and pale, mist clinging to the edges of broken pavement. Behind him, The Velvet Spine stood hollow and gray, its neon sign dead at last. He crossed the road and sank onto a bench that had seen better years, his breath clouding faintly in the cold morning air.
His hands still trembled. He didn’t know whether from fear or exhaustion. The world felt thinner now, stretched taut after what he’d seen — as if something fundamental had been torn open.
From the corner of his eye, a shape lurched closer. A woman — old, clothes torn, eyes bright with the glazed film of drink. She staggered past him, then stopped, staring hard.
“Looks like you seen a ghost,” she slurred, the words rolling out heavy but not unkind.
Before he could answer, she shoved something against his chest — a half-empty bottle of vodka, the cheap kind that burned like acid.
He blinked, startled. “I don’t—”
She waved him off, already swaying away down the street, her laughter thin and cracked. “Keep it. You’ll need it more’n me.”
Damien watched her go until she vanished into the fog. He sat in silence for a long while, the bottle cold against his palm. Then he twisted the cap, took a long pull, and winced as the bitterness clawed at his throat.
“That was too close…”
The voice came from nowhere and everywhere — melodic, smooth, threaded with something ancient.
He froze. “Who’s there?”
A faint shimmer of sound, almost a sigh. “You ask a question you already know the answer to.”
He stared at the ground, jaw tightening. “Annabeth,” he said quietly. “Who was she?”
The reply was soft, but it carried the weight of centuries. “Annabeth of Love and Lust. Once a muse, then a goddess. She fell when her desire outweighed her devotion. She learned too late that hunger devours the hand that feeds it.”
Damien’s knuckles whitened around the bottle. “And what did she want from me?”
A pause — the kind that felt like a smile withheld. “Not you, Damien but your seed… for that is what gave her power...”
He looked up sharply, scanning the empty street. But the voice was gone, fading like a dream before waking.
He leaned back against the bench, the first light of the sun creeping over the rooftops. The bottle hung loose in his hand. His reflection stared back at him in the glass — eyes dark, tired, but alive.
The last of the vodka burned a trail down Damien’s throat. He swallowed hard, the warmth spreading for a fleeting moment before settling into the dull ache behind his ribs. With a soft clink, he set the empty bottle on the pavement beside the bench — a small, fragile monument to another night survived.
The world had gone still again. The fog was lifting, though not entirely. Above him, the clouds shifted in slow procession, their bellies bruised with the colours of dawn. He loosened his tie, pulled his jacket tighter across his chest, and let himself sink into the cold iron of the bench.
The quiet pressed close. The city’s heart still beat somewhere beyond — faint hum of traffic, a distant shout, the creak of waking life — but here, at this forgotten corner, everything felt suspended.
He watched the clouds drift, pale against a sky too bright for what he carried inside. His eyelids grew heavy. The exhaustion came not from the body but the mind — the kind that no sleep could mend, only delay.
As he hovered at the edge of dreams, a faint tremor rippled through his thoughts. Echoes of the woman in silver. The whisper of her plea. The name that had saved him. Annabeth.
He turned on his side, curling against the morning chill. The last thing he saw before sleep claimed him was a gull gliding across the rising sun, its cry thin and solitary — a sound that somehow felt like warning.
Then the world faded, and Damien drifted into an uneasy, shadowed sleep beneath the watchful sky.