> Suggested Instrumental:
🎵 "Experience" by Ludovico Einaudi — slow, sorrowful piano; emotional crescendo. Let it play low in the background.
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Lucian hadn't fed in days.
He didn't need to. Not really. Hunger had become a shadow he danced with rather than obeyed. Yet something else gnawed at him now — something more ravenous than thirst.
The fire still lingered from the dream.
The vision.
Kyrell's eyes, wide and dark, full of something unspeakable. His breath had tasted like ash and memory. His presence clung to Lucian's skin like smoke.
He stood at the edge of the broken cathedral, gazing down at the empty streets below. Shadows bled across the stone, and night came with the kind of silence that roared. There was nothing to see — yet Lucian felt him.
As if Kyrell had left something behind in that vision. A scent. A stain.
A pull.
Lucian clenched his gloved hand. His fingertips burned beneath the leather.
He hadn't believed in fate, not since the war, not since he was turned. But whatever this was — this reappearance, this haunting — it was no coincidence. It couldn't be. The boy from the forest… the man on the rooftop... Kyrell. The name itself throbbed in Lucian's skull like a secret trying to wake.
He vanished before Lucian could ever touch him. Twice now. Just out of reach.
What did that mean?
He turned, footsteps echoing through the chapel's hollow bones. The cross above the altar had long since fallen, leaving a shadow like wings against the wall. He thought of Kyrell standing there, bathed in twilight.
Lucian should've been afraid.
But all he felt was… drawn. And angry about it.
He went down into the catacombs. His haven. The only place the noise of the world couldn't follow.
And there — buried in dust, candles, and silence — the scent came back.
Salt. Heat. That strange wild thing — like damp earth and sin.
Lucian stopped moving.
Closed his eyes.
A whisper unfurled through the cavern, curling around his ears.
"You're not the only one who remembers, Lucian..."
His breath caught.
He hadn't said his name aloud. Not in days. Not since the dream.
He opened his eyes to find no one. Nothing. Just the stillness. Just himself.
But something had shifted. The air was no longer empty.
And the flame inside him — the one he'd buried decades ago — it burned.