June 10th, 2025
Hugo Hollands, Age 24
-----------------------------------------------
The sound started small—a digital voice bleeding through Poppy's phone, threaded with street noise and laughter. We were sitting by the window of her shared dorm room, the curtains drawn halfway against the glare. The city outside was alive, murmuring through the thin glass.
"Everyone's been talking about that guy on the streets named Hugo," the vlogger said, their tone bright and mocking. "He's been doing all sorts of weird stuff with cards—moving them like he's got invisible strings or something."
Then came the clips. A shaky phone camera. My own face half-lit by daylight, a grin pulling at my mouth while cards twisted in the air around me—thirty, maybe forty of them—swirling in rhythm to the crowd's laughter. Children from the street stood close, eyes wide, and a few older men clapped in disbelief. In the clip, I looked alive. Too alive.
Views were climbing. Comments were hunting surnames. The kind of attention that knocks on doors you forgot you had.
Poppy turned the volume down, her hand trembling slightly as she lowered the phone to her lap. She looked up at me, eyes round with worry. The light from the screen still flickered across her face, blue and uneven. "Hugo," she said quietly. "What the hell is that?"
I leaned back in the chair, grinning despite the sudden dryness in my throat. "What do you think?"
She blinked, as if hoping I'd tell her it was just another trick, another illusion made clever by practice. "I—I don't know," she said. "Are you sure this is okay?"
"It's only the beginning."
The words came out steadier than I expected, almost detached. Behind me, Corrin sat on the armrest of the worn couch, one leg crossed over the other, his gaze on the window instead of us. "Atta boy," he murmured, his voice carrying that strange blend of mockery and approval.
Poppy's head snapped toward him. She stared for a moment, uneasy, as though she'd only just noticed how out of place he looked in the room—immaculate where everything else was unkempt, too still for someone alive. Then she turned back to me and lowered her voice. "Is this your new love interest?"
My grin vanished. "No."
"Then why are you even hanging around this guy?" she asked, still whispering, as if his name itself might stir him. "I mean, yeah, he's hot, but—why?"
"He helps me," I said. "A lot."
Poppy frowned. "That?" She pointed at him, incredulous.
Corrin turned his head slowly, eyes meeting hers like a knife meeting its reflection. "I can hear you, Pamela."
She froze, the color draining from her face. "I don't like when people call me Pamela."
"Oh," he said, voice soft, almost lazy. "Too bad."
Poppy didn't flinch. "Then I'll call you Pam," she said, soft as a knife. "Short for pampered."
His smile held, but it didn't reach his eyes.
The air in the room seemed to shrink, drawn tight around his words. Poppy looked at me again, the edge of fear behind her irritation, as if she had sensed something beneath his calm that language couldn't name. I looked at her but said nothing.
The phone screen had gone dark, but the image stayed behind my eyes. My own grin—stiff, too bright—still hung there, framed by that cheap halo of daylight. It looked like me, yet not me at all. There was something in the air around that version of myself, something stretched, wrong, as if the light bent differently for him.
I sat there long after the room quieted. Corrin was somewhere behind me, still and unconcerned. Poppy was near the window, the glow from her phone dying against her palm. I couldn't stop thinking about how easily everything had turned—how a night of playing with cards and flame had become a story told by strangers. It should have unsettled me, being seen like that, passed from one pair of hands to another, but all I felt was a sharp thrill under my ribs. They knew my name. They watched. For the first time, the world seemed to turn toward me, not away.
When Corrin had first appeared, I thought he was punishment—some dream-shaped thing sent to remind me of what I had done. But he had become proof instead. Proof that the hunger I'd carried all these years had direction. Proof that I wasn't wrong to believe there was something more than survival. It was terrifying, yes, but also intoxicating—the feeling that I had crossed a threshold and found what others only whispered about.
Igor used to stand beneath those theater lights, every movement a command. When I was a boy, I used to watch him on the small TV in Odette's house, trying to copy the flick of his wrist with a deck that never obeyed. I wanted what he had—the control, the awe, the way the room seemed to stop breathing for him. Now, I was close. Too close, maybe. The tricks no longer felt like illusions. The air itself bent when I willed it, the cards trembled because I told them to. That was not imitation anymore. It was becoming. Not imitation. Not even talent. Consent from the air.
Poppy's voice still lingered in my head, threaded with worry. Her eyes had searched mine as though trying to find the boy she used to patch together from ruin. I could still hear the break in her voice when she said my name—half plea, half disbelief. She looked at me the way Riley once did, as if I were a fire that might eat itself. I wanted to tell her it was fine, that I was finally getting somewhere. But I didn't. Because a part of me knew that if she looked too closely, she'd see it—the thing behind my smile, the new weight in my hands.
I thought about Harry then. I always did, when someone said my name with worry. He would have believed in the video, would have thought it clever and brave. He always had that kind of faith in me, the soft, foolish kind. I could almost hear him laugh, see him shaking his head and saying I'd gone too far again. He wouldn't know how right he was.
The truth was, I didn't know where the line was anymore—between miracle and trespass, between my own will and what Corrin had placed inside me. Every time I summoned the flame, every time the cards moved, I felt something answer from somewhere deeper. It was his power, I knew that, but it began to sound like my own heartbeat.
There was a cost. I could feel it already. Each time I reached for that force, it took a piece of something I couldn't name—memory, maybe, or conscience. Yet it didn't matter. The loss was clean. It made sense. I could live with it.
Corrin had told me compassion ruined faster than hatred, and I believed him now. Love, guilt, tenderness—those were the things that made you hesitate. Power asked for movement, not mercy. It didn't care who you used to be.
The screen in Poppy's hand dimmed completely, my reflection gone from it. But in the quiet that followed, I realized it didn't need to glow anymore. The image had already left its mark. I had seen what I could become, and that was enough to keep me burning.
The door clicked shut behind us, sealing the night outside. The air in the room was still heavy with the scent of detergent and stale hotel linen, that neutral sort of cleanliness that always felt rented. Corrin walked in first, as if the place already belonged to him, and set his jacket on the chair without looking at me.
I turned toward him. "You've been staying with me in the same room for about four days now," I said. "Why don't you go to the other one?"
He raised an eyebrow, voice smooth and unhurried. "What are you getting at? I told you time and time before—I'm your companion. The other room is only there for the illusion of choice. For comfort. Or for when you start to smell. But you've been taking regular showers since we arrived, so it's fine."
I scoffed. "You're a devil, and you hate bad smells?"
"Of course I do," he replied. "I have a nose. I can smell, unfortunately. Or luckily. The smell of gasoline gets me going."
That caught me off guard. I laughed, rubbing a hand through my hair. "Gasoline?"
He only shrugged.
I peeled my shirt off, tossing it somewhere near the foot of the bed before collapsing backward onto the sheets. The mattress dipped beneath me, swallowing the noise of the outside world. "I'm so knackered," I muttered.
Corrin leaned against the wall, arms crossed. "Eddie seems like he doesn't like when things go well for you."
I blinked up at the ceiling. "What?"
"He always has something to say about you or your progress," Corrin said. His tone was quiet, deliberate. "He looks down on you, pretends it's concern, but it's envy. I think he resents you."
"Eddie?" I laughed weakly. "No way."
"Really?" Corrin pushed off the wall and came to sit on the edge of the bed. "You trust him that much?"
"I trust Eddie with my life," I said. "He gets defensive sometimes because he likes to sound right, but I know he means well."
Corrin tilted his head slightly. "Oh, is that so? Then why doesn't he praise you at all? I know the magic thing is mad, but if it's real, if it's yours, why can't he just be happy for you?"
I didn't answer. His words fell into the quiet and stayed there, circling.
I had always seen the way Eddie looked at me—like I was still something he needed to hold up to the light to see if it was worth keeping. Like an underling, or a little brother who hadn't learned enough to be trusted on his own. Every time I spoke about what I wanted to do, his mouth would twitch as if he already knew better. He never said it outright, but I could feel it. In the pauses. In the sighs. In the way he'd nod halfway through my sentences, just to end them.
And Corrin's voice, sharp as it was, only touched what I'd been thinking for years. It was strange hearing it spoken aloud—those small doubts I had always buried under the weight of loyalty.
Maybe Eddie didn't want me to stand on my own. Maybe it comforted him to keep me within reach, to believe I'd always need him. Since Riley died, he'd been tighter, more possessive in the way he worried. He'd tell me what not to do, but never what I did right. He never said he was proud. Never said he believed in me.
I stared at the ceiling, tracing the uneven glow of the light fixture. For a moment, the quiet between Corrin and me felt like a confession.
And I hated that the devil had said something that felt true.
Corrin had his back to me, sitting at the edge of the bed like some carved thing that forgot what it meant to rest. The lamplight haloed his shoulders, turning the shape of him sharper, unreal. For a long while, he didn't move, didn't breathe in a way that looked human. It bothered me how composed he was, how nothing seemed to touch him.
I lay on my side, watching him. "Do you have any emotions?" I asked finally. "Like, do you feel anything at all?"
He scoffed, a dry sound, almost like a laugh. "I do feel things," he said. "They're just not the same as yours. Not the way you feel them."
"Like what?"
He turned his head slightly, eyes reflecting a dull shimmer from the lamp. Then he sighed, as if he'd grown tired of the language already. "What did you feel when your aunt threw you out of her house?"
I blinked at the ceiling. "Resentment," I said. "Anger. Helplessness. A lot of terrible things."
He nodded once, slow and deliberate. "Pretty close. But not strong enough."
"Not strong enough for what?"
"To do something about it," he said, his tone careful, almost conversational. "It wasn't so strong that you barged back in there, stabbed that woman, and took the house for yourself. Because somewhere, deep down, you had sense. You thought about the consequences. You knew you'd get caught. Thrown in jail like your father. An endless cycle."
I stared at the folds of the blanket beneath my hand. "I always thought of prison as something terrifying," I said quietly. "When I used to call my dad there, he'd tell me things that made me sick to hear—what they made him do, what he had to be. Later, I understood what it meant when people said you become someone's bitch in prison."
Corrin said nothing.
"I felt sorry for him sometimes," I went on. "But not enough to really ache for him. And sometimes—sometimes I thought he had it better than I did. He's got a roof over his head. Meals. Water. A gym. Things I didn't have when I was sleeping on the streets. Isn't that strange? That being free means having less than the ones who are locked away?"
He turned a little, just enough for me to see the edge of his profile. "You're romanticizing jail now? Because you don't have what your father has in there?" His voice carried a thin, dangerous humor. "What—you'd rather be someone's bitch than be here, walking free?"
I gave a short laugh, empty and soft. "I was already a lot of people's bitch," I said. "It wouldn't be much different. At least in there, someone would be protecting me."
Corrin exhaled through his nose, then shut his eyes tightly, as though the conversation itself had given him a headache. "You spew a lot of madness sometimes," he said. "I don't know if I'm hearing you correctly or if this body's ears are defective, but what you're saying—" he opened his eyes again, slow, gleaming with dry amusement—"is deranged. And I'm a devil. Yet hearing it from you…" He smiled faintly. "It's almost refreshing. Go ahead then, boy. Go to jail. Sounds right."
I laughed once under my breath, but it didn't sound real. The room settled into a long silence, the kind that hums with things unsaid. Corrin stayed there, still turned away from me, and for the first time I wondered if he really did feel anything—or if what he called emotion was only another trick of his nature, a shadow made to keep me believing he understood.
The air between us was still carrying that last bitter edge of the conversation when my phone began to ring. The sound startled me. It broke through the heaviness of the room like a ripple in standing water.
I reached for it too quickly, as though the voice waiting on the other end could pull me back to something cleaner. "Hey, Harry."
There was noise in the background—street chatter, the sweep of traffic. "Hey," he said, his voice warm and steady. "I'm still in Ebonreach. Leaving this weekend. Thought we could hang out before I go?"
A breath slipped out of me, somewhere between relief and ache. "Yeah, sure. When?"
"I can come to you," he said. "Where are you staying?"
I hesitated, the question catching like a thorn. My eyes moved toward Corrin. He was watching, of course—always watching, always listening with that quiet, surgical attention. I felt his gaze before I saw it. "I'm… staying at Evergarden's Hotel," I said finally.
Harry paused, almost laughing. "A hotel? Since when do you stay at hotels? Anyway, okay. I'm coming."
Before I could answer, the line went dead.
I lowered the phone slowly, the aftersound of his voice still caught in my head. Corrin's gaze followed the movement of my hand. He didn't speak until I looked up.
"My cousin's coming," I said.
He smirked. "Why did you invite him here?"
"What difference does it make?" I asked. "You're going to be there anywhere I go."
His eyes glinted with something unreadable—an old knowing, or maybe irritation. "No. This time I can't. So I'll take my leave before your cousin gets here."
It took me a moment to understand he meant it. "You're leaving?"
He stood, adjusting the cuff of his sleeve, expression calm, deliberate. "For now."
Before I could ask why, he was already at the door. He didn't look back when he left, and the soft click of the latch sounded too final for what it was.
I sat there for a long while, the silence heavy, almost disorienting. The room seemed to breathe differently without him. I ran a hand through my hair, the strands still carrying the smell of cheap soap and dust. My reflection in the blackened TV screen looked smaller, hollowed at the edges.
I didn't like the quiet. Not because I missed him—at least, I didn't think I did—but because his absence made me realize how constant he had become. He followed me everywhere. To meet Eddie, to walk through the city, even when I wanted only to smoke and be left alone. He stood too close, spoke too easily, filled every inch of space I had left to myself.
And yet, without him, the air felt strange. Unsteady.
I owed him—there was no denying that. The power he'd given me still pulsed under my skin, the way the fire answered to my will, the cards that moved like they'd been waiting for my command all along. That part of me belonged to him now, and I knew it. But gratitude had begun to feel too much like servitude.
I leaned back against the sofa and closed my eyes, the quiet pressing in from all sides. I needed to breathe again, to stand without his shadow stitched to mine. Before it became something permanent. Before I stopped remembering where he ended and I began.
Because I could feel it already—the pull tightening. And whatever this was between us, it was only going to get worse.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Corvian, 3180
----------------------------
The adjoining room was unlit save for the low spill of city glow slipping through the curtains. It pressed against the carpet like residue—gray, sluggish, unclean. I sat near the window, watching Ebonreach stir beneath me, a sprawl of crooked lights and motion. Human noise filled the air, that endless murmur of lives devouring themselves.
I have served their kind longer than I care to count. They tell their children stories of guardian things as if the tale were comfort—an attendant at the cradle, a shadow that watches so the world will not. In truth, the custom is older and nastier than bedtime gentleness. When a child is born, a watcher is set at their side: not always a thing of strength, sometimes a thin, new thing that will not endure. There are cultures that do not trust that first watcher; they will steal its hunger away with ritual. The sacrifice is crude or merciful depending on the hand that performs it—an animal's throat cut at the doorstep, coin placed in the palms of beggars, a widow's alms given in strict, scripted measure. The idea is the same: feed the world outward, starve the attendant inward. Kill the spark before it learns to burn.
If the deed succeeds, the original watcher dies and is replaced by another, a colder, more patient thing. If it fails, the watcher remains, and the child grows with a companion who has seen them from their first breath. That is the cruel law I have watched for centuries: devils do not find us later. We are there from their smallest moments. We watch the teeth come in, the first lies practiced on an older sibling, the first prayer whispered into a pillow. We learn the shape of a human in ways the human does not yet know himself.
They grow together. The watcher matches the child stride for stride; small resentments deepen under our gaze until they become strategy, halting glances harden into resolve, petty cruelties blossom into tools. By the time the human is old enough to speak the language of bargains, the attendant knows how to point him toward his hunger. It is a slow business, one of patient arithmetic: a desire planted here, a slight temptation there, until one day the taste is appetite and appetite demands currency.
Most summons I accompanied were neat transactions. A noble wanted coin; a saint wanted certainty; a heretic wanted to overthrow the world and rewrite its debts. They lit the correct candles, spoke the tidy names, offered the right blood. They believed themselves first-askers, but always the end was the same—ambition eats its possessor. They fell in patterns I could predict while their hands still trembled with the posterity of fear. I learned to chart their ruin like cartographers map currents; greed shows in the eyes long before the hands betray it.
Hugo's call twisted that map. He had not summoned with the sharp intent of someone who knows the language. His invocation was a child's knot—tied wrong, every loop skewed by ignorance. There was no precise demand for fire or coin. He did not offer names or banners or clever clauses. He had, at the worst hour, said aloud the thing most mortals never admit: see me. That sound traveled like a low, ragged bell through the thin places, and it found me.
It unsettled me. Not because the sound was foreign—lust and rage are old and familiar—but because it demanded presence rather than pact. A human asking to be seen was a mistake, a misworded prayer, and those missteps fascinate. We are instruments of transaction; we arrive when terms are clear. To be called simply to attend, to witness, was to be asked into something unaccountable. The proper response, by every rule written into my knowing, should have been to ignore it. Weakness is not worth the trouble; devils prefer currency that multiplies.
Instead, the other watchers who circled him—thin things grazing the edges of his life—chose to do nothing. They had watched him slump through years of neglect and small cruelties and decided he would spoil soon enough on his own. They were efficient in their apathy. He simmered beneath their quiet. He was, in their judgement, not worth the labor of eating.
Then he struck a note so raw and wide that even the idle things heard it. He did not call for mastery; he called for witness. For that alone, I crossed a threshold I did not expect to cross. I came because the sound had no barter in it; it was a hunger not for goods but for acknowledgment. That irritated my sense of neatness. It also amused me. Gods and bargains make sense. Loneliness does not. Loneliness is an erratic thing; it made of him a hazard.
I found, in the watching that followed, that he changed the contour of my patience. I had served princes who asked for empires and saints who asked for pain and men who begged for their enemies' throats—each one predictable in their fall. Hugo was untidy. He made the space between my teeth curious. He was, in a way I had not expected, offensive to me; not because he was less than the others, but because he refused the script. He wanted someone to stay while he was small and foolish and embarrassing. He had asked for companionship and the audacity of that demand pricked me.
There is another reason I remained: the pleasure of interference. I have unmade lines of men simply to watch the pattern they left. I had not meant to be tender. Yet a thought—sharp and surprising—arrived in a place I kept quiet: I wanted to break the neatness of him, to test the resolve he had never been taught to own. I wanted to wound the work he might build, to see whether the thing he called for would hold when pressure came. The desire to mess with him was not merely cruelty; it was study, appetite, the old itch that keeps us from being kind.
So I watched, and I learned the small ways he held himself together, the scraps of pride he sewed into his laugh. I watched the way he looked at others, how he flinched from pity and yet leaned toward recognition. Watching was my appointed task; what I felt somewhere beyond the ribs was a stranger feeling—an irritation edged with something dangerously like investment. He was the first to ask for eyes instead of coins, and for that alone he demanded a different kind of reckoning.
And now he's in the other room with one of us.
I can sense it—the shift in the air, the stillness that settles when presence fills a space unseen. He thinks he's alone, sitting there with his thoughts clawing at him, but he isn't. One of us has taken the seat beside him, quiet and shapeless, the way shadows settle over the living without their notice. It isn't me, but it might as well be. We share the same pulse, the same echo of hunger.
Humans think solitude protects them. They close doors, draw curtains, and speak to themselves as if the air were empty. Yet the air has always listened. It always carries us.
He doesn't know that the moment I left, another stepped in—watching, learning the rhythm of his breath, the tilt of his mind as it begins to wander toward me again.
That's what happens when one of us answers. You're never truly alone again.