The path wound higher into the heart of the mountain, splitting and folding like the inside of some vast, broken cathedral. The stone beneath my boots was damp, green with moss, slick with the breath of centuries. Arches of rock rose on either side—ruined and skeletal, their ribs draped in ivy so black it looked wet with oil. Water dripped somewhere in the distance, echoing faintly before vanishing into the hollow dark.
The air here was colder. I could taste the metal of it, sharp and thin, like the inside of an old well. Each step carried the whisper of things that had moved here long before us.
The woman walked ahead, slow but steady, her figure gliding through the murk with a kind of practiced ease. The man followed behind her, his stride sure, unbothered by the broken edges of the stairs that spiraled upward like bones stacked against one another. I trailed after them, trying to match their pace, though every part of this place felt designed to resist movement.
At one turn, the stair crumbled beneath my heel. My body lurched forward into the emptiness yawning below. I gasped, arms flailing. The man caught me by the arm with a grip that felt impossibly quick and strong.
"Watch your steps," he said, his voice low, calm as still water.
I steadied myself, heart hammering. "It's too dark here."
"Use your coin," he said. "Angle it toward the hairline cracks. It throws light back."
I blinked, confused. "Reflects?"
"Try it."
I pulled the coin from my pocket, its edges cold and rough beneath my fingers. Running my thumb over the ridges calmed me for a second, enough to look around. The cavern wasn't entirely dark—there were small fissures in the walls where faint light leaked through, pale and ghostly like veins of some buried star.
I raised the coin and turned it toward one of those cracks. The surface caught the hairline light, bloomed, then softened. The reflection pulsed like a living thing. I stared, half disbelieving.
"How can you see?" I asked, glancing at the man ahead.
"I just can," he said flatly. "Stop with the questions. And stop whining, kid."
I huffed under my breath. "It's not exactly a five-star hotel I'm walking through."
He turned his head slightly, enough for me to catch the glint of a smirk—or maybe it was just the trick of the light. "Keep your voice down," he said. "I might know that you're joking. The others won't."
That word—others—hung in the air, heavy, curious, wrong. "Who are the others?" I asked before I could stop myself.
He didn't answer.
"Didn't I tell you to stop asking questions?" he said, his tone colder now, not raised but weighted.
Then it came—the sound.
At first a low undertone inside my skull. Then it knifed up into a ring so high it felt like it cut the air itself. It filled my head until everything else went quiet. I stopped walking, pressing my palms to my ears, eyes squeezed shut. The pain vibrated through my teeth, my bones.
I must've made a sound because the man turned, his silhouette blurred by the dark. I could see his mouth move, but I couldn't hear what he said. The ringing built higher, then broke—splintering into silence as sudden as its arrival.
I drew in a shaky breath. My vision pulsed at the edges, and for a moment, the path seemed to twist underfoot.
When I opened my eyes again, he was already walking ahead, the faint reflection from my coin glinting off the damp walls. I followed, slower this time, my hand tracing the cold stone beside me.
We climbed another set of stairs that bent sharply to the left and ended at a narrow passageway. The air shifted—the scent of dust giving way to something dry, metallic, and faintly sweet, like burnt sugar. I could see faint light spilling from beyond.
The man stopped at the mouth of another opening carved into the rock.
Without turning, he said quietly, "We're here."
And for a reason I couldn't name, I hesitated before stepping forward. The air ahead felt thinner, almost alive. The light that bled through it trembled—neither warm nor cold, but wrong in a way that made my skin tighten.
I clutched the coin tighter, its edge biting into my palm.
The passage opened into a vast chamber that swallowed sound and light alike. The air shifted the moment I stepped through—heavier, older, steeped in the scent of burnt wax and wet stone. The walls curved outward into a perfect circle, the blackened pillars around them lined with torches whose flames shivered but didn't die. Melted wax bled down the columns like the remnants of some long and exhausted prayer. Above, a chandelier of rusted iron hung by a chain so thin it seemed impossible that it still held. Its candles glowed weakly, their light trembling against the dome ceiling that disappeared into shadow.
The ground was rough beneath my boots, uneven with cracks that branched like veins. At the center of the room stood a circular dais—raised by three short steps, each darkened by stains that looked like they'd been washed over and over, yet never truly erased. I could hear the faint hum of air moving through unseen vents, a sound that didn't quite belong to breath, nor to wind.
That's when I saw him.
He sat on the edge of the dais as though the stone itself had been carved to fit him. His hair, silver with a faint hue of violet, fell in long, immaculate braids over his shoulders, catching the dim firelight like strands of liquid dusk. His skin held the soft pallor of someone untouched by the world outside—too smooth, too quiet. And his eyes… they were almost luminous, a violet-gray that seemed to look through everything, including me.
beautiful past plausibility, too polished to belong to this decaying place. His mouth curved faintly, almost lazily, as if he had been expecting me for hours and the wait amused him.
The woman stepped forward and bowed her head slightly. "Sir Thea," she said. "This young man came through Deus. He carries a coin and seeks your blessing for black magic."
The man who had led me here—silent until now—spoke next, his tone steady. "I found him on the path leading to the mountain. Quite determined."
Thea's lips curved into something between a smile and mockery. His gaze drifted from them to me, deliberate, slow. "You're here to make a pact?"
"I… I don't understand," I said, the words stumbling out before I could catch them.
"Come closer," he said.
Something in me hesitated.
"Closer," he said again, softer this time.
Before I could move, the man behind me gave a firm push. I stumbled forward, knees buckling against the hard stone, the impact echoing faintly. I caught myself on my hands, dust coating my palms. When I looked up, Thea was already crouching before me, close enough that I could see the shimmer of his irises catch the candlelight.
"I can sense you really want that magic," he said, his voice a slow murmur that filled the hollow space. "Do you realize what you're stepping into?"
My breath came shallow. "I… I was told I could obtain black magic," I said. "I do card tricks with my hands—sleight of hand—but it's not good enough to get me out of where I am. I want to get out."
He studied me in silence, head tilted, expression unreadable. Then he smiled again, sharp and quiet. "And how much are you willing to give?"
"What?"
"You do realize this is a bargain," he said. "We don't give for free."
I hesitated, the weight of his words pressing deeper than the sound. "How much?" I managed finally.
Thea's laugh was soft, almost human, but wrong in the way it lingered—like honey poured too slowly from a jar. He rose to his full height, the movement so fluid it barely seemed physical. "Stand up, Hugo."
My chest tightened. He shouldn't have known my name. He couldn't have. But by now, I didn't need to ask. Everything here was built on what I didn't know, and somehow that felt like part of the cost.
I pushed myself off the ground, legs trembling, the echo of my name still circling in the air. Thea watched me rise with the calmness of someone who had seen this play out a thousand times before. The room felt smaller now, the torches dimmer. And I understood, at least in part, that whatever I had stepped into wasn't a negotiation—it was an invitation into something that would not let me leave whole.
The closer I stood to him, the more the details sharpened—as if distance had blurred him on purpose. Thea's presence wasn't human in the way people are, but something sculpted to resemble it. His skin carried an undertone that wasn't warmth, nor coldness, but a silvery stillness that caught every hint of light and refused to let it go. His hair, bound into two immaculate braids, spilled down his chest and back, strands finer than thread, whispering each time he moved. The faintest scent of something metallic clung to him—like rain striking a blade. His lips were the kind that looked soft enough to deceive, pale and tinged faintly blue, and his eyes—his eyes were ruinous. They were the kind of eyes that could hold a man's reflection until he forgot he was looking. The color wasn't steady; sometimes violet, sometimes grey, sometimes colorless altogether, as if his gaze shifted with his thoughts.
Standing so close, I could see a faint mark on the side of his neck, small, circular, like a burn that had never healed. His collarbones cut clean under his skin. His posture, effortless, regal. He seemed made of something older than the stone that built this place.
"Hugo," he said quietly, and hearing my name from him again made something twist in my gut. "This requires a sacrifice."
He stepped closer; the sound of his boots was too soft for the size of the room. "We have to feed your companion."
"Who's my companion?" I asked, my voice thinner than I intended.
He tilted his head, strands of his hair sliding across his shoulder. "You'll meet them soon, if you succeed." A pause, then, with a faint amusement: "We need money. And we need blood."
My stomach sank. "My blood?"
"No," he said. "Not yours."
His voice lowered—velvet around something dangerous. "Someone tied to you by blood."
The words clung to the air. For a moment, the torches flickered, shadows trembling against the walls as if the stone itself had reacted. I felt the back of my neck go cold.
I thought for a long second before I spoke. "Can it be my father's?"
Thea's smile softened, but his eyes did not. "Isn't he imprisoned?"
"Yes."
"That won't do. We need a free-roaming body."
The thought curdled in my chest before I could shape it into words. "Do I have to kill someone?"
Thea moved before I could blink—his body closing the space between us in a slow, deliberate motion. He bent just enough so that our faces were level, and the nearness of him felt unbearable. The air seemed to thin around us. His eyes searched mine with that unblinking precision that made me feel stripped open.
"Would you?" he asked.
His breath brushed my cheek. The question didn't sound like a challenge. It sounded like curiosity.
I tried to meet his stare, but every muscle in me was trembling. I took a long, uneven breath. "You said blood."
Thea straightened, that smile blooming again, sharp as the edge of glass. "Then why would you ask such a question in the first place?"
"Because you're being very vague," I said, my voice low, shaking.
He took a step back, his tone deepening with amusement. "Then ask the right questions."
My throat tightened. "You said you need the blood of a free-roaming body," I said. "How do you want that blood?"
Thea tilted his head slightly, eyes glinting beneath the chandelier's half-dead light. "Once again," he said, his tone smooth as silk, "you make me want to put you in harder situations, Hugo. You're infuriating."
I clenched my fists. "Once again, you're being vague."
Thea's laughter unfurled slowly, soft and intimate, though it didn't echo. It simply lived in the space between us, like something alive and breathing. When it ended, he looked at me again, eyes narrowing slightly, lips still curved.
"Good," he said quietly. "Keep arguing. It makes the fear more interesting."
The torches around us crackled once—bright, then dim. And I felt, for the first time, that the darkness in this place wasn't just absence. It was watching.
"Can I please talk, Sir Thea?" the woman said, her tone brittle as dried reeds.
Thea turned his head toward her, one hand resting loosely at his side. "Yeah," he said, a quiet smile flickering at the edge of his mouth. "Be my guest."
She stepped closer, her robe dragging over the stone floor, the faint rasp of fabric the only sound that dared fill the space between the torchlight and the dark. Her face looked older under the fire's sway, her eyes filmed with something that wasn't just age.
"Listen, young man," she said, her gaze pinning me where I stood. "We need the body of a free-roaming soul. We need the blood of that same body. It's your choice who that will be, but it must be tied to you by blood."
The words fell like weights, and I felt them settle behind my ribs. She continued before I could speak.
"The way you're going to acquire this," she said, "we're going to give you something. Because you need to leave a mark on the body you use. So no one else gets to use it."
My throat felt dry. "Other people might come here and use the same body?"
She gave a small, humorless smile. "Listen, Hugo. There are other beings in this world that need feeding. And those other beings—" her voice faltered briefly, softening in some strange, tired way—"they feed through the same acts. When you mark the body you use, that means it's been claimed by someone. It's taken. It's yours."
"My companion," I said quietly.
She shook her head, slowly. "No, your companion will be all yours. That's something else entirely."
A silence grew between us. The torches crackled, and I heard the faint drop of water fall from somewhere high above, landing in the center of the room with a sound too small for the space it filled.
"So my companion," I said, "it's not going to be another human, right?"
Thea let out a breath that could've been a laugh, though it carried no joy. "Do we have to hand him a manual?" he murmured, his voice smooth, like silk dragged across glass. He turned to me fully now, expression unreadable. "No, Hugo. It's not going to be a human."
He took a slow step toward me, then another. "You're already in the presence of a lot of creatures right now."
I froze, the back of my neck prickling. My eyes darted around the chamber—the pillars, the corners, the shadows that pooled where the torchlight couldn't reach.
"How come I can't see them?" I asked, voice low.
Thea's smile widened faintly. "You just can't," he said. "You won't see them unless they choose a form your mind can stand—an object, a shape, a face. Humans can't see other beings from the other world. Not as they are."
The woman's voice cut softly through the thick air again. "Look, Hugo," she said. "We're going to give you everything you need. You just have to make the move."
She glanced at Thea, as if seeking silent permission. He gave none, but didn't stop her either.
"And as for the money," she continued, "we're asking for thirty thousand pounds."
My breath hitched. "That's… that's fairly too much."
Her tone hardened, though her words stayed calm. "And you want the magic, don't you? You want the companion? Then listen well. We told you this is a bargain. You're making a pact."
The word settled heavy in my ears—pact. It sounded older than language, older than me.
"With who?" I asked, the question barely more than a whisper. "Who am I making the pact with?"
Thea tilted his head, eyes glinting faintly in the half-light. "It's not that obvious yet?" he asked, almost mockingly.
Something inside me shifted. I looked at them both—the calm certainty of the woman, the slow amusement in Thea's face, the silence that moved through the chamber like it was alive—and I realized then what we'd been circling around all along.
No one wanted to say it out loud. Not what these "other beings" were. Not what this place really was. Not what kind of creatures I was bargaining with.
And in the hollow of my chest, I felt it— the unmistakable truth of what stood before me.