Michael, oblivious, leaned in slightly, lowering his voice into a conspiratorial tone. “The stories say they would sometimes take a human consort. A beautiful local woman, of course.” His green eyes roamed over her face, her body, with an ownership that was infuriatingly familiar.He leaned in closer, his camera forgotten at his side. “Youknow, I’d really value a local perspective for my research.” His eyes lingered on the curve of her neck before returning to her face. “I have an excellent bottle of wine back at my rental. Or I could bring it here tomorrow night? We could discuss the... legends.” The way he said the last word made it clear what he was really proposing.
The moment the invitation left his lips, the world fractured. The warm, golden light of the sunset vanished, snuffed out like a candle flame. An instantaneous, deep blue twilight fell over the beach, cold and absolute. A frigid gust of wind tore across the sand, whipping Lina’s hair across her face and raising goosebumps on her arms. It was a cold that felt ancient and unnatural, a cold that came from a place where no sun had ever shone.
Lina looked at Maruz and what she saw made her heart stop. For one terrifying second, he was no longer wearing his handsome human mask. His form seemed to expand, to swell with shadow and rage, his shoulders broadening, his height increasing until he loomed like a dark god against the bruised sky. His eyes were no longer black glass but burning pits of amber coal, and from his silhouette, she thought she saw tenebrous shapes unfurling like wings of smoke. The air around him seemed to warp and crackle with a silent, violet energy. It was a glimpse of the raw, untamed thing she had summoned, a being of pure judgment and devastating power.
Then, as quickly as it came, it was gone. He was himself again, contained, solid, perfectly still. But the cold remained.
Michael shivered, a violent, full-body tremor. Michael’s eyes darted around, searching for the source of the unnatural cold, seeing nothing but finding everything changed. His shoulders hunched forward as if he’d been struck. He wrapped his arms around himself, his confident expression replaced by a look of bewildered discomfort. “Whoa. Where did that come from?” He glanced up at the now-dark sky,then back at them, his eyes wide. The flirty, predatory light was gone, replaced by a primal unease he clearly didn’t understand.
“You know what, I should... I should get back,” he stammered, already backing away, his fingers fumbling with his equipment, the lens cap slipping repeatedly from his trembling hands. “It’s getting late. But, uh, I’ll find you tomorrow. For sure.” He gave a weak, unconvincing smile and then turned, almost running back down the beach toward the path to the main road.
Lina stood frozen, the unnatural chill seeping into her bones. She watched Michael’s retreating figure disappear into the gloom. The golden sunset did not return. The world remained locked in that cold, tense, and unforgiving twilight.
They walked back to the house without speaking, the unnatural twilight clinging to them like a shroud. The usual night sounds of the coast were absent, swallowed by the profound, ringing silence that followed Maruz’s display of power. The path, usually so familiar, felt alien and menacing.
He finally broke the silence, and his voice was not the warm, resonant murmur she had grown to love. It was sharp and cold, like a shard of obsidian. “That man,” he said, the words cutting through the stillness. “Perhaps he deserves judgment.”
Lina stopped dead on the path. The blood drained from her face. To hear the thought she had been desperately suppressing spoken aloud was a violation. “Don’t,” she breathed.
Maruz turned to face her, his features hard and impassive in the gloom. “Why not? I saw into his mind as he stood before you. It is a shallow, selfish place. He moves through the world as if it is a marketplace laid out for his consumption. Women, to him, are not people. They are artifacts of a culture, exotic experiences to be collected, catalogued in his journal, and then forgotten.” His fingers traced a complex shape in the air, and for a moment, a trail of black smoke lingered where they passed. “He leaves them emptier than he finds them. A small cruelty, perhaps, not worthy of a storm or a flood. But it is a poison nonetheless. The kind I was made to purge.”
His justification was so clinical, so reasonable. It was a tempting logic, a clean moral equation that made a monstrous act feel like a service.
“One more judgment, Lina,” he said, his voice dropping to an intimate, seductive whisper. He stepped closer, and the cold radiating from him was no longer a sign of his power, but the chill of the void he was destined for. “His name, spoken with intent. A drop of your blood on a new vessel. It is all that is required.” He lifted a hand, his fingertips hovering a millimeter from her cheek. “He would be erased. A brief, ugly memory. And we would have another season. Months together.”
She stared at him, at the breathtakingly beautiful face that was promising her a future in exchange for a man’s soul. And the most terrifying part was the dark, eager thing in the pit of her stomach that leapt at the offer. A voice that was her own whispered, *He’s right. What is one man like that?*
The thought horrified her more than any threat he could make. It was his corruption seeping into her, twisting her own pain into a weapon. She flinched away from his hand as if it were a hot iron andtook a stumbling step back. She saw him not as a tragic, fallen god, but as an addiction, a poison she was beginning to crave.
Without another word, she turned and fled. She ran up the path, burst through the doors of the silent, perfect house, and did not stop until she reached her bedroom, shutting the heavy wooden door behind her and leaning against it, her body trembling. She had shut him out. But she feared the more dangerous monster was the one she had just locked in with her.
She fell onto the bed and into a sleep that was not sleep, but a black, feverish pit. The dream came instantly. She was standing on the beach alone, the full moon a predatory silver eye in the sky. The waves were black and oily, crashing on the sand with the sound of breaking bones. In her hands, she held a new talisman, a piece of sharp, volcanic rock. She knew what she had to do. With a sense of grim purpose, she drew an obsidian blade across her palm and let her blood drip onto the stone.
She spoke the American’s name. “Michael Richardson.”
The air tore open. Maruz appeared before her, not in his handsome disguise, but in his true form - a being of shadow, lightning, and ancient rage, his eyes burning suns. The dream-Michael appeared on the sand, screaming, and Maruz rendered a judgment that was swift and apocalyptic. But the dream wasn’t about them. It was about her. As she watched, she felt not horror, but a surge of exhilarating, ecstatic power. It flooded her veins, a feeling more potent than desire, more profound than any pleasure she had ever known. It was the power to balance the scales, to correct an injustice, to *unmake*. And it was intoxicating.
The Abyss Gazes Back
Lina jolted upright in the tangled sheets, a ragged gasp tearing from her throat. The dream clung to her like a fever-sweat, its phantom pleasures still pulsing in the deepest parts of her, a shameful, undeniable heat that warred with the bile of self-loathing in her throat. Her heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She was awake. Horribly, completely awake.
He was there. The bedroom door, which she had slammed shut against him, stood ajar, and he was a silhouette in theopening, a tear in the fabric of the night. The full moon was just a day away, and its predatory light poured through the vast windows, backlighting him, revealing the terrifying truth of his state. He was barely there. His form flickered and wavered, the hard lines of his magnificent body blurring into smoke at the edges, resolving, and then dissolving again like a failing projection. He was a memory fighting to stay present, an echo about to fade.
He moved, drifting from the doorway into the room with a silence that was absolute, his feet making no sound on the cool marble floor. He was a column of living shadow, a concentration of night that approached her bed. She didn’t flinch away, didn’t scream. The dream had burned all her simpler fears to ash, leaving only this complex, aching terror.
Her voice was a raw, torn thing. “Why are you watching me?”
Maruz stopped beside the bed. The moonlight cast his inhumanly beautiful features in planes of silver and shadow. He settled onto the edge of the mattress, and she felt the truth of his unmaking as his immense weight failed to create so much as a ripple in the fabric. He was a phantom sitting beside her, his presence a crushing weight on her soul but not on the world. His volcanic-glass eyes, which had witnessed her dream, held no judgment, only a weariness that seemed to predate the mountains.
His gaze dropped to her lap where her hands twisted against each other, knuckles bleached white - the same hands that had, in her dream, dripped crimson to condemn a man to oblivion.She reached for her throat, fingers finding the talisman. Against her feverish skin, the ancient pendant hung cold and undeniable, tethering her to this moment when all else seemed to dissolve into shadow. This small thing bound him to the world; she controlled his prison. A shudder passedthrough her body - not from fear, but from the crushing weight of such power.
Slowly, deliberately, she lowered her hand from the talisman and reached for him. Her movements were fluid, unafraid. She extended her hand into the space between them, an offering. He watched her, motionless, his flickering form betraying a tension his perfect features did not.
Her fingertips brushed against his. The cold was profound, a seep of ancient void that stole the warmth from her skin. His substance yielded beneath her touch with a sickening lack of resistance, like pressing into densely packed mist. A lesser version of herself would have recoiled, but she pushed through the sensation, her resolve hardening. She slid her palm against his and laced her fingers through his massive ones. She held the hand of a phantom, and she did not let go.
The moment her skin made full contact, the chaotic swirling beneath his surface changed. The dark, arcane patterns seemed to slow, to gather around her touch as if drawn to the heat and solidity of her living flesh. For a moment, his form seemed to stabilize, the desperate flickering at his edges calming to a low, steady hum. She was his anchor.
Her voice was a whisper, a fragile thing in the vast silence of the room, yet it carried the weight of a final surrender. “I never expected to care for you.”
