Ink and Immortality

A Whisper in Print

Cassian stared at the blank page for the better part of an hour.

He’d written and rewritten the first sentence so many times the parchment bore ghostly echoes of ink that had been blotted out, scratched over, and torn through. Nothing satisfied. Nothing sounded like her.

How did you capture the impossible?

He didn't know her name. He didn’t know her age—only that it stretched back into centuries like ivy curling into a crumbling wall. But he remembered her eyes. Her face. The way her voice curved around his name with a softness that unsettled him.

And the truth: she was a vampire.

The memory should've been a blur. A foggy dream. But some part of his mind clung to it—her beauty, her power, the way the mist had coiled around her like a lover.

So he wrote.

---

From the “Vale of Shadows” column – The Herald & Oracle, Thursday Edition

A Lady in Fog

They say the city breathes strange things at night—stories that slip down gaslit alleys and curl around your throat before you can scream.

I met one.

She came to me from the fog, dressed in midnight. Her gown was woven from shadows and candlelight, flowing like water in the breeze. Her hair, black as a raven’s wing, shimmered with dew, and her face—God help me, her face—was sculpted perfection. Like a marble statue granted life, carved by longing itself.

Her eyes glowed with something ancient and unknowable—deep garnet pools that seemed to read everything I’d ever been, everything I ever would be. Her voice was velvet dipped in poison and honey. When she spoke, the world hushed to listen.

She smiled at me like she knew the shape of my soul. And then she vanished.

She is not human. I say this with the utmost sincerity, as a man who’s spent his life chasing ghosts and myths. She is something older, stronger. A secret stitched into the bones of this city.

I do not know her name. But I remember her. Every line of her face. The cadence of her breath. The cold heat of her gaze.

If you’ve seen her… then you know. If you haven’t… then look harder. She walks among us. And I intend to find her again.

Because once you see something that beautiful, that terrible, you don’t just let it fade.

You chase it until it consumes you.

---

Cassian leaned back, chest tight. It was the boldest article he’d ever published—less a report, more a plea. His editor would scoff. His readers would assume fiction. But maybe… just maybe… she would see it.

He stared out the foggy window of his flat, heart drumming hard.

“Come find me,” he whispered. “Come find me again.”

Far beneath the city, in a forgotten manor sealed behind layers of illusion and shadow, Seraphine held the newspaper in her pale hands.

Her eyes flicked across every word of Cassian’s column.

Twice.

Then a third time.

A whisper of a laugh escaped her lips. He was supposed to forget. That was the deal. He was meant to be distracted, not obsessed.

She folded the paper carefully, fingertips lingering on the print as though it were something fragile.

“Foolish boy,” she murmured. “You weren’t meant to remember this much.”

Behind her, another figure stirred in the shadows.

“I thought you said your spell would keep him at bay,” came a sharp, feminine voice—Aradia, her coven-sister.

Seraphine didn’t turn. “It was supposed to. But perhaps… his will is stronger than I expected.”

“He’s drawing attention to you,” Aradia warned. “To all of us.”

“There is no one left in this city who could pose a threat to me,” Seraphine replied calmly. “They wouldn’t dare. But still...”

Her voice grew colder.

“I want him to stop. These descriptions… they're too vivid. If others begin to suspect, the veil we’ve kept drawn over this city will begin to thin. I need to see him again. I’ll make him stop… one way or another.”

Aradia narrowed her eyes. “You’re getting sentimental.”

Seraphine turned slowly at that, the air around her thickening.

“Careful, sister.”

Aradia said nothing.

“Let him chase,” Seraphine whispered, staring at the candlelight again. “Let’s see where it leads.”