Real Or Fake
1110 Words
I feel numb, but strangely, it doesn't terrify me like I thought it would.
It’s like floating—adrift in a void neither cold nor warm, alive nor dead. My body isn’t weightless, but unmoored. As though I’ve slipped through the cracks of the world and landed somewhere between breath and oblivion. A slow, creeping calm wraps around me like a shroud, comforting in its stillness. My heartbeat is distant, barely a murmur against the hush of this place.
Then I feel it—fingers brushing against my cheek.
My eyes snap open.
Panic spikes like lightning in my chest. I sit up too fast, the world tilting—only, there is no world. Only a dim, mist-laced chamber glowing faintly with blue firelight. Its walls aren’t stone but shadow, and the air smells faintly of myrrh and something older. Ancient.
A man stands before me.
He doesn’t move. He simply waits—like he knew I would wake. Like he’s been watching me sleep.
He’s draped in a black silk robe that clings to his frame like liquid night, every fold catching the flicker of ethereal flames. His long silver hair gleams faintly in the gloom, flowing past his shoulders like moonlight trapped in water. But it’s his eyes that hold me still—white as fresh snow, luminous, with no pupil or iris, and yet I feel them pierce straight through me.
“You’re awake,” he murmurs, voice smooth as honey and deep as a grave.
It rolls through me, soft and rich and utterly unnatural. My skin prickles. I scramble backward on the velvet cushions beneath me, chest heaving.
“Who are you?” I rasp, throat raw, panic rising. “Where am I? What is this?”
He steps forward, slow and unhurried, one hand extended as if to calm me. “Hush, little flame. This world has hurt you long enough. I felt it—your pain, your ending. I followed your blood.”
I stop. “My… blood?” The words scrape out. “I-I was dying—”
“You were dying,” he says gently, nodding. “But now you are… mine.”
“No,” I breathe, but it’s already too late.
He closes the distance, kneeling before me with the silent grace of something that isn’t human. One hand lifts, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear. The gesture is almost tender—too tender.
I flinch, but he catches my chin between his fingers, tilting my head up. His touch is impossibly light, but the strength beneath it makes something inside me twist. He moves like silk. Like smoke. Like the darkness is part of him.
“I can smell the fear on you, Rose.” The way he says my name—it rolls off his tongue with a strange intimacy. “Even beneath the blood and dirt… you smell divine.”
My breath hitches. My heart hammers against my ribs, too fast, too loud. His thumb brushes along my jaw. His touch trails down my neck, grazing the pulse that thrums frantically beneath my skin.
“I’m not yours,” I whisper, though the words barely reach the air.
A smile ghosts across his lips. Not cruel—just certain. “No?”
He leans in, so close I can feel his breath—cool against the fever of my skin. His face hovers just above the crook of my neck. My pulse stutters wildly. I can smell him now—like cold ash, like crushed violets, like something that should not exist.
“You will be,” he murmurs.
I shove at his chest with both hands, panic surging—but it’s like trying to move stone. He doesn’t budge. Instead, he laughs—a low, velvety sound that coils through me like smoke.
“I don’t want this,” I cry, but even I can hear the weakness in my voice.
“You want to be free from pain,” he counters, his lips brushing the shell of my ear. “You want to be touched like you matter. Don’t you?”
His words dig under my skin, too close to truths I’ve never spoken aloud.
“I can give you that,” he whispers. “Pleasure. Power. Purpose. You don’t even know what you are, do you?”
“What… I am?” The question echoes inside me.
My legs shake. Heat curls deep in my belly, sick and heavy and wanting. I hate it. Hate that a part of me shivers not just from fear, but from something darker. Something ancient. Hungry.
He breathes me in again, his nose tracing the line of my throat.
“Just one taste,” he murmurs.
And then—
Fangs.
A sharp pain lances through my neck—clean, precise—and I gasp. The burn lasts only a breath before it twists into something else. A sudden, overwhelming heat that crashes through me like a tide. My spine arches. My fingers clutch his robe, not to push him away—but to hold on.
No. No, I can’t—
But it’s too late.
He drinks.
I feel it—every pull. It’s like he’s not just drinking my blood, but peeling me apart, unraveling my edges until I don’t know where I end and he begins. My breath comes in ragged bursts, dizzy and fevered. My heart thrums a wild, irregular beat that matches the strange rhythm between us.
I’m sinking. Spiraling.
And gods help me, part of me wants to drown.
He draws back, slow and savoring. Blood glistens on his lips. His tongue flicks out, catching the crimson.
“Exquisite,” he purrs, gaze hooded.
My limbs are liquid. My vision blurs. I feel light—unreal. Like I’ve been scooped out and left hollow, filled instead with velvet darkness and flickering heat.
“What… did you… do?” I whisper, barely conscious.
He gathers me into his arms like I weigh nothing. Like I’m something precious.
His voice is low against my hair. “I only gave you what the world refused.”
I can barely keep my eyes open. His robe smells of midnight and magic. I’m cradled against his chest, and the beat of his heart—or whatever lives in place of it—reverberates through me.
“Sleep now, precious one,” he whispers. “When you wake… you’ll understand why you were never meant to die.”
His words drip with prophecy and promise. And stillness takes me again—but this time, I don’t fight it.
This time, I fall willingly into the dark.
- Writer
