The First Gathering❤️🔥
1082 Words
🥀Eva🥀
They told me nothing.
No rules. No warnings.
Only that I was to return to the chapel the following night at ten, and that I was not to speak of it—not even to Rowan.
I didn’t.
I couldn’t.
Because if I said it out loud, it would make it real.
---
The chapel was different this time.
No longer forgotten, no longer faded. It had awakened.
Candles lined the windowsills, casting amber reflections in the stained glass. Velvet drapes masked the decaying pews. Incense floated thick in the air—sweet, cloying, like overripe fruit and crushed petals.
There were no clocks, but I could feel the time thicken as the others arrived—one by one, faces hidden behind their silver and bone masks.
Callista stood at the altar, her posture too perfect to be anything but calculated.
She didn’t speak until the doors closed.
“We begin,” she said simply.
A string quartet—hidden somewhere behind the altar curtain—began to play. Low and mournful. The kind of music that made you ache without knowing why.
Lucian was already there, of course. Always in the shadows.
He didn’t wear a mask.
He sat at a writing desk lit by a single candle, surrounded by torn paper, ink, and books so old their spines had no names.
His eyes met mine. I felt something slip in my ribs, like a thread being pulled.
---
Callista moved through the room like a curator in a gallery of living art.
“We are creators,” she said. “We are destroyers. We gather to reveal the truth behind beauty—and the rot beneath it.”
Then she turned to me.
“Eva Moreau. Chosen. Muse. You will witness.”
She snapped her fingers.
A girl stepped forward, trembling. Porcelain mask. Gloves stained with paint.
“She is mine,” said one of the cloaked figures—a sculptor, by the tools he carried.
Callista nodded.
The girl sat in a throne-like chair at the center of the room. The sculptor began to speak—not to us, but to her.
“You are not real,” he said. “Until I make you real.”
He circled her, murmuring lines of poetry and scripture, carving her likeness into a block of black stone while the rest of us watched.
No one interrupted.
Not even when she started to cry.
---
By the time the sculpture was done, she was shaking.
The likeness was uncanny. Almost violent in its precision. The angles too sharp. The eyes too wide.
Callista clapped once.
“It is done.”
The sculptor stepped back. The girl collapsed into herself. No one moved to comfort her.
I looked at Lucian.
He was watching me, not the performance.
As if *I* was the art.
---
Later, there was wine.
It tasted like ash and berries. I didn’t ask where it came from.
Members murmured in corners, trading riddles like currency. Some sketched. Some read aloud. One girl with hair like wildfire painted blindfolded, guided only by whispers in her ear.
Callista sat beside me.
“You handled that well,” she said, tilting her head. “Most muses don’t last the first gathering.”
“What happens to the ones who don’t?”
She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “They become stories.”
I glanced toward the door.
It was still open.
Barely.
“Why me?” I asked.
She traced the rim of her glass with one crimson nail. “Because someone looked at you and saw something worth unraveling.”
She didn’t say who.
She didn’t have to.
---
When I stepped outside, Lucian was already waiting in the courtyard, his coat soaked from mist.
He didn’t say anything.
Neither did I.
But I stood there, just the same—while he watched me like a secret he had written long ago and only now remembered.
“Was it supposed to scare me?” I asked finally.
“The sculpture?”
“The ritual. All of it.”
“No,” he said softly. “It was meant to show you how far someone will go to be seen.”
“And if I don’t want to be seen like that?”
He stepped closer.
“Too late.”
His fingers brushed mine, leaving ink behind.
---
That night, I couldn’t draw.
Every time I picked up my pencil, I found myself sketching the sculpture. The girl’s face. My face.
But the hands?
They were always his.
---
Lucian❤️🔥
After the First Gathering.
Unsent. Unshared. Torn from a leather-bound notebook hidden beneath floorboards.
She watched and didn’t flinch.
That’s how I know she belongs here.
Most muses cry the first time. Or run. Or pretend not to understand what’s happening as they’re being immortalized and hollowed out all at once.
But not Eva.
She watched the sculptor carve that girl like a confession, and I swear to God—she didn’t blink once. She stared at the stone like it owed her something.
Maybe she saw herself in it.
Maybe she saw me.
I wanted to know what she was feeling in that moment.
More than that—I wanted to write it.
Not on paper.
On her skin.
---------------------
The others talk about beauty like it’s currency. They trade in it, gamble with it, ruin it just to say they’ve touched it.
But Eva?
She carries beauty like a wound.
Quiet. Subtle. Bleeding beneath the surface.
I’ve never wanted to open someone so badly just to see if the inside matched the ache I see in their eyes.
Is that cruel?
Or just honest?
--------------------
When I looked at her across the chapel, she met my gaze like she already knew the story I was writing in my head.
I wonder if she realizes:
I will not write her name in ink.
I will write it in fire.
She asked if the ritual was meant to scare her.
I said no.
But maybe it should have.
Because this isn’t about fear.
It’s about surrender.
And I don’t want parts of her.
I want the whole goddamn manuscript.
I want her rage, her memories, her darkness, her doubt.
I want to know how she looks when she’s unraveling,
and whether she blames me for the thread she handed over willingly.
If she comes again…
I’ll begin.
And once I begin, I will not stop.
- Writer
