Part 1 Chapter 1.
1309 Words
The Heart Awakens.
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The rain came down heavily, washing the streets of Eiren Hollow into a blur of silver and shadow. Iris Dalen tightened her coat and ran faster, her shoes slapping against the soaked pavement.
The Midnight shifts at the hospital always left her half-dreaming, but tonight the world felt too awake.
The air hummed, restless, as if something ancient had stirred up beneath the storm.
She cut through the road, the quickest route to her apartment; a lonely stretch beneath the old stone bridge. Thunder roared. Then she saw something: a figure collapsed against the wall, pale as marble, blood flowing dark and thick into the puddles.
Her suddenly instincts took over.
“Hey, hey! Can you hear me?” she dropped to her knees, pulling open her medical kit, her fingers trembling.
The man didn’t make a move or probably he couldn't move, she thought. He was young, or perhaps looked like it, with sharp, elegant features and hair darkened by the rain.
His clothes were torn, the fabric was rich but old-fashioned, like something that came out of another century.
She pressed two fingers to his neck.
A pulse.
Weak, but there.
“Okay, you’re not dead. Stay with me,” she whispered, scanning the wound across his abdomen.
It wasn’t deep enough to kill him. She’d seen worse.
The blood, though… it wasn’t right.
It gleamed faintly, like liquid moonlight.
Her breath caught. “What in the…” His eyes snapped open.
Iris froze. His eyes were gray, not silver, not blue, not even red but gray, like storm clouds about to break. For one heartbeat, neither of them moved, their eyes in each other's. The sound of the rain seemed to vanish.
Then he whispered, voice rough but controlled, “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I should…, you’re bleeding. You need help.” She said with a hint of urgency in her tone.
He tried to sit up, grimaced, and she caught his shoulder. His skin was cold, almost otherworldly so. But beneath it, she felt something faint… a tremor, a vibration, like the echo of a heartbeat trying to return.
She leaned closer. “Don’t move. I can stop the bleeding.”
He almost smiled, a broken, knowing smile.
“You can’t.”
Her hands shook as she tore a strip from her sleeve and pressed it to the wound anyway. “Watch me.”
When her hand brushed his chest, something snapped through the air, like static, like breath drawn after years of drowning.
She gasped.
Because suddenly she could hear it.
A second heartbeat. Not hers.
Slow. Powerful. Syncing with her own. He inhaled sharply, eyes flaring with something between wonder and terror.
“…Your heart,” he murmured. “It’s calling mine.”
The words made no actual sense, but yet the sound of them filled the space between them, electric, sacred, and frightening.
Lightning flashed across the bridge, and for an instant she saw his face clearly. Too pale. Too still.
Too… perfect. Then he collapsed forward, catching himself with one trembling hand. She moved to help, but he gripped her wrist with sudden strength.
“Don’t follow me.” His voice had changed, it was lower, edged with command. “Forget this.” “I can’t just leave you…”
He was gone.
In a blink of an eye, and the space where he’d been was empty. Only the rain remained, falling harder now, erasing every trace of him, even to the blood that had glowed in the dark. Iris stumbled to her feet, her heart racing wildly. The echo of his pulse still thudded in her chest, stubbornly, and impossibly alive. She pressed her palm against her chest, breathing hard.
Thunder rolled overhead, and the bridge lights flickered. Her own pulse answered; steady, strong… and not alone.
Two heartbeats.
She looked up into the storm, whispering into the wind, “What did you do to me, stranger?”
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For three days, Iris couldn’t get the sound out of her head.
That second heartbeat seemed phantom, impossible, too real. She’d even gone to the hospital lab after her shift, checked her vitals twice, scanned for irregular rhythms but everything came back normal.
Yet sometimes, when the room was quiet, she could swear that she could feel another pulse under her skin.
Slow.
Patient.
But not hers.
By the third night, she’d convinced herself it was mere exhaustion and nothing more.
So when her friend Mina dragged her to an art exhibit downtown, she agreed, just to stop thinking about ghosts beneath bridges.
The gallery was warm and hushed, filled with people murmuring over portraits bathed in amber light. Most of them were beautiful but sad. Every face on the walls wore the same expression;
Longing. Unfinished Love. Suspended Time.
“God,” Mina sighed, sipping her wine.
“Can you imagine painting something like this? It feels like they’re watching us.”
“They are,” Iris murmured a reply.
One canvas held her still. A woman in white, standing in a storm, her hair wild, eyes alive, one hand clutching her heart.
The artist had captured movement inside stillness. It wasn’t just paint.
It was alive.
Iris stepped closer to read the plaque.
“Heart in the Rain.” By Arden Vale.
The name sent a shiver down her spine.
“Are you okay?” Mina asked.
“Yeah, I just…” Her voice cut...
He was standing across the room.
The same man. Same gray eyes, same quiet presence that felt heavier than the air itself. No blood, no wounds. Just… there.
Alive.
Or whatever he was.
He looked at her once, as if recognizing a memory rather than a person. His expression didn’t change, but she could feel the pulse in her throat quicken.
Mina followed her gaze. “Wow. He’s…uh…looking this way. Should I disappear, or…?”
But Iris barely heard her.
She moved toward him, every rational thought drowned out by that strange pull beneath her ribs, that heartbeat that wasn’t hers.
When she reached him, he smiled faintly.
“I…didn’t know you’d be here,” she managed to speak.
“I wasn’t sure either,” he said softly, “until I heard your pulse.”
Her breath hitched. “My… what?”
He looked away, almost embarrassed at what he was about to say. “I forget how that sounds to mortals.”
“Mortals?” she repeated. “You make it sound like you’re not one.”
He said nothing.
Up close, his beauty felt wrong, it was too precise, too graceful, too perfect like a sculpture pretending to be human. His clothes were simple but elegant, his voice like low music against the murmurs of the crowd.
“You disappeared,” she said. “After the bridge. I thought you were dying.”
“I was,” he said, eyes on her again. “And then you touched me.”
“I didn’t do anything. You just healed.” He tilted his head, a shadow of a smile curving his lips. “Perhaps you did more than you know.”
A curator’s voice broke the tension. “Mr. Vale, the collector is asking for you.” Arden inclined his head politely, but his gaze stayed on Iris.
“Excuse me for a moment.” He turned, spoke briefly with the curator, then disappeared into a side hallway.
Iris waited a few seconds before following.
The hallway was empty, only the soft echo of her shoes and the steady rhythm of her heart filling the space. She hesitated, half-angry, half-drawn, until a door creaked open at the end.
Inside it was a small room, dim, filled with canvases covered in white sheets. One stood uncovered.
Her stomach twisted.
It was her.
Painted perfectly.
- Writer
