Into the Darkness: Chapter One - Previous Chapter
Chapter 2.
Damian moved through the city like a shadow unpinned from its master, the storm swallowing him whole. He knew this was not the place he was meant to be—the signs he sought were absent—but still he wandered, drawn by the pull of restless streets. A shopping trolley broke free and rattled across a car park; his hand fell upon it, stilling its wild flight before returning it to the line of its kind. A hat tore loose into the gale; he caught it with a predator’s precision, placing it back upon a stranger’s head.
Yet every kindness carried a weight, each gesture unsettling in its silence.
The rain lashed, the wind howled like some hungry thing, and Damian slipped inside the supermarket. The strip lights trembled at his presence, shadows twisting against the walls. On the security screens he did not appear as a man at all, but as a smear of black, an absence that writhed and breathed.
The air thickened with voices.
“I hope Storm Amy hits hard,” a man sneered into his phone, “maybe I’ll be spared work.”
A mother pushed her cart, her complaint ragged: “Back when I were a child, we went to school through snow, through thunder…”
The guards’ eyes hunted a knot of teenagers who circled the sweets aisle like wolves.
The youths snatched chocolate and bolted. Damian did not turn his head, yet a thin, sinuous tendril coiled from his shadow, slithering across the tiles. It curled about the leader’s ankle, and he crashed to the ground. The others toppled into him, their laughter sharp as broken glass, their theft undone.
Damian reached for a bottle of Bells Blended Scotch Whiskey, the glass cold against his palm. At the till, the young woman with hair like spilled flame fumbled with his purchase. He laid a crisp £50 note upon the counter, took his change, and regarded her with eyes that seemed to drink the light from her skin.
He stepped back into the storm, and the night embraced him as if it knew him well. The wind keened, the rain lashed harder.
He walked and walked, the storm soaking his suit until it clung like a second skin. The cold did not touch him. The wet carried no weight. He moved on, untethered, until the flicker of cathedral lights caught his eye.
A low hum of voices drifted from within, footsteps echoing off stone as people sought shelter in its walls. Damian knew the place well. He had watched its bones rise between 1844 and 1848, each stone set into place beneath a grey Salford sky. This city had been his haunt since long before it earned the name of “city” in 1926, back when it was nothing more than a settlement clinging to the banks of the Irwell. Centuries had reshaped it, yet its ancient heart still beat beneath the mortar and glass.
And Damian adored the ancient. He fed upon it.
The cathedral stood proud and solemn, its age breathing through the stone. He let his shadow stretch long and lean, dissolving into the gloom as he stepped inside. Whatever stirred the crowd to gather here, he would see for himself.
The cathedral loomed in cruciform splendour, its Gothic Revival arches stretching high into darkness where candlelight could not reach. The stone breathed history, cold and damp with memory, every pillar a reminder of hands long turned to dust.
Damian slipped inside, carried by silence. He moved along the edges where light faltered, his figure clinging to the shadows cast by vaulting ribs and pointed arches. The voices of the living rippled through the nave—tourists in heavy coats, students speaking in hushed awe, an old woman kneeling at a side chapel, whispering prayers to saints who had heard centuries of petitions. The cathedral drew them all: the faithful, the curious, the weary. Diversity clothed the congregation like a mosaic of shifting colours, but none of them looked for him, none of them saw.
He walked unseen beneath stained glass windows, the jewel-toned saints fractured by night. He traced familiar outlines with his eyes: the rose window blooming above, the carved angels watching from their alcoves. He had seen them born from stone, had watched masons sweat and curse as they raised these walls. This house of God was no stranger to him—it was as much his dwelling as theirs.
At last, he came to a quiet recess, far from the murmur of footsteps. There, beneath centuries of dust and polish, his hand found the mark: a name carved into the stone, crude and shallow, worn by time until it was nearly illegible. A ghost of himself etched in the bones of the church.
He lingered, his fingers tracing what remained, and for a moment the cathedral seemed to exhale around him—an ancient structure recognising an older soul.
The cathedral shuddered as the great doors slammed shut with a thunderous finality, the sound rolling through the nave like the crack of judgement. Lights flickered, stuttering halos against ancient stone, before dimming into a trembling glow. The air shifted, heavy with dread, and cold bled into the chamber—so cold that breath crystallised midair, condensation on the walls hardening into a lattice of ice.
Time seemed to falter. The world slowed, every heartbeat stretching into eternity.
From the pews, a scream split the silence, shrill and raw, ricocheting off vaulted arches. An elderly woman, once bent in prayer, lifted her trembling face as thin rivulets of blood traced downward from her eyes and nose, dripping onto folded hands. Her voice dissolved into sobs.
Then, a sharp crack. Somewhere among the crowd, a man slumped forward, his neck bent at an impossible angle. Shock rippled outward, terror swelling in every chest.
From the shadows, Damian emerged at last. His figure unfurled like ink spilling into light. He walked without haste, each step deliberate, until he reached the trembling woman. She flinched as his hand, pale and cold, touched her shoulder. No words passed his lips. Yet the bleeding ceased—not by stopping, but by retreating. The crimson lines withdrew, sliding back beneath her skin, restoring what had been stolen.
The crowd gasped, some whispering prayers, others choking on fear.
Movement above. The vaulted beams groaned. From the rafters, a figure dropped, landing in a crouch that split the stone tiles beneath its weight. Dust rose in a choking cloud. It stood—a towering humanoid, back bristling with vast black wings that unfurled like funeral drapes. Its eyes burned with malice, and the stench of something ancient, charred and forgotten, rolled from its presence.
Panic erupted. Visitors screamed, surging toward the cathedral doors, clawing at the iron handles. But the doors held fast, sealed by an unseen will. No force of man could pry them open.
Inside, the cathedral became a cage.
Damian shifted his stance, shoulders low, his eyes locked onto the thing across from him. The beast’s gait was deliberate, each step scraping claws across the flagstones, leaving shallow scars in the ancient floor. Its lips peeled back in a grin too wide, too hateful, its fangs jutting forward like splintered knives pushing through its own teeth. Not a vampire, not anything so easily named—something older, uglier, and hungry.
They circled. Damian’s shadows crawled outward, slick tendrils creeping over the cathedral floor, sliding pews aside with eerie care. The creature snarled at the gesture, snatching up one of the benches and flinging it—not at Damian, but at the huddled innocents pressed against the walls. Screams tore through the nave. Damian’s shadows whipped up in time, coiling around the wood, lowering it gently as if mocking the violence.
That mocking calm only enraged the beast. It lunged, claws extending with a sickening crack of bone, teeth snapping together with sparks of saliva. The air split with the ferocity of its charge. Its strikes came in a blur: claws slashing, fists hammering, feet kicking with the precision of something made to kill. Damian met the storm head-on. His body moved like a man long-practised in war, weaving through the blows, deflecting with forearms and shoulders, absorbing what he could not avoid. The claws scraped his sleeve, tearing fabric but not flesh.
Then he struck. A punch, clean and brutal, straight into its chest. The impact rang like iron on stone. Before the beast could recoil, Damian’s palm crashed forward, a strike that sent it skidding backward across the nave. Its body slammed against the floor, cracks spider-webbing through the flagstones, before it snapped its wings open—massive, black, leathery things that reeked of rot—and dragged itself upright. Its grin never faltered.
The crowd was a sea of panic. Some pressed into corners, sobbing; others raised shaking phones, capturing what their minds could barely process. Damian would appear to them only as a shifting blot of shadow, but the creature—its claws, its grotesque fangs, its wings—was all too visible. Proof carved in pixels.
Damian flexed his hands, tendrils writhing at his heels like impatient serpents. He couldn’t kill it here without consequence. But he had to end it, before its hunger turned the cathedral into a mausoleum.
The beast tilted its head, blood dripping from its gums, wings twitching in anticipation. The cathedral’s ancient stones groaned, as though the building itself recoiled from what it was forced to witness.
The fight was only just beginning.
Damian rolled his shoulders, loosening his frame, then rose onto the tips of his toes. He bounced lightly, the way a prizefighter might in the seconds before a bell. His lips curled into something halfway between a smirk and a snarl as he stretched out a hand, curling his fingers inward—a silent, taunting summons.
The beast did not hesitate. It thundered forward, claws outstretched, fangs dripping. This time Damian did not wait for his shadows. He met the charge head-on. He ducked beneath its grasp and drove ten rapid-fire punches into its stomach, each blow hammering into flesh and bone with machine-like precision. The beast lurched back, wind knocked out in ragged bursts. It swung wildly, a clawed hand slicing the air where his skull had been a heartbeat before. Damian slipped under and countered with a right hook that snapped the monster’s head sideways, a spray of spit and blood catching the light.
The beast reeled, arms clawing to shield its face. Damian shifted low, drove forward, and speared his shoulder into its waist. The impact echoed like a battering ram. Together they crashed to the stone floor with a brutal crunch, the beast’s wings splaying wide and slamming into the cathedral tiles, the sound a thunderous crack.
For the first time, it screamed. The cry was sharp and piercing, a sound so foul it made the cathedral walls quiver. Those hiding in the shadows clutched their heads as blood welled at the corners of their ears, dripping onto their shoulders. The creature’s agony was infectious, gnawing into every human nerve.
Damian did not falter. He pressed his knee into the small of its back, forcing it down, grinding it against the cold stone. His grip tightened around the bases of the beast’s wings, and with a brutal pull he wrenched one free of its socket, then the other, the sound of tearing sinew wet and sickening. The monster’s screeches rose into a shrill, inhuman howl, echoing through the nave like the tolling of a funeral bell.
With its wings ruined, Damian shifted his hold, snaking his arms around its throat. His muscles strained, every tendon burning as he pulled back with all his strength. His teeth grit. Shadows quivered at the edges of the cathedral, drawn into his fury, whispering against the stone.
The beast clawed at the ground, dragging furrows into the flagstones, but Damian’s grip only tightened. He was going to break it—neck, spirit, everything.
And for a heartbeat, the cathedral itself seemed to wait, uncertain which of them was the monster.
Crack.
The beast’s neck gave way, the sound sharp and final. Its shrieking howl died in its throat, cut short in silence. The cold that had gripped the cathedral eased, the frozen air loosening as if the building itself had been holding its breath. With a groan, the great doors swung open, and light—blue, red, flashing in rapid bursts—spilled across the stone floor.
Damian rose, slow and deliberate, his chest rising with unlaboured breaths. He reached down, fisting his hand into the creature’s matted hair, and dragged it across the length of the cathedral. Its ruined wings scraped behind, smearing black blood into the cracks of the stone.
Outside, the storm had broken into chaos of its own. Police officers swarmed the car park, weapons raised, faces tight with panic. A megaphone crackled, the voice amplified but trembling beneath the veneer of command.
“Stop where you are! Hands in the air! Do it, do it now!”
Damian ignored it. He walked to the center of the lot, dragging the corpse in his wake. Behind him, officers ushered the terrified survivors of the cathedral toward safety, their faces pale and streaked with tears.
At last, Damian let the body fall. It hit the tarmac with a wet thud. He stepped back, his eyes catching the gleam of rifle scopes, the jittering dance of laser sights fixed on his chest. Taser prongs quivered in the officers’ hands. They were ready to bring him down, but none dared move first.
Damian knelt beside the beast’s remains. He pressed his palm to the ground. The earth shuddered, rumbling deep, setting car alarms screaming across the lot. Cracks split open beneath the corpse, widening into a jagged maw. With a final lurch, the ground swallowed the body whole. A moment later, the asphalt sealed itself, flawless, as though nothing had ever disturbed it.
The megaphone blared again, shrill and desperate.
“Arms in the air or we will shoot! This is your last warning!”
But the warning fell into emptiness.
Shadows rose around Damian, swallowing his form, cloaking him in a living darkness that pulsed and twisted. When the veil dissolved, there was nothing left.
Only silence.
And a circle of officers staring at an empty lot, bewildered, shaken, and no closer to understanding the nightmare they had just witnessed.
The car park was a tableau of panic. Officers shouted into radios, their voices thin and shaky. Civilians clustered along the edges, eyes wide, bodies pressed against cars and each other. The smell of ozone, iron, and burnt rubber clung to the air. Broken alarms screamed, then fell silent as if the world had exhaled in exhausted fear.
No body lay where Damian had knelt. The asphalt bore no trace of the beast he had dragged, only cracks that looked like scars in black stone, jagged veins that seemed to pulse faintly, almost like a heartbeat. Shadows pooled unnaturally in the corners of the lot, stretching thin and thick in ways that defied the flickering streetlamps. A cold wind coiled through the metal fencing, carrying a whisper that no one alive could place, and the hair on the backs of their necks stood rigid.
Officers raised their weapons in hesitant arcs, tasers quivering, rifles trembling in their grips. “Where did it go?” one breathed, voice tight, eyes scanning the emptiness. Another stepped forward, hand on the megaphone, shaking: “If anyone is here—identify yourself! Hands where we can see them!”
Somewhere in the distance, a solitary shadow slithered along the edge of the lot. Not human. Not beast. It moved with deliberate grace, a pulse of darkness that seemed to drink the weak light around it. Damian watched through it all, his senses extending through the streets, the alleys, the river fog curling along the city.
He could feel the city’s bones beneath him: the cobbled streets of old Salford, the abandoned mills, the churches and tenements that had seen centuries of human folly. Each footstep, each whisper, each frightened heartbeat of the living was a note in a symphony he had heard for centuries.
Damian’s eyes swept the lot one last time. The humans froze, caught between fear and disbelief. Their fear did not matter, not truly. What mattered was the subtle pattern beneath it all: the city, the life, the fragile order of things that could so easily be broken.
A shadow peeled off the nearest building, elongated, reaching toward him like a blackened hand. He allowed it to brush against him, not hiding, not fleeing. When it withdrew, he was gone.
The officers remained, rifles and tasers fixed on emptiness. The echoes of the cathedral’s screams, the beast’s agony, and the unnatural tremor of the ground lingered in the asphalt and the air. The city seemed to pulse in response, silent and watchful.
No one moved for a long moment. Then, one officer whispered, voice tight and trembling: “What… what just happened?”
No answer came.
The police tried to piece together what had unfolded in the cathedral, their voices taut with tension and disbelief. Officers scribbled furiously in notebooks, flashlights bobbing across stained pages, while survivors spoke haltingly, their words tumbling over one another.
“They… it… saved us,” a young woman stammered, trembling. “I don’t know how, but it stopped… everything…”
An elderly woman, her hands still trembling from the night’s horrors, added in a small, quivering voice, “I was bleeding… from my eyes and nose… and then—someone… something—touched my shoulder. All the blood… it went back in… like it never happened.” Her gaze drifted, distant, as though she were still seeing the shadow in the corner of her mind.
The officers nodded, jotting down notes with growing unease, trying to remain rational. The body slumped in the cathedral had been the sole casualty. They wheeled it out on a stretcher, solemn and silent, and an officer identified the man as someone he had arrested days before for a drunken brawl at a local pub. The realisation did little to clarify anything; if anything, it deepened the sense of absurdity.
Whispers filled the lot as more officers gathered, exchanging glances heavy with incredulity. “Are we sure there’s no gas leak? Or… some kind of… hallucination?” one asked, voice tinged with fear.
“No, readings are clean,” another responded, shaking his head. “Nothing in the air. Nothing in the building. It… it doesn’t make any sense.”
Outside, the city continued as if oblivious. Streetlights flickered, fog crawled along the edges of the cathedral grounds, and somewhere deep in the alleys, shadows stretched and recoiled like living things. The witnesses’ eyes darted to every corner, every darkened doorway, as though the thing that had saved them might still be watching.
Confusion and disbelief hung over the police, heavy as the night itself, leaving an unspoken question in the air: how does one account for something that may not exist—or something that existed long before they could understand?
“Busy, busy… like a worker’s bee,” the voice murmured, echoing softly in the room’s dim corners.
Damian tutted, the familiar symbol of the city scratching at some memory, but he didn’t reply.
“More will show up like that. Worse still, we don’t know why—or who is sending them. Now you know your purpose… to investigate.”
Damian uncapped the whiskey he had bought earlier, the amber liquid sloshing as he tilted it to his lips. A long swallow burned down his throat.
“Why me?” he asked finally, voice low and gravelly. “There are many others who could investigate this.”
“You… just because,” came the cryptic response.
He leaned back, letting the shadows ripple around him like impatient serpents. “I was killed in my former life,” he began, eyes darkening, “by someone—or something—unknown. With my dying breath I begged to be able to live in the shadows… to help those in need… to reap what they sow. Through hundreds of conflicts I’ve walked, ending those who dared to bring darkness, and yet… here I am, still searching.”
The female voice softened, almost coaxing. “You will find what you seek. Patience is all you need.”
Damian took another drink, letting the warmth fade into the cold edges of his mind. His shadowy tendrils shimmered, coiling and uncoiling, a visible pulse of frustration.
“Peace,” he muttered, voice tight. “White wings. That’s what I seek now… after hundreds of years, giving the underground thousands upon thousands of new tenants.” He let the words hang, heavy with centuries of exhaustion and violence, the bottle nearly empty in his hand, the shadows around him waiting, restless and watchful.
Chapter 2.
Damian moved through the city like a shadow unpinned from its master, the storm swallowing him whole. He knew this was not the place he was meant to be—the signs he sought were absent—but still he wandered, drawn by the pull of restless streets. A shopping trolley broke free and rattled across a car park; his hand fell upon it, stilling its wild flight before returning it to the line of its kind. A hat tore loose into the gale; he caught it with a predator’s precision, placing it back upon a stranger’s head.
Yet every kindness carried a weight, each gesture unsettling in its silence.
The rain lashed, the wind howled like some hungry thing, and Damian slipped inside the supermarket. The strip lights trembled at his presence, shadows twisting against the walls. On the security screens he did not appear as a man at all, but as a smear of black, an absence that writhed and breathed.
The air thickened with voices.
“I hope Storm Amy hits hard,” a man sneered into his phone, “maybe I’ll be spared work.”
A mother pushed her cart, her complaint ragged: “Back when I were a child, we went to school through snow, through thunder…”
The guards’ eyes hunted a knot of teenagers who circled the sweets aisle like wolves.
The youths snatched chocolate and bolted. Damian did not turn his head, yet a thin, sinuous tendril coiled from his shadow, slithering across the tiles. It curled about the leader’s ankle, and he crashed to the ground. The others toppled into him, their laughter sharp as broken glass, their theft undone.
Damian reached for a bottle of Bells Blended Scotch Whiskey, the glass cold against his palm. At the till, the young woman with hair like spilled flame fumbled with his purchase. He laid a crisp £50 note upon the counter, took his change, and regarded her with eyes that seemed to drink the light from her skin.
He stepped back into the storm, and the night embraced him as if it knew him well. The wind keened, the rain lashed harder.
He walked and walked, the storm soaking his suit until it clung like a second skin. The cold did not touch him. The wet carried no weight. He moved on, untethered, until the flicker of cathedral lights caught his eye.
A low hum of voices drifted from within, footsteps echoing off stone as people sought shelter in its walls. Damian knew the place well. He had watched its bones rise between 1844 and 1848, each stone set into place beneath a grey Salford sky. This city had been his haunt since long before it earned the name of “city” in 1926, back when it was nothing more than a settlement clinging to the banks of the Irwell. Centuries had reshaped it, yet its ancient heart still beat beneath the mortar and glass.
And Damian adored the ancient. He fed upon it.
The cathedral stood proud and solemn, its age breathing through the stone. He let his shadow stretch long and lean, dissolving into the gloom as he stepped inside. Whatever stirred the crowd to gather here, he would see for himself.
The cathedral loomed in cruciform splendour, its Gothic Revival arches stretching high into darkness where candlelight could not reach. The stone breathed history, cold and damp with memory, every pillar a reminder of hands long turned to dust.
Damian slipped inside, carried by silence. He moved along the edges where light faltered, his figure clinging to the shadows cast by vaulting ribs and pointed arches. The voices of the living rippled through the nave—tourists in heavy coats, students speaking in hushed awe, an old woman kneeling at a side chapel, whispering prayers to saints who had heard centuries of petitions. The cathedral drew them all: the faithful, the curious, the weary. Diversity clothed the congregation like a mosaic of shifting colours, but none of them looked for him, none of them saw.
He walked unseen beneath stained glass windows, the jewel-toned saints fractured by night. He traced familiar outlines with his eyes: the rose window blooming above, the carved angels watching from their alcoves. He had seen them born from stone, had watched masons sweat and curse as they raised these walls. This house of God was no stranger to him—it was as much his dwelling as theirs.
At last, he came to a quiet recess, far from the murmur of footsteps. There, beneath centuries of dust and polish, his hand found the mark: a name carved into the stone, crude and shallow, worn by time until it was nearly illegible. A ghost of himself etched in the bones of the church.
He lingered, his fingers tracing what remained, and for a moment the cathedral seemed to exhale around him—an ancient structure recognising an older soul.
The cathedral shuddered as the great doors slammed shut with a thunderous finality, the sound rolling through the nave like the crack of judgement. Lights flickered, stuttering halos against ancient stone, before dimming into a trembling glow. The air shifted, heavy with dread, and cold bled into the chamber—so cold that breath crystallised midair, condensation on the walls hardening into a lattice of ice.
Time seemed to falter. The world slowed, every heartbeat stretching into eternity.
From the pews, a scream split the silence, shrill and raw, ricocheting off vaulted arches. An elderly woman, once bent in prayer, lifted her trembling face as thin rivulets of blood traced downward from her eyes and nose, dripping onto folded hands. Her voice dissolved into sobs.
Then, a sharp crack. Somewhere among the crowd, a man slumped forward, his neck bent at an impossible angle. Shock rippled outward, terror swelling in every chest.
From the shadows, Damian emerged at last. His figure unfurled like ink spilling into light. He walked without haste, each step deliberate, until he reached the trembling woman. She flinched as his hand, pale and cold, touched her shoulder. No words passed his lips. Yet the bleeding ceased—not by stopping, but by retreating. The crimson lines withdrew, sliding back beneath her skin, restoring what had been stolen.
The crowd gasped, some whispering prayers, others choking on fear.
Movement above. The vaulted beams groaned. From the rafters, a figure dropped, landing in a crouch that split the stone tiles beneath its weight. Dust rose in a choking cloud. It stood—a towering humanoid, back bristling with vast black wings that unfurled like funeral drapes. Its eyes burned with malice, and the stench of something ancient, charred and forgotten, rolled from its presence.
Panic erupted. Visitors screamed, surging toward the cathedral doors, clawing at the iron handles. But the doors held fast, sealed by an unseen will. No force of man could pry them open.
Inside, the cathedral became a cage.
Damian shifted his stance, shoulders low, his eyes locked onto the thing across from him. The beast’s gait was deliberate, each step scraping claws across the flagstones, leaving shallow scars in the ancient floor. Its lips peeled back in a grin too wide, too hateful, its fangs jutting forward like splintered knives pushing through its own teeth. Not a vampire, not anything so easily named—something older, uglier, and hungry.
They circled. Damian’s shadows crawled outward, slick tendrils creeping over the cathedral floor, sliding pews aside with eerie care. The creature snarled at the gesture, snatching up one of the benches and flinging it—not at Damian, but at the huddled innocents pressed against the walls. Screams tore through the nave. Damian’s shadows whipped up in time, coiling around the wood, lowering it gently as if mocking the violence.
That mocking calm only enraged the beast. It lunged, claws extending with a sickening crack of bone, teeth snapping together with sparks of saliva. The air split with the ferocity of its charge. Its strikes came in a blur: claws slashing, fists hammering, feet kicking with the precision of something made to kill. Damian met the storm head-on. His body moved like a man long-practised in war, weaving through the blows, deflecting with forearms and shoulders, absorbing what he could not avoid. The claws scraped his sleeve, tearing fabric but not flesh.
Then he struck. A punch, clean and brutal, straight into its chest. The impact rang like iron on stone. Before the beast could recoil, Damian’s palm crashed forward, a strike that sent it skidding backward across the nave. Its body slammed against the floor, cracks spider-webbing through the flagstones, before it snapped its wings open—massive, black, leathery things that reeked of rot—and dragged itself upright. Its grin never faltered.
The crowd was a sea of panic. Some pressed into corners, sobbing; others raised shaking phones, capturing what their minds could barely process. Damian would appear to them only as a shifting blot of shadow, but the creature—its claws, its grotesque fangs, its wings—was all too visible. Proof carved in pixels.
Damian flexed his hands, tendrils writhing at his heels like impatient serpents. He couldn’t kill it here without consequence. But he had to end it, before its hunger turned the cathedral into a mausoleum.
The beast tilted its head, blood dripping from its gums, wings twitching in anticipation. The cathedral’s ancient stones groaned, as though the building itself recoiled from what it was forced to witness.
The fight was only just beginning.
Damian rolled his shoulders, loosening his frame, then rose onto the tips of his toes. He bounced lightly, the way a prizefighter might in the seconds before a bell. His lips curled into something halfway between a smirk and a snarl as he stretched out a hand, curling his fingers inward—a silent, taunting summons.
The beast did not hesitate. It thundered forward, claws outstretched, fangs dripping. This time Damian did not wait for his shadows. He met the charge head-on. He ducked beneath its grasp and drove ten rapid-fire punches into its stomach, each blow hammering into flesh and bone with machine-like precision. The beast lurched back, wind knocked out in ragged bursts. It swung wildly, a clawed hand slicing the air where his skull had been a heartbeat before. Damian slipped under and countered with a right hook that snapped the monster’s head sideways, a spray of spit and blood catching the light.
The beast reeled, arms clawing to shield its face. Damian shifted low, drove forward, and speared his shoulder into its waist. The impact echoed like a battering ram. Together they crashed to the stone floor with a brutal crunch, the beast’s wings splaying wide and slamming into the cathedral tiles, the sound a thunderous crack.
For the first time, it screamed. The cry was sharp and piercing, a sound so foul it made the cathedral walls quiver. Those hiding in the shadows clutched their heads as blood welled at the corners of their ears, dripping onto their shoulders. The creature’s agony was infectious, gnawing into every human nerve.
Damian did not falter. He pressed his knee into the small of its back, forcing it down, grinding it against the cold stone. His grip tightened around the bases of the beast’s wings, and with a brutal pull he wrenched one free of its socket, then the other, the sound of tearing sinew wet and sickening. The monster’s screeches rose into a shrill, inhuman howl, echoing through the nave like the tolling of a funeral bell.
With its wings ruined, Damian shifted his hold, snaking his arms around its throat. His muscles strained, every tendon burning as he pulled back with all his strength. His teeth grit. Shadows quivered at the edges of the cathedral, drawn into his fury, whispering against the stone.
The beast clawed at the ground, dragging furrows into the flagstones, but Damian’s grip only tightened. He was going to break it—neck, spirit, everything.
And for a heartbeat, the cathedral itself seemed to wait, uncertain which of them was the monster.
Crack.
The beast’s neck gave way, the sound sharp and final. Its shrieking howl died in its throat, cut short in silence. The cold that had gripped the cathedral eased, the frozen air loosening as if the building itself had been holding its breath. With a groan, the great doors swung open, and light—blue, red, flashing in rapid bursts—spilled across the stone floor.
Damian rose, slow and deliberate, his chest rising with unlaboured breaths. He reached down, fisting his hand into the creature’s matted hair, and dragged it across the length of the cathedral. Its ruined wings scraped behind, smearing black blood into the cracks of the stone.
Outside, the storm had broken into chaos of its own. Police officers swarmed the car park, weapons raised, faces tight with panic. A megaphone crackled, the voice amplified but trembling beneath the veneer of command.
“Stop where you are! Hands in the air! Do it, do it now!”
Damian ignored it. He walked to the center of the lot, dragging the corpse in his wake. Behind him, officers ushered the terrified survivors of the cathedral toward safety, their faces pale and streaked with tears.
At last, Damian let the body fall. It hit the tarmac with a wet thud. He stepped back, his eyes catching the gleam of rifle scopes, the jittering dance of laser sights fixed on his chest. Taser prongs quivered in the officers’ hands. They were ready to bring him down, but none dared move first.
Damian knelt beside the beast’s remains. He pressed his palm to the ground. The earth shuddered, rumbling deep, setting car alarms screaming across the lot. Cracks split open beneath the corpse, widening into a jagged maw. With a final lurch, the ground swallowed the body whole. A moment later, the asphalt sealed itself, flawless, as though nothing had ever disturbed it.
The megaphone blared again, shrill and desperate.
“Arms in the air or we will shoot! This is your last warning!”
But the warning fell into emptiness.
Shadows rose around Damian, swallowing his form, cloaking him in a living darkness that pulsed and twisted. When the veil dissolved, there was nothing left.
Only silence.
And a circle of officers staring at an empty lot, bewildered, shaken, and no closer to understanding the nightmare they had just witnessed.
The car park was a tableau of panic. Officers shouted into radios, their voices thin and shaky. Civilians clustered along the edges, eyes wide, bodies pressed against cars and each other. The smell of ozone, iron, and burnt rubber clung to the air. Broken alarms screamed, then fell silent as if the world had exhaled in exhausted fear.
No body lay where Damian had knelt. The asphalt bore no trace of the beast he had dragged, only cracks that looked like scars in black stone, jagged veins that seemed to pulse faintly, almost like a heartbeat. Shadows pooled unnaturally in the corners of the lot, stretching thin and thick in ways that defied the flickering streetlamps. A cold wind coiled through the metal fencing, carrying a whisper that no one alive could place, and the hair on the backs of their necks stood rigid.
Officers raised their weapons in hesitant arcs, tasers quivering, rifles trembling in their grips. “Where did it go?” one breathed, voice tight, eyes scanning the emptiness. Another stepped forward, hand on the megaphone, shaking: “If anyone is here—identify yourself! Hands where we can see them!”
Somewhere in the distance, a solitary shadow slithered along the edge of the lot. Not human. Not beast. It moved with deliberate grace, a pulse of darkness that seemed to drink the weak light around it. Damian watched through it all, his senses extending through the streets, the alleys, the river fog curling along the city.
He could feel the city’s bones beneath him: the cobbled streets of old Salford, the abandoned mills, the churches and tenements that had seen centuries of human folly. Each footstep, each whisper, each frightened heartbeat of the living was a note in a symphony he had heard for centuries.
Damian’s eyes swept the lot one last time. The humans froze, caught between fear and disbelief. Their fear did not matter, not truly. What mattered was the subtle pattern beneath it all: the city, the life, the fragile order of things that could so easily be broken.
A shadow peeled off the nearest building, elongated, reaching toward him like a blackened hand. He allowed it to brush against him, not hiding, not fleeing. When it withdrew, he was gone.
The officers remained, rifles and tasers fixed on emptiness. The echoes of the cathedral’s screams, the beast’s agony, and the unnatural tremor of the ground lingered in the asphalt and the air. The city seemed to pulse in response, silent and watchful.
No one moved for a long moment. Then, one officer whispered, voice tight and trembling: “What… what just happened?”
No answer came.
The police tried to piece together what had unfolded in the cathedral, their voices taut with tension and disbelief. Officers scribbled furiously in notebooks, flashlights bobbing across stained pages, while survivors spoke haltingly, their words tumbling over one another.
“They… it… saved us,” a young woman stammered, trembling. “I don’t know how, but it stopped… everything…”
An elderly woman, her hands still trembling from the night’s horrors, added in a small, quivering voice, “I was bleeding… from my eyes and nose… and then—someone… something—touched my shoulder. All the blood… it went back in… like it never happened.” Her gaze drifted, distant, as though she were still seeing the shadow in the corner of her mind.
The officers nodded, jotting down notes with growing unease, trying to remain rational. The body slumped in the cathedral had been the sole casualty. They wheeled it out on a stretcher, solemn and silent, and an officer identified the man as someone he had arrested days before for a drunken brawl at a local pub. The realisation did little to clarify anything; if anything, it deepened the sense of absurdity.
Whispers filled the lot as more officers gathered, exchanging glances heavy with incredulity. “Are we sure there’s no gas leak? Or… some kind of… hallucination?” one asked, voice tinged with fear.
“No, readings are clean,” another responded, shaking his head. “Nothing in the air. Nothing in the building. It… it doesn’t make any sense.”
Outside, the city continued as if oblivious. Streetlights flickered, fog crawled along the edges of the cathedral grounds, and somewhere deep in the alleys, shadows stretched and recoiled like living things. The witnesses’ eyes darted to every corner, every darkened doorway, as though the thing that had saved them might still be watching.
Confusion and disbelief hung over the police, heavy as the night itself, leaving an unspoken question in the air: how does one account for something that may not exist—or something that existed long before they could understand?
“Busy, busy… like a worker’s bee,” the voice murmured, echoing softly in the room’s dim corners.
Damian tutted, the familiar symbol of the city scratching at some memory, but he didn’t reply.
“More will show up like that. Worse still, we don’t know why—or who is sending them. Now you know your purpose… to investigate.”
Damian uncapped the whiskey he had bought earlier, the amber liquid sloshing as he tilted it to his lips. A long swallow burned down his throat.
“Why me?” he asked finally, voice low and gravelly. “There are many others who could investigate this.”
“You… just because,” came the cryptic response.
He leaned back, letting the shadows ripple around him like impatient serpents. “I was killed in my former life,” he began, eyes darkening, “by someone—or something—unknown. With my dying breath I begged to be able to live in the shadows… to help those in need… to reap what they sow. Through hundreds of conflicts I’ve walked, ending those who dared to bring darkness, and yet… here I am, still searching.”
The female voice softened, almost coaxing. “You will find what you seek. Patience is all you need.”
Damian took another drink, letting the warmth fade into the cold edges of his mind. His shadowy tendrils shimmered, coiling and uncoiling, a visible pulse of frustration.
“Peace,” he muttered, voice tight. “White wings. That’s what I seek now… after hundreds of years, giving the underground thousands upon thousands of new tenants.” He let the words hang, heavy with centuries of exhaustion and violence, the bottle nearly empty in his hand, the shadows around him waiting, restless and watchful.
Into the Darkness: Chapter 3
Chapter 3 The night was thick with haze and heat when Damien reached the source of the sound — a heartbeat of bass rising from the cracked pavement like something alive. The club’s sign sputtered in red neon: The Velvet Spine. It hissed faintly, as though exhaling the town’s sins. Inside, the...
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