The chapel looked like it had given up trying to impress anyone. Wedged between a tannery that made your eyes water and a gambling house that never seemed to sleep, it had the tired resignation of something that had seen better days and stopped expecting them to return. The white stone walls were now the color of old smoke, and where there should have been beautiful stained glass, someone had patched the broken window with whatever scraps they could find.
Father Aldric's knees protested as he knelt before the altar, but he'd stopped listening to his body's complaints years ago. At sixty-three, his back curved like a question mark, and his hair had thinned to wisps that caught the candlelight like cobwebs. Twenty years he'd been here—twenty years since the Church hierarchy had politely suggested he might be "better suited" to a smaller parish. Translation: his superiors were tired of his big mouth and stubborn streak.
He'd known exactly what they were doing. Greywick wasn't a assignment; it was exile with a collar.
But every morning, he lit those candles anyway. Every morning, he said his prayers to a congregation that rarely exceeded three people on a good day. The townspeople crossed the street when they saw him coming. The local thugs made jokes about blessing their knuckles before a fight. And still, he showed up.
Somebody had to. Even here. Especially here.
Tonight felt different, though. His hands wouldn't stop shaking as he fingered the worn sunburst pendant at his throat—a nervous habit he'd picked up somewhere between his first broken nose and his last transfer request.
The stories had been filtering in all week, each one a little more unsettling than the last.
First, it was Old Henrik, reeking of cheap wine and cheaper decisions. "Father, I swear on my mother's grave, this man... he just looked at me. Didn't say nothing, didn't move. But I swear I wet myself standing there. Couldn't help it."
Aldric had nodded sympathetically and handed him a few coppers for food. Henrik was always seeing demons in his drink.
Then came Mira from the brothel, slipping into his confessional like a ghost. Her voice shook as she whispered through the screen: "His eyes, Father. They weren't... they weren't the right color. Not human color. I've seen plenty of men, but this one..." She'd trailed off, and he'd heard her crying softly. "I thought I was going to lose my mind just looking at him."
That had made him pause. Mira had survived things that would break most people. She didn't spook easily.
The third story came from Tommy the Knife—seventeen years old and cockier than a rooster until someone broke his arm in three places. The boy had crawled into the chapel bleeding, pride forgotten, whispering: "He doesn't fight normal, Father. Doesn't even touch you. Just... breaks things. Inside you."
Three people. Three completely different walks of life. All describing the same impossible fear.
Aldric's old soldier instincts—buried under decades of sermons and sacraments—were screaming at him. He'd seen enough battlefields to know when something was wrong. Really wrong.
He pushed himself up from the kneeler with a grunt that echoed in the empty space. His reflection wavered in the cracked altar stone as he placed both hands on its surface, closing his eyes.
"Lord," he said, and his voice sounded smaller than he'd like. "I know I'm not much. Hell, I know why You stuck me in this forgotten corner of creation. But these people... they're scared. And if there's something hunting them, something that shouldn't be..." He took a shaky breath. "Just give me enough light to see what I'm up against. Please."
For a heartbeat, nothing. Then—warmth. Faint as a candle flame in a storm, but real. Real enough to make his chest tighten with something between hope and terror.
The Light was still listening. Which meant his gut instinct was right: something genuinely evil had come to Greywick.
The chapel door's hinges announced a visitor with their familiar squeal. Aldric turned to find Sarah Mudfoot hovering in the doorway—one of Greywick's permanent fixtures, a woman whose real name had been lost under years of accumulated dirt and bad luck. She kept glancing over her shoulder like she expected something to follow her inside.
"Father?" Her voice cracked like old leather. "Mind if I... just sit a spell?"
"Course not." He gestured to the nearest pew. "That's what they're for."
She practically collapsed onto the wooden bench, hands trembling so badly she had trouble accepting the cup of water he brought her. When she finally drank, her eyes met his—and he saw genuine terror there, not the usual mixture of hunger and desperation.
"It's him," she whispered.
Aldric felt his stomach drop. "Who's him, Sarah?"
"The one they're all talking about. The stranger." Her fingers clutched at his sleeve with surprising strength. "I was scrounging behind Miller's bakery—you know, looking for day-old bread he throws out—and I heard footsteps. But when I looked..." She swallowed hard. "He was just standing there. Watching. And Father, I swear to you, everything went quiet. No crickets, no wind, nothing. Like the world was holding its breath."
Aldric's jaw clenched. He covered her shaking hand with his own. "You're safe now. Nothing can touch you here."
But even as he said it, his mind was racing. Four stories now. Four different people, all describing the same unnatural dread. The same feeling that they'd looked into something that shouldn't exist.
As Sarah curled up on the pew, exhaustion finally overtaking fear, Aldric returned to his altar. This time, he didn't kneel. He was too agitated, too wired. Instead, he stood there, staring at the flickering candles, and admitted something he'd been trying not to think about.
"Whatever's out there," he said quietly, "it's not human. Can't be. Humans don't make the air go still just by existing."
The wind picked up outside, rattling the chapel's loose boards and making the candlelight dance. Shadows jumped across the walls like living things.
But Aldric stood his ground. He'd spent twenty years in this forgotten corner of the world, watching over people nobody else cared about. He wasn't about to stop now, no matter what was prowling Greywick's streets.
When the darkness finally showed itself—and he knew it would—he'd be ready.
He just hoped ready would be enough.
The confessional booth was like sitting inside a damp closet that someone had tried to make holy with incense. The wood creaked every time Aldric shifted, and the metal lattice between him and whoever sat on the other side had worn smooth from decades of whispered secrets. Most nights, he sat here alone. In Greywick, people were more likely to brag about their sins over a pint than confess them to a priest.
But tonight, the familiar rustle of the curtain made his pulse quicken. Someone had actually come.
"Speak, child." The words came automatically after twenty years of practice. "Whatever's eating at you, God's heard worse."
The silence stretched long enough that he wondered if his visitor had changed their mind. Then came a voice—young, male, barely holding together:
"Father, I think I saw the Devil himself."
Aldric's stomach dropped. He'd been waiting for this conversation all week, dreading it and needing it in equal measure. "Tell me what happened."
The story came out in jagged pieces, like the boy was trying to pull glass from a wound.
"Me and my friends, we were coming back from the tavern, you know? Cutting through the alley behind Harren's butcher shop. There was this man... just standing there in the shadows. We figured he was some drunk looking for a place to piss." The boy's voice cracked. "Marcus—he's always running his mouth—he starts making jokes. Then this man looks up at us."
A long pause. Aldric could hear the boy's breathing getting faster.
"Father, it was like someone had sucked all the sound out of the world. Marcus just... stopped talking. Mid-word. We all did. Tom tried to run but his legs wouldn't work right. And I..." The boy made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "I couldn't even blink. Like my whole body had forgotten how."
Aldric's knuckles had gone white where he gripped the bench. "Did he hurt you? Threaten you?"
"That's what's so messed up—he didn't do anything. Just walked past us like we were furniture. But when he got close to me..." The boy's voice dropped to barely a whisper. "I swear my heart stopped beating. Just for a second, but I felt it. Felt the silence in my chest. And his eyes..." A shuddering breath. "They weren't human eyes, Father. They were like looking into an empty well."
Aldric closed his own eyes, feeling suddenly older than his sixty-three years. "You did the right thing coming here. Fear isn't always weakness—sometimes it's your soul telling you to pay attention."
"What am I supposed to do? My friends won't even talk about it. They act like it never happened."
"Stick to the main roads after dark. Stay where there are people, where there's light. And keep praying." It felt inadequate even as he said it, but what else could he offer?
The boy left without another word, his footsteps echoing in the empty chapel like stones dropped down a well.
By sunrise, Aldric had heard the same story four more times. Each visitor painted the same impossible picture with different details. Mrs. Henley from the bakery, voice shaking as she described finding three stray dogs in the alley behind her shop—not dead, exactly, but empty. Drained. "Like something had drunk the life right out of them, Father."
A professional gambler named Crews, drunk but dead serious, swearing he'd seen shadows moving independently of whatever should have cast them. "I know tricks, Father. I know sleight of hand. This wasn't tricks."
Even Big Garrett, a mercenary who'd survived more battles than he had teeth, slumped in the booth like a broken man. "I've killed dozens of men, Father. Looked death in the face and spat in it. But this thing... it ain't natural. It ain't human. I don't fight ghosts."
Each story chipped away at Aldric's hope that this was all mass hysteria, shared delusion, anything but what his gut told him it was.
When the last confession ended, Aldric's back was screaming from hours of sitting rigid. He forced himself out of the booth and walked stiffly to his altar, where the Sun God's statue watched over him with a face half-worn away by time and neglect. Even the statues in Greywick looked tired.
He didn't kneel this time—his knees couldn't take it. Instead, he gripped the altar's edge and let twenty years of frustration pour out.
"Lord, I've been your servant since I was seventeen years old. I've ministered to killers and thieves and never once asked why You stuck me with them." His voice echoed in the empty space, rough with exhaustion and something deeper. "But this thing that's hunting my people... it's not human. It's not natural. And they're terrified."
His fingers dug into the stone hard enough to hurt. For the first time in years, he felt genuinely angry—not at God, but at his own helplessness.
"I'm old, Lord. My back hurts, my eyes aren't what they were, and half the time I can't remember if I've said morning prayers or not. But if You need someone to face this darkness..." He took a shaky breath. "I'm still here. Still willing. Just... give me enough strength to see it clearly. Enough courage not to run."
Behind him, a single candle flame suddenly jumped higher, casting dancing shadows across the cracked walls. Coincidence? A draft from the broken window? Or something more?
Aldric didn't know. But for the first time in days, he felt like he wasn't facing this alone.
Later that evening, Aldric positioned himself by the chapel's front window, ignoring his protesting joints as he settled into the wooden chair he'd dragged over. Most priests his age would be writing letters to their superiors, requesting help, waiting for someone else to handle the crisis.
But Aldric had learned long ago that God helped those who helped themselves. And in Greywick, if you didn't solve your own problems, they tended to solve you.
The square outside was busy with evening commerce—merchants closing up shop, workers heading home or to taverns, the usual flow of life in a town that had learned to keep moving no matter what. At first, he saw nothing unusual.
Then his attention snagged on a figure crossing the far side of the square.
Nothing dramatic. Just a man in dark clothes, walking at a perfectly normal pace. But something about him made Aldric's throat go dry. The way people seemed to step aside without realizing it. The way conversations died as he passed, only to resume once he was gone. The absolute stillness of his movement, like he was gliding rather than walking.
"Son of a bitch," Aldric whispered, his hand instinctively finding the sunburst pendant at his throat.
He had no proof. No divine revelation. Just the bone-deep certainty that comes from forty-six years of reading people and situations. This was the thing that had been stalking his flock. This was what had turned grown men into terrified children.
And it was walking through his town like it owned the place.
Aldric's jaw tightened as he watched the figure disappear into the maze of side streets. For the first time in years, he felt like he had a real purpose beyond just keeping the candles lit and the door unlocked.
He was going to find this thing. He was going to stop it.
He just hoped he lived long enough to figure out how.
Aldric didn't even try to sleep. He sat in that damn uncomfortable chair all night, staring out at the spot where the stranger had disappeared, his back screaming and his eyes burning from strain. But every time he thought about closing them, he remembered the terror in that boy's voice. The way grown men had stumbled into his chapel like broken children.
Someone had to keep watch. Might as well be the old fool nobody else would listen to.
Dawn crept over Greywick like it always did—reluctantly, as if even the sun didn't want to illuminate what this town had become. The usual morning sounds started up: merchants cursing at stubborn cart wheels, apprentices dragging their feet, the general symphony of people who'd rather be anywhere else. From his window, everything looked normal.
But Aldric knew better now. Evil didn't always announce itself with thunder and lightning. Sometimes it just walked through your town like it belonged there.
By mid-morning, his restless energy had him pacing the chapel like a caged animal. He grabbed the first two altar boys he could find—young Marcus and Tom, both more interested in skipping their lessons than serving God, but useful enough for simple tasks.
"I need you to listen," he told them, trying to keep the urgency out of his voice. "Go to the taverns, the market, anywhere people gather. But don't make it obvious. Just... keep your ears open for talk about strangers in town."
The boys exchanged glances. Marcus, the sharper of the two, raised an eyebrow. "What kind of stranger, Father?"
"The kind people notice but don't want to talk about."
What they brought back an hour later made his coffee taste like ash in his mouth.
"Nobody's seen him eat anything, Father. Not even bread."
"Barkeep at the Crooked Crown says he ordered ale but never touched it. Just sat there, watching."
"And Father..." Tom's voice dropped to a whisper. "Big Jim Morrison went missing three days ago. Last anyone saw, he was following some stranger into an alley, talking about collecting a debt."
Aldric's hands tightened around his mug. Big Jim was—had been—six feet of muscle and bad attitude. Not the type to just vanish without a fight.
"Thank you, boys. Go help Sister Agnes with the evening meal preparation." He waited until their footsteps faded, then slumped forward in his chair. "Christ almighty," he muttered, immediately feeling guilty for the blasphemy. But what else was he supposed to think?
No normal man lived without eating, drinking, sleeping. No normal man made people disappear without a trace.
Across town, Blaze paused mid-step.
Something had changed. Not anything he could see or hear—Greywick's afternoon bustle continued as usual around him. But there was a weight in the air now, a sense of being observed that made his skin crawl with familiar warning.
He tilted his head slightly, scanning the square without seeming to look for anything in particular. Market stalls, arguing merchants, the usual collection of petty criminals and broken dreams. But his gaze kept drifting back to one building that seemed to radiate attention like heat from a forge.
The chapel.
Of course. Where else would trouble start?
"Master?" Kael's voice was barely audible beside him. "Something wrong?"
Blaze allowed himself a thin smile. "Seems our presence hasn't gone completely unnoticed." He adjusted his hood, pulling it lower. "Time to be more careful about our routes. That old building has eyes now."
Kael's hand drifted instinctively toward his weapon. "Want me to deal with it?"
"No." The word came out sharper than intended. "We're not animals, Kael. We don't solve every problem with violence." Not yet, he added silently.
That night, Aldric's hands shook as he lit the altar candles. He told himself it was just age, just the cumulative weight of too many cold mornings and sleepless nights. But deep down, he knew better.
The chapel felt different now. Heavier. Like the shadows in the corners were deeper than they should be, like something was pressing against the walls from outside, testing for weaknesses.
He'd felt this before—decades ago, on a battlefield outside Carrion Pass, when the enemy had been more than just men with swords. That same suffocating presence, that sense of wrongness that made your soul want to crawl out of your body and hide.
"Light preserve me," he whispered, the words coming out more like a plea than a prayer. His voice cracked—not from doubt, but from the bone-deep exhaustion of a man who'd spent forty-six years fighting losing battles and wasn't sure he had another one left in him.
The candle flames wavered, and for just a moment, he could have sworn he saw something move in his peripheral vision. A darkness that was too thick, too deliberate to be natural shadow.
When he turned to look directly at it, nothing was there.
"God help us all," he breathed. "It's really happening."
By morning, the stories had multiplied like weeds after rain. Mrs. Hendricks swore every bird in the market square had gone silent when the stranger walked through. Old Pete from the docks claimed he'd seen the man's reflection move independently in a puddle of rainwater. Even the children were whispering about "the quiet man who never blinks."
Aldric collected each story, wrote them down in his careful script, and tried to ignore how his hand cramped around the pen. The details were different, but the shape of the thing was becoming clear.
Vampire.
The word sat in his mind like a tumor, growing heavier with each passing hour. He'd studied them as a young priest—ancient predators that the Church had supposedly wiped out centuries ago. Creatures that fed on blood and left emptiness in their wake.
He'd never actually believed they were real. They were stories, cautionary tales, metaphors for spiritual corruption.
But metaphors didn't make grown men wet themselves in terror.
Aldric pushed back from his desk and walked to the window. Somewhere out there, this thing was walking among his people. Planning. Hunting. And he was the only one who knew what they were really dealing with.
The smart thing would be to send word to the capital, request aid from the Church hierarchy. Let someone with actual training handle this nightmare.
But communication took weeks. People were disappearing now. And besides, when had the Church hierarchy ever given a damn about what happened in Greywick?
"Just me and You then, Lord," he said quietly, pressing his palm against the cracked glass. "Like always."
High above the town, Blaze stood on a rooftop that gave him a clear view of the chapel below. The wind tugged at his cloak, and his enhanced vision picked out every detail of the building—the cracked stones, the patched windows, the thin thread of smoke rising from a chimney that had seen better decades.
"So the old priest has figured it out." His voice was conversational, almost amused. There was something almost refreshing about being recognized for what he really was, instead of just feared as a vague threat.
The cursed ring on his finger pulsed warm against his skin, responding to his mood. He'd been careful, subtle, patient. But patience only worked for so long, and he could feel the hunger growing stronger each night.
Soon, he'd have to make a choice: leave Greywick for safer hunting grounds, or deal with the priest before the man became a real problem.
Blaze smiled, fangs catching the moonlight for just a moment.
He'd never been one to run from a challenge.
And so the game began in earnest.
An aging priest with more courage than sense, armed with faith and fading strength.
A vampire trying to balance hunger with caution, hoping to avoid the mistakes that had doomed his kind before.
Two predators circling each other in the narrow streets of a forgotten town, each waiting for the other to make the first move.
In Greywick, even the rats seemed to sense that something was about to break.