quick heads up been writing this since I've started working, this was an idea when i started watching the sandman and loved the idea of dreams and desire, i have got a lot of unpolished chapters though so i need to do some seriously refining before i myself am satisfied with it. If you like it please go ahead and add to your library, hopefully in the following month that chapter 1 will be in a good enough state to not be writing like a two year old :) enjoy the prologue of the story
The city throbbed. Not with energy, but with hunger. Even now—just after the third chime of the night cycle—the air vibrated with invisible tension . It spilled out rusted vents, crawled across broken windows, oozed out the mouths of the hungry. Neon lights flickered like dying stars' death throes, promising what no one could ever own: loveliness, strength, freedom, affection. A better existence for the price of longing.
Kian Vale stood on the roof, eyes cast down, rain running down the defined edge of his jaw. His coat clung limp on his bony frame, soaked through to the yarn. Down on the ground, streetlights cut trembling halos in puddles. A couple fought in the alley on the other side of the block. A child cried somewhere far away. Hunger vibrated in the city's bones.
He felt no such thing.
He hadn't felt much of anything for some time now.
His fingers fluttered up and down his leg, not because he was cold, but because he remembered—weak, muscle memory ghosts of what once stimulated him. The flavor of appetite. The rush of the hunt. The sting of aching so much for something that it hurt.
But that was lost now.
Burned away. Hollowed out.
The job was easy. In one shot. Get the mark, get out the rest. The crew had n't even anticipated live rounds—they expected clean. A safe under the abandoned metro ruins a long time past abandoned by the city and supposedly unmolested by scavengers. Just another relic stash, just another payday day.
But relics don't wait nicely for people to pick 'em up.
They listen.
They select.
Kian had not willingly touched it. He recalled that far back enough. He had stumbled. Recovered himself. Hand pressed against a glass container. Fractured it.
And then—
He blinked.
He thought he saw something moving back behind his own eyes for a split moment.
There'd been no electricity surge. No blast of light or shriek of revelation. No hint of skill. No spell. No strength. Just silence. Heavy as infinity.
The crew failed to get out.
He didn't recollect how. Drones maybe. Or something far worse. But once in a while, in the silence, he could still hear them—a hand scrabbling up his jacket, shouting his name before it cut off like a circuit.
He came around with blood on his hands and a siren eulogizing far above ground.
The relic was gone.
Or rather. not.
It was on the inside now. Some place. Buried like a chunk of chilled metal against the empty spot where his longing once dwelled.
Kian closed his eyes.
Behind them: silence.
The silence on the inside wasn't metaphoric. It had a form. A will. A name he could not say. It was the one that failed to shatter him when it oughta've done so. The one that failed to devour him—just awaited.
He was no longer afraid of it. It was a familiar now. Almost. cozy.
He shifted his weight, the building complaining under his boots. The edge beckoned him—not as a promise, not as an escape. Just. a question.
Would it hurt like anything?
A voice whispered, deep and far away, like wind on rock.
Not yet.
His breath stalled. He didn't stir. Didn't flinch. The voice was not coming from without.
It never was.
It wasn't necessarily him speaking. Nor was it some other guy's voice. It was what the silence sounded when it had something to say.
It first whispered in his ear once, he had tried scrabbling it out—scraped his own flesh raw, battered his own fists senseless against the brick. Silence refused to scream. It refused combat. It merely. awaited. Patient. Immortal.
They're coming, it whispered.
Kian's eyes opened.
Down below walked three men through the street. Coats black as black could be. No lights. No noise. They walked as if they knew where he was just as much as he knew where he was.
Relic Retrieval, it whispered again
Pay-by-night ghosts sent out by the authorities for a job recovering whatever the authorities could not account for—and offing whatever they could not—by means fair or foul as need be.
He oughta've fled. He didn't.
In its place Kian retrecated a pace back away from the edge and squatted next to the old generator box. The darkness enveloped him like a old buddy.
His heartbeat kept regular pace.
No terror. No panic. Just silence.
The silence on the inside stirred once more but didn't utter a word. It didn't need to.
He could sense them drawing closer.
He wondered—casually—what they'd do if they caught a real look at him. No aura. No glow. A kid with dead eyes and a Relic-sculped hole gouged out of his heart.
Not a user. Not a monster. Not yet, the silence spoke again.
He was told the word once upon a time in a whisper. In an old book someone attempted to burn.
"A vessel emptied of Want," it had said. "Marked for transformation."
The vast majority didn't make it out that way. The few that did. didn't remain human.
And yet he was here.
No monstrous form. No fangs. No insanity. Just the silence.
You should run.You should fight.You should desire living.
He didn't.
The silence thrummed, slow and deep, like a heartbeat two.
He dropped lower as footsteps clanged up the fire escapeway. Slowly. Methodically. They weren't running. They knew. One murmured something—he couldn't make out the words—but the silence in him contorted as if it knew.
Kian's hand dipped into his coat, fingertips brushing on metal. Not a gun anymore. Just a memory. A coin embossed with the same mark that had branded itself upon his skin that fateful heist night.
A broken crown. A closed eye.
The emblem of Nothing.
A shriek tore the air asunder—far away, over by the rooftops—and the footsteps stalled.
It was no human scream.
The Retrieval agents glanced at one another—their sidearms came out as they tapped the comm at their ear. Kian saw their stance change—their hunt was no longer human now.
He released a breath slow as he melted away under dark, boots as silent as they came on the wet steel.
Whatever the scream was granted him was a reprieve.
Silence in him didn't rejoice. It didn't mock. It just watched.
Kian ascended down the other side of the structure and vanished away down an alley's gullet.
The library did not feature on maps. Not real maps anyway.
It wasn't listed in the school catalogue anymore—flushed underground like a failed experiment, or a secret that its owner's managed to forget a century too soon.
It had lights nonetheless.
And a guardian.
The old man never questioned things. Not when Kian tripped in bleeding three nights before. Not when he rambled on some Relic and "the silence." Not even when the lights fluttered and the air around him chilled.
He just provided Kian a cot and a book.
"You're here now," he'd told him. "Might as well read something before it eats you."
Kian had not answered him.
He didn't sleep. He didn't eat much, either.
He just read.
The books here didn't vibrate with need like the books up top. They were dusty, dry things. Complied with warnings, old incantations, no-go words. Abandoned theses on magic that spoke not of strength—but lack.
absence
The use of nothingness.
He didn't comprehend it all. Not yet.
But the silence comprehended.
At times, when he turned a page, it whispered.
That one.Remember that.This is where it begins.
He'd stopped him asking what it was.
Tonight he sat by himself in the reading room, the world outside yet breathing with need.
The silence no longer pressed upon him like a burden. It wrapped itself around him like smoke.
A portion of him still questioned what truly occurred in the vault.
What he'd touched. What he'd become.
He still didn't pursue the questions. He allowed them to find him as they found him the silence had come to him.
And when he found them, he'd be ready.
Not with need.But with the lack of it.