When my new acquaintance left in search of coffee, I rose from the table, where open books were stacked in precarious towers around Yesenia, and moved to a free spot nearby. Fortunately, the library was empty but for the two of us, so there was no need to worry about taking up too much space. Settling in at the opposite table, I flipped open my laptop. The screen flickered to life with a familiar greeting, prompting me to enter my password—a combination I recalled almost automatically.
The desktop was cluttered with shortcuts and folders scattered like fallen leaves. I opened my handwritten notebook over the touchpad and began reviewing our earlier notes, trying to recall the logic behind each citation—why we'd thought it might prove useful later. Once I had a rough sense of direction, I clicked open my word processor, ready to start transferring material—until my eyes caught the list of recently opened files.
There it was again.
The same mysterious title. The same file—one that wasn't mine, that couldn't be mine. But how? I'd deleted it. I was sure of it. Could files come back after deletion? I really should have asked Mark—he understood computers far better than I ever would. But my walking encyclopedia of all things technical was anywhere but here, and so, as usual, I was left to untangle the problem on my own.
Holding my breath, I clicked on the file, praying for an error message. Anything—anything but the reappearance of that damned text, the one that had unnerved me with its uncanny precision. Yet, to my dismay, the screen filled once more with lines of words. White pages bled black. Sentence by sentence.
My gaze snagged on Mark's name. It appeared again and again, threaded through the paragraphs like a pulse. Something inside me tightened, wound itself into a hard knot. A sense of inevitable doom settled over my shoulders like a heavy veil, brushing cold fingers against my skin. A voice, dark and distant, whispered in my mind—Don't read.
But of course, I did.
A lump rose in my throat. My trembling fingers slid across the touchpad, scrolling through the text with agonizing slowness.
Then I saw it again—the passage where Yesenia entered the library and began reading more intently. At first, the words seemed identical to before. But when I reached the moment I had interfered—my movement, my voice—the lines began to change. Right before my eyes. As if someone, somewhere, was rewriting the story in real time, documenting reality as it unfolded.
What kind of madness was this?
When you are a creature of magic yourself, every breach of normality feels like a siren call. What if this was the work of the Clan? What if I had crossed someone stronger, someone who wanted me to know it? My mind spun with possibilities—each one more absurd than the last. After all, what power could a mere text possess, if all it did was mirror what was already happening?
Absurd—or so I told myself. And yet, something deep inside urged me onward.
Every story has its climax—a moment of truth, the reason the tale exists at all. A human life doesn't work that way. It's fragments, glimpses, scattered episodes pieced together by whoever holds the pen, depending on what message they wish to leave behind. Even if this file was meant as some kind of warning—a scare tactic from the Clan to keep me from meddling in council affairs after my father's death—it seemed a pitiful attempt.
So someone was rewriting our lives. So what? So someone was watching our vacation, transcribing it line by line.
Big deal.
I tried to soothe myself with reason, eyes racing faster across the text—but that creeping dread only grew louder, more insistent. Because if the Council really was behind this, then they knew about Mark. They knew that the daughter of a fallen ruler, dead under suspicious circumstances, had sullied her name by loving a mortal—a vessel of blood, worthless in their eyes.
Not a man. Not a soul. Just a coin tossed to Hades in exchange for the right to roam this earth forever.
Among the Eternal, binding yourself to a human was no different from buying a toy: it brings joy for a brief while, and when it breaks—or when you tire of it—it's boxed away with all the other forgotten trinkets. Never to be touched again.
Toys multiply and blur together in memory, fading faster than the taste of a strawberry bubblegum blister pack. The need for them burns out almost as soon as it's born. Of course, some of my kind used humans for more than just entertainment—just as my father once had.
He was drawn to mortal women for their warmth, for the lightness that at first wrapped him in a sweet fog and made the centuries fall away. He used to tell me how he drank in their laughter, their smiles. Their simplicity. The way they could take joy in small things—gestures, moments, ordinary wonders—as if seeing the world anew each day. It fascinated him, that sense of discovery reflected in a lover's eyes. The purity of emotion.
But it never lasted. The moment he revealed what he truly was, that fragile light died.
Eternity tempted others with its mysteries, its endless possibilities. The only problem was that ignorance made our existence seem far more romantic than it truly was. At least, that's how Father spoke of it—and others in the Clan agreed. I was expected to form my own opinion someday, to decide what eternity meant—if I ever dared to bind my life to Mark's. But that was the last thing I wanted to test. Because what if, when he learned the truth, his love shifted—not toward me, but toward the idea of touching forever?
The thought alone made my skin crawl.
It was that very temptation—the promise of escaping death—that lured Father's lovers to their doom. They'd flock to eternity like moths toward flame, wings trembling with awe, desperate to reach its glow, only to burn away in seconds—consumed before they had truly lived.
Human life is finite, a brief, bright flicker. Their blood marks them as mortal, as vessels destined to run dry, never equals in the eyes of those who watch centuries pass. The stories like to lie—tell of love stronger than death, of the immortal who turns his beloved, and the two living happily ever after.
Reality is crueler.
To turn a mortal is to load a revolver with a single bullet, spin the chamber, press the barrel to your temple, and pull the trigger. Most don't survive the change. It's a gamble with eternity—and eternity rarely plays fair.
Even if I ever chose to make Mark like me, he would never truly be like me. The worst way to bind someone to you is to give them your poison. The weak-blooded—those turned rather than born—are condemned to wander forever in their maker's shadow, dependent on the blood of their creator to keep the madness at bay. Deprive them of it, and they unravel—slowly, painfully, into feral ruin.
I could never wish that kind of life on Mark.
But my desires clashed with the laws of the Clan. Anyone who learned too much about our existence had two choices: join the other side of the veil—or die before they could expose it. No matter how strong the mind, the tongue grows careless with age.
What if the Clan had already set their sights on Mark? What if this file wasn't a coincidence at all—but a warning?
As if answering my thought, the monitor flickered—and the screen bled into blue. The "Blue Screen of Death." I yanked my hands away as lines of code began racing past, indecipherable and relentless, until the screen went black again.
Then, silence.
A moment later, a blank page appeared. The white glare of the word processor flooded the screen. A single blinking cursor waited at the top—each flash echoing in my head like the tick of a clock, each second dragging heavy with dread.
I didn't move. I didn't even breathe. I waited—watching to see if the words would begin to write themselves again.
Nothing.
My thoughts tangled and frayed, the edges between reality and hallucination blurring. My pulse thudded in my ears. Still, I stared—certain that someone, somewhere, was watching from the other side of the screen.
But the stranger remained silent.
And that was the worst part.
Not knowing.
It's never the danger itself that destroys you—it's the uncertainty. When you know what you're facing, you can fight it. Solve it. End it. But when you don't… you drown in possibilities. You chase every shadow, imagine every outcome—until you miss the one truth staring you in the face.
And by the time you see it, it's already too late.
A wild thought flashed through my mind—an idea so reckless it might finally prove that I wasn't losing it, that someone was really out there, on the other side of the screen, writing, watching us.
I could ask them something. Type my own words into the document.
If both of us had access to the same file, then the connection had to go both ways. Whatever I typed, the other would see—if, of course, this wasn't some elaborate program designed by the Clan to rattle my nerves for their amusement.
My fingers hovered above the keyboard, frozen in hesitation. What should I even ask?
I didn't care about the author's creative ambitions, nor about whatever twisted inspiration drove them to transcribe our lives. There was only one question that gnawed at me—the only one I truly wanted to ask, and feared the answer to.
To hell with it.
My fingers fluttered over the thin laptop keys, the words spilling out faster than thought:
"What happens to Mark at the end of the story?"
The cursor blinked after the final period. Thick silence filled my lungs, stretching each second like wire. I waited a minute. Then two. Five.
Nothing.
The words just sat there, stark against the empty white of the page.
What had I been hoping for, exactly? That someone would talk to me? Reveal themselves, confess their hand in all this? It was absurd. And yet, I had to try.
Ten minutes passed. Long enough for the panic to ebb, for the worst possibilities to lose their hold.
I'd simply spooked myself. That was all. Someone was probably just playing a trick, trying to scare me—remind me of the Clan's rules, frighten me into giving up my "little human amusement."
Idiots.
I pushed the thoughts aside and bent back over the notebook, trying to remember which passage I'd meant to copy into the document. When I finally found the right quote, I sighed, selected the question I'd written, and hit delete.
Nothing happened.
I frowned, pressed the key again. The line vanished for a second—then reappeared, intact.
You've got to be kidding me.
I jabbed the key again, harder this time. And again. The words blinked out and returned, as if mocking me.
Frustration flared white-hot. I was one breath away from grabbing the laptop with both hands and hurling it to the floor when the screen flickered blue again.
Then everything changed.
When the word processor reappeared, my question was gone. In its place, new words began to form—one letter at a time, then faster, until they poured across the screen in a frantic rush. I tried to keep up, reading as they appeared, but the sentences kept shifting, mutating—each one worse than the last.
Mark died. Again and again.
Mark slipped on the stairs and broke his neck.
Mark stumbled and fell into an open manhole.
Mark crossed on red and was hit by a truck.
"What the hell is this—a joke?" I whispered.
But the words kept coming, a river of ink spilling from nowhere. The story twisted through every possible ending, as if searching, testing, finding the one that fit. There were no names, no dates, no places—just endless variations, each one another way for him to die.
Every one of them was an accident.
An accident. That was all it would take for me to lose Mark. Because humans—humans were fragile things.
If not a chain of coincidences, then an illness.
If not an illness, then sheer, blind bad luck—being in the wrong place, at the wrong time.