Vel Gendis -

I ran after him. I don't know why. Maybe I thought I could reason with a nightmare. Maybe I just couldn't bear to be alone with the silence. "Stop! You don't have to—"

And he is always listening.

He tilted his head. The movement was slow, mechanical, as if he were relearning the geometry of necks. vel gendis

I should have stopped. Every instinct, every ghost story I’d ever collected, screamed at me to run. But the academic hunger is a terrible thing. It unlatches the doors that common sense keeps locked.

He is very polite. And he is very patient. I ran after him

And for three hundred years, no one did.

Silence. Then, not a roar or a scream, but a sound infinitely worse: a soft, wet, sucking noise, like a boot being pulled from deep mud. The earth didn't burst open. It simply… softened. The chains slumped, no longer taut, as if the anchor they held had dissolved. Maybe I just couldn't bear to be alone with the silence

His face was the worst. It was a mask of absolute stillness, a porcelain lie over whatever churned inside. And his eyes… his eyes were not eyes. They were two polished chips of absolute darkness, voids in the shape of pupils.