To understand what really happened, it's best to first look into the past to understand the present.
1409 days ago…. Somewhere in Neon City
The rain fell in crooked sheets, slashing through the neon haze like knives, cleansing the streets of the rich neigbourhood afresh. Kiolle didn't bother to shielding himself from it. The cold and rain didn't bother him anymore ever since he turned to a vampire who knows how long ago. Neither did the blood drying on his collar.
The bodies were still warm behind him. However, after some time, they would all turn to ash and dust after some time anyway. Three men. All dead. All his masters. The last one had made an entire bullshit speech.
"I fed you, clothed you, kept you safe, a fledgling shouldn't be out in the open, they are vulnerable especially with a face like yours! You should thank me, pet, thank us! But now you betray us"
And Kiolle had smiled, soft and beautiful, as his fingers crushed the man's throat like a paper cup. "I'm not your pet," he'd whispered. "I'm a goddamn apex predator." As he gutted him in the chest deeper then whispered "Just like you," And the light from his former oppressor faded.
It was the first time in who knows how many decades that he felt free. His shoulders slumped in relief and he exhaled slowly. Savouring every drop of his new found freedom. From now on he would never be restrained again.
He'd spent the next few hours cleaning house—burning documents, destroying footage, wiping all traces of his blood from the collars they used to chain him like a beast. To the police, if they ever bothered with looking for them, he was the entsranged son who moved out of the house once he turned eighteen, probably.
By the time the sun peeked over the skyline, Kiolle was a ghost. And the prison shaped like a mansion was covered in fine dust some in heaps.
He then spent the next six months in the shadows. Watching. Studying. Feeding when he had to—the world had changed so much since he was human from his hazy memories, he hardly recognised it. He'd stolen enough money from his former masters to live comfortably albeit in moderation. But every night, the same ache echoed inside him, Longing, belonging.
Music was the only thing he remembered from before the turning. Before slavery and confinement. A stage, a crowd, a piano under moonlight. The only time he'd felt real.
So when he stumbled across that dingy studio looking for a meal and heard the soothing sound of someone's voice through a cracked door, soft, imperfect, but real, he paused. Something in him stilled with recognition. And that was new. This new foreign world lacked anything similar to his fragmented past.
It wasn't even a full sentence... just a sharp, exasperated, "You're off-beat again, Briar, slow the hell down!" But the sound of it hit Kiolle like a forgotten memory. Sugar laced with poison. It was raw, unfiltered, honest... so painfully honest that it made something ancient and bruised in him ache. He brushed aside those feelings and moved.
He stepped closer to the cracked door of the studio. Leaned in, quiet as a shadow.
You're mine
He didn't even know what his instincts meant by that or if they spelled something different and he misinterprated the feeling, only that it felt true. More real than anything had in years. No stage. No spotlight. No carefully planned scene. Just a man yelling at his friend over a failed harmony, wiping sweat from his brow and pushing his too-long hair from his face.
When Kiolle finally saw him, his bright surprisingly dark green eyes, face flushed from rehearsal and alive with frustration and love, he felt a slow, thudding certainty bloom inside his hollow chest.
That's mine. His instincts urged. Inevitable. Like gravity. Like time.
It wasn't about his handsome face, though he had it nor about strength, though he had that too in his presence, his confidence. It was something deeper. Some immortal part of Kiolle recognized the rhythm of the stranger's soul as its twin flame.
He was meant to find him. He was meant to be with him. It was terrifying, how fast it happened. How absolute it felt. But he could only accept it as it was.
In a life painted with silence, cruelty, and blood, his presence was the first sound of music Kiolle had truly heard in years. It was the kind that sang directly to the thing inside him that had refused to die, even after everything.
And so, when the man looked up from the studio interface, brows furrowed and jaw tight, and locked eyes with Kiolle through the door's gap...
Time stopped. Their gazes met like opposing storms, and Kiolle, for the first time in a while, forgot what it felt like to be hunted. Forgot the chains. The hunger. The years of manipulation he'd honed like art. He forgot to act. He simply was.
"Hey," the stranger said pleasantly, voice curious but guarded. "You sing?"
You're the reason I will, Kiolle thought, but he smiled, small and sweet, and said, "Used to. Thinking of getting back into it, that's why I've been renting the next room, just wanted to say hi."
"That's great, nice to meet you," he said calmly, then remembered something, " My name is Eldrin, this idiot over here is Briar, the other is Loran and that's Corin what's yours?"
"Kiolle" he answered as he closed the distance and shook his hand.
From that moment on, Kiolle didn't just want to be part of Nyxx. He wanted to wrap himself in Eldrin's presence like armour. To earn his trust, inch by inch. To be the one he confided in when the others failed him. To someday make Eldrin need him the way he already felt fated to need Eldrin.
Because this time, Kiolle wasn't going to be chained. He was going to choose his obsession. And oh, what a beautiful obsession Eldrin would be.