Corvian, 3181.
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The dining hall carried the dull chorus of morning—porcelain whispering against marble, the soft rasp of linen, coffee rising in dark steam. Gold light fell through the tall windows and made a theater of the ordinary. He sat across from me with his plate arranged the way mortals reassure themselves: fruit in a line, eggs like a promise of strength, bread that yielded as if it had been made to forgive. He ate without hurry. He has learned spectacle, but not to hurry.
A woman detached herself from another table and drifted toward us with the cheerful daring of those who believe the world will always open a path for them. She stopped at his shoulder, clasping her phone to her chest as if it could bless her.
"An autograph? And a picture?" she asked. He nodded, polite, the way he has learned to be when worship dresses itself as manners. She leaned closer, studying his face like a small sun. "I must say, you look gorgeous. The hair. The piercings. Your eyes—god!"
I dislike when they use that name as a measure of wonder. As if surprise were prayer. As if beauty were an accident of benevolence rather than a law carved into matter. We were formed in radiance and torn from it. Fire is the eldest lesson; it eats and gives light in the same breath. Tell me what mortal thing is more honest.
He signed the napkin with a quick hand. A photograph, her face bent to him, his mouth easy with courtesy. She left in a tremble of perfume and soft gratitude, returning to the comfort of being near greatness without touching the damage it requires.
Poppy watched the woman go and dragged her chair closer, conspiratorial. "It still feels strange seeing you up there doing all that," she said to him. "Sometimes I can't believe it. It's like a dream."
He lifted his eyes to her, the smallest crease at the corner that pretends to be a smile. "I feel like it's a dream as well."
She turned her attention to me, mouth tilted, pleased to pick at a mystery. "You brought a lot of good luck to our friend."
"Did I," I said, and reached for the glass of orange juice. The liquid met my tongue with domestic brightness. "He brought me even more."
Her face softened, that human sweetness that calls itself love even when it is only memory warmed by time. "Riley would be so happy that you're doing what you wished for."
"Would he," I asked, not looking away from Hugo. "Or would he be like his other friend. Eddie."
Hugo's fork paused, then lowered. "No," he said. "Riley is very different from Eddie. Not even close. Riley would never hate good things for me."
"Would he not," I said. "Do friends not help their chosen keep moving toward what they claim to want? Why was it that no one around you managed to push you?" The question sat between us like a mirror. He has learned not to flinch.
A small smile crossed his mouth, and he turned to Poppy with that deliberate gentleness he saves for the few who did not abandon him. "Poppy pushed me. She gave me the rest of the money to pay—" He stopped there, the sentence folding itself, and glanced at me. "You know."
I know. Money is only ever a posture. It buys openings in walls but not a way out of judgment. I let the silence approve of him and inclined my head. "Poppy seems like a real one," I said. "The realest among them."
Her grin arrived bright and quick. "Wow. That's a first. Corrin never praised me."
"Do not expect more," I said. "I exhausted every kind thing I could ever say about you. That's my lifetime quota."
She rolled her eyes, content to be insulted if it meant she was seen. "I feel like he secretly loves me."
We did not rehearse it; we did not need to. "No," we said together, and the sound of our denial landed with clean symmetry across the table.
She laughed into her cup, pleased by the choreography. Around us, plates arrived and departed; knives traced quiet lines; a child somewhere asked for sugar with absolute faith that the world would provide it. Hugo lowered his gaze to his food again, and the morning gathered itself around his hands as if they had always belonged to such rooms. He is learning how to be looked at without apology. He is learning how attention makes a chalice of the body.
The woman at the other table glanced over once more, pressing her palm to her heart after reviewing the photograph she had taken. God, she had said. As if the word were a jewel one could hold to the light. Let them borrow language for wonder; we know what it costs to keep a flame steady. We count in ages, not in days. And still, I watched him lift a slice of peach to his mouth and admired the ordinary victory of his appetite.
"Eat," I said, and he did, obedient without noticing. My work is simplest when he forgets I am working at all.
When we returned to the room, the air still carried the warmth of breakfast—the kind of comfort that fools the human mind into believing in safety. Poppy threw herself onto the sofa like she had been waiting all morning for the permission to fall. The television came alive beneath her fingertips, channels flashing past in restless color. I wandered, half-listening, my steps tracing slow circles around the room—habit more than purpose. Mortals fill their hours with motion, and I've learned that imitation makes them less afraid of me.
He came over a moment later and collapsed beside her, the cushion sinking beneath the weight of his careless grace. "Wait," he said suddenly, voice cutting through the drone of adverts and static. "Go back."
She stopped, thumb hovering over the remote. "Which one?"
"EBN," he said.
The blue glow shifted, landing on the news channel. The colors steadied into the image of a reporter speaking with too much composure for the words that followed. Hugo leaned forward, eyes narrowing. I watched him from across the room—his stillness more telling than any panic could be.
"The cause of the fire at Andres Salem's residence," the reporter said, "is still under investigation. Authorities announced earlier this morning the casualties—four dead, eight injured. Names withheld. Mr. Salem remains in critical condition. Investigations are ongoing, and with the elections approaching in January, no suspects have yet been identified."
The sound of it spread through the room like slow poison. He reached for the remote in Poppy's hand and turned the volume higher. I could see the tremor in the air between them—the mortal instinct to name what they already know. When his head turned toward me, I met his gaze. I did not need to speak.
I moved toward the bedroom. The door closed behind me with a soft click, not in retreat but in quiet acknowledgment of the storm gathering behind his ribs. Through the wood, I heard his voice—light, too light—"Weird, anyway." Then music. It grew louder, as if he were trying to drown a thought before it could form.
A few moments later, the door opened. He entered. His steps were careful now, his eyes searching mine for reassurance I did not give freely.
"Do you think—" he began.
"Unless someone saw you," I said, cutting through his question, "no one will ever know where the fire began."
He exhaled, shoulders slackening, but not enough. "I made sure no one saw me," he said. "I was sure."
I closed the distance, resting a hand on his shoulder. "Then you don't need to worry."
His gaze dropped to the floor. "But why didn't they say anything earlier? Why now? It's been twelve days."
"Who knows," I said. "Perhaps they did, and you missed it. Perhaps the police were told to stay quiet. Andres Salem is a man of weight, and men of weight bend silence to their favor. There are always reasons, none of them pure."
He stood there, still as glass. The music from the other room continued faintly—some soft rhythm mortals call comfort.
"Hugo," I said, my voice lowering. "You know things are not the same now. You are not like any other human."
He looked up, almost pleading. "What difference does that make?"
"It makes all the difference," I told him. "You are far more powerful than you understand." I let the words linger, heavy and slow. "Tomorrow, you'll see it. When you stand on that stage and devour Igor Ivanov—then you will know what you've become."
His silence deepened, a small gravity drawing everything inward. He has not yet learned that creation and destruction share the same root. He will.
The room had quieted to that particular stillness that belongs to late hours—where even the air seems to wait for permission to move. Moonlight pressed through the tall windows, breaking against the edge of the curtains and spilling across the floor in a pale spill. He slept on his side, one arm curled near his face, his breath steady, shallow, human.
I stood beside the bed, watching. It is an old habit of mine, this watching. Devils do not sleep, though sometimes we wish we could, if only to escape the noise of thought.
The fire still lingered in my mind—not its light, but its aftermath. The scent of burnt timber never reaches me, but I can imagine the shape of it, how it must have unfolded: the first quiet spark, the slow surrender of walls, the panic that comes only when it is too late to pray. Henry Powell would survive; men like him always do. He is unaccompanied, unguarded by my kind, yet I know his sort—he does not fall. He finds ways to use ruin, to polish it into power.
I crossed my arms, eyes tracing the rise and fall of Hugo's back. He dreams lightly now. It's strange to think he can still dream after seeing what he's seen, after doing what he's done. That, perhaps, is the cruel mercy of being mortal—the ability to sleep between sins.
Should I have stopped him before he burned that house? The thought came uninvited, sharp as glass. For a breath, I let it sit in me. Then I dismissed it. No. No, that's not the way.
Wake up, Corvian. You're not some grieving angel. You're a devil, and he's yours.
He belongs to me now. Whatever he sets aflame, whatever tremor he leaves behind, the world will bend to protect him because I will it so. Nothing will happen to him. Not a whisper of suspicion, not a trace of guilt that lasts long enough to break him. Let the city crawl through its ashes searching for answers—it will find none. He can burn heaven itself, and I will make sure the smoke clears before the mortals even look up.
He turned slightly, a lock of hair falling across his cheek. The mark beneath his ribs pulsed once, subtle, alive, like an echo of my own pulse. There it was again—that connection neither of us can fully name. His body still carries the rhythm of my breath. He doesn't know how much of him I can feel.
He can cause whatever havoc he wants. The words repeat themselves inside me, steady as a mantra. He's untouchable now.
The lock of hair had fallen across his cheek again, soft against the slow rhythm of his breath. I reached over and brushed it aside. The strands caught on my fingers for a moment before sliding free, warm from his skin.
His face was unguarded in sleep, the kind of calm that mortals only wear when no one is watching. I touched his cheek with the back of my hand, tracing the faint warmth there, the pulse that marked him as alive. The skin yielded slightly beneath my fingers, fragile and resilient in the same measure.
I let my hand wander lower, to his mouth. His lips were parted, the faintest breath leaving him—a whisper of life that did not belong to him alone anymore. My thumb brushed over the curve of his lower lip, feeling the cold ring of metal glint against my skin. The piercing—how small a thing, and yet how deliberate. A wound made beautiful. A choice to hurt and adorn at once. I could almost taste the defiance that chose it.
I lingered there, feeling the quiet thrum of his pulse through the air, through the bond that now stitched us together. His body was still his, but his soul carried my breath inside it. The thought both steadied and unsettled me.
I moved, slow and deliberate, and sat at the edge of the bed near his feet. The mattress dipped under my weight. He stirred, a small shift, nothing more.
The night lay heavy in the corners of the room. His face caught what little moonlight escaped the curtains, and I studied it in silence—every line, every shadow, every small imperfection that made him whole. There was something sacred in this unguarded stillness, though I will not call it love. Devils do not love. We observe. We claim. We remember.
I stayed like that for a long while, watching the shape of his breath rise and fall, the world outside dissolving into the quiet pulse between us.
I leaned forward, elbows resting on my knees, the fabric of the sheets brushing against my hands. The air between us felt different now—warmer near him, colder everywhere else, as though the room itself understood the gravity of what lay in it. His lashes twitched once, catching the faint light that slipped through the curtains.
I studied the curve of his mouth, the small parting of his lips, the stillness of him. So easily mistaken for peace. Mortals always look most innocent in sleep—when their sins stop moving long enough for the world to forget them.
I lowered my voice, not to wake him but to let the words exist somewhere, to mark the air as mine. "You'll be coming with me," I said softly, the syllables drawn out like a vow.
The sound barely stirred the air, but it carried weight. I could feel it travel from my throat to the space between us, sinking into him as if the room itself absorbed the promise.
"And I'm not even sorry about it."
The confession was quiet, but it tasted like truth. I meant it. Every word.
He didn't move, didn't know, didn't need to. I would not allow him the mercy of ignorance for long. The world would burn itself out around him eventually, and I would be there—waiting, patient, unrepentant—to lead him through the ashes.
The night deepened outside, and I watched him a while longer, the corners of his mouth soft, unknowing, as I whispered again—so low that even the dark could barely hold it—"Mine."
September 21, 2025
Hugo Verran, 25.
The hall was overfilled with light. It pressed against the walls, collected in the corners, turned the white marble floors into mirrors that threw back the image of every restless face. A thin scent of paper and perfume lingered in the air—expensive, sterile, designed for mornings like this.
I sat in the last row, slouched low enough that the gilt edge of the seat in front of me cut across my sightline. Poppy was still asleep upstairs. Corvian had vanished before dawn, the way he does when the world begins to bore him. And me—I had been told to attend. "It's good for your public image," Clay had said, as if philosophy could polish a soul.
At the front of the room stood Andy Kelman, tall, severe, his voice calm in the way people speak when they expect no interruption. His new book—The Weight of Joy—was propped beside him on a glass lectern. I stared at the title for a while. Joy with a weight. That sounded right.
He began, voice measured and articulate, speaking of happiness as a condition of loss. "Humans," he said, "do not pursue happiness because they want to be happy. They pursue it because they cannot tolerate the thought that what they have will not last."
A quiet stir rippled through the audience. I traced the edge of my sleeve, letting the fabric slip through my fingers.
"Happiness," Kelman continued, "is not a destination. It's a negotiation with fear—the fear of impermanence. Every decision we make is a defense against decay. We choose love because it fools us into believing in continuity. We choose ambition because it lets us pretend that meaning can be manufactured. But every choice carries its shadow, and the shadow always collects its due."
His words slid into the air like cold water into a wound. I tried to listen, to let them fall away, but something about the way he said shadow caught me. It wasn't poetic. It was matter-of-fact, like describing a law of nature.
He gestured to a page open before him, the sound of paper crisp and final. "The question," he said, "is not what makes you happy, but what kind of pain are you willing to live with in exchange for it. Happiness is never pure. It is bought, bartered, extracted. It costs blood—sometimes your own, sometimes another's."
I felt something cold move beneath my ribs.
He went on, pacing slowly. "We speak of choices as freedom. But choice is rarely about freedom—it's about the illusion of control. People do not choose what they desire; they choose what they believe will hurt them least. In that, there is no virtue. Only survival."
A few people nodded, murmuring in agreement. I wondered what they thought they were agreeing to.
The air-conditioning hummed overhead, and I watched the light shift across the marble. For a second, I thought of the fire. The house. The lives folded neatly into the news like footnotes. The cost of my own kind of happiness—or whatever you'd call this thing I've built with Corvian.
Kelman spoke again, softer now, like he was speaking to himself. "Happiness," he said, "is often a rearranged form of guilt. We tell ourselves we've earned it to make peace with the ruin we left behind. The happier you are, the more blood there usually is beneath your feet."
The audience stayed still. No one laughed. No polite applause broke the quiet. Just the slow rustle of shifting in chairs, the awkward weight of people realizing he might be right.
I leaned back, eyes drifting toward the ceiling, trying to imagine what Corvian would say if he'd been here. Probably nothing kind. He would've smirked, said something about mortals building philosophies out of what they can't understand. Still—I couldn't shake the echo of the man's words.
A rearranged form of guilt.
Maybe that's all I've been doing. Taking my guilt, polishing it until it looked like ambition, calling it happiness because it glowed.
Before the questions began, Kelman had leaned forward on the lectern, fingertips pressing lightly against the edge as though bracing himself for confession.
"Much of this book," he said, "is built around old ideas—old enough to have lost their sharpness in conversation. Take, for instance, the seven deadly sins. They were never truly about morality, not in the sense of good and evil, but about hunger. Each one, if you look closely, is a form of wanting. Lust is the hunger for closeness, gluttony the hunger for comfort, greed the hunger for permanence. Wrath, envy, sloth, pride—they are all distortions of longing. The Church called them vices because they distracted from divinity, but to me they are the most human measures of desire. They tell us what we will risk to feel alive."
He paused, letting the murmur settle before continuing. "In the book, I compare these to the Greek concept of hybris—that old sin of overreaching. The Greeks understood that the line between tragedy and fulfillment is drawn by excess. Prometheus, for instance, stole fire from the gods to give it to men. He was punished not for cruelty but for generosity carried too far. Pandora opened her jar not out of malice, but curiosity—the same impulse that drives science, art, love. Even Icarus, that poor, winged boy, wasn't condemned for flight, but for forgetting that joy burns as easily as wax. Their punishments were echoes of their desires. Every myth that survives is a caution against the intoxication of wanting too much."
He straightened, his voice steady, no flourish in it—only conviction. "And so, I argue that happiness and sin are twins. Both are born of appetite. What we call virtue is often just restraint disguised as fear. To live well is not to deny the appetite, but to learn how to hold the flame without being consumed by it."
A quiet shiver moved through the room, that collective silence that happens when people realize they have understood something dangerous. He looked down at his open book again, then raised his gaze to the crowd. "The ancients didn't fear sin," he said. "They feared imbalance. They knew that too much light blinds, and too much purity kills curiosity. The question is not whether you sin—but whether your sin belongs to you, or you to it."
Only then did the moderator rise and open the floor for questions, and the first brave voice lifted itself to speak.
Kelman closed his notes, thanked the audience, and the sound of applause filled the hall—thin, practiced, the kind that doesn't reach the hands. I clapped too, because that's what one does. But my palms stung after, and I couldn't tell if it was from the force or from knowing that somewhere, beneath all of this, he had been right.
Because happiness had always felt, to me, like the calm that follows a burning house. The quiet you mistake for peace because there's nothing left to destroy.
A woman near the front lifted her hand, rings flashing in the light. "Mr. Kelman," she said, voice smooth, rehearsed, "if happiness is as temporary and negotiated as you describe, what's the point of pursuing it at all?"
Kelman smiled, not kindly but with that patience of someone used to repeating hard truths. "The point," he said, "is the pursuit itself. Humans cannot live without wanting. Desire is the proof of being alive. You can't remove it without removing the pulse."
A man farther down the aisle stood without waiting to be chosen. "You spoke about choice being a kind of illusion," he said. "Are you saying free will doesn't exist?"
Kelman paused, as though he found the word free amusing. "I think free will exists in theory," he said. "But most people don't use it. They follow habit, fear, or longing. The freedom you believe in is mostly retrospective—you look back at what you've done and call it choice. In truth, you only ever recognize freedom when it's already gone."
Murmurs rippled through the hall. I watched a man in a gray suit write that down as though it might save him from something.
Another question came from a younger voice—a girl in her early twenties, her excitement still uncorrupted by experience. "Do you believe happiness can exist without suffering?" she asked.
Kelman nodded slightly, but his eyes didn't soften. "It can exist," he said, "but it would be flavorless. You would not know what it was. People need contrast to define meaning—pleasure needs pain, faith needs doubt, joy needs memory. The absence of suffering isn't happiness; it's numbness. The two are not the same."
Her face fell, but she nodded as though she understood.
Then, from somewhere near the aisle, an older man—perhaps a professor, judging by his posture—asked, "If happiness is intertwined with guilt, as you suggest, what role does morality play in your argument? Are you saying the immoral are happier?"
Kelman tilted his head. "Not necessarily," he said. "But I think the immoral often sleep better. Morality demands self-examination. It asks you to look back at your own shadow. People who can't feel guilt never have to look behind them. It's not that they're happier—it's that they've forgotten what happiness requires."
The room quieted after that, the air thick with thought or discomfort—I couldn't tell which. Someone coughed near the front. A phone buzzed, quickly silenced.
Kelman rested his palms on the lectern, his voice lowering. "You see, people imagine happiness as light," he said. "But light blinds, too. It destroys clarity when you stare too long. The wisest people learn to live in the dusk—between brightness and loss—because that's where you can actually see what's real."
Before the silence could fully settle, I found my hand rising of its own accord. A quiet gesture at first, uncertain—more instinct than intent. The moderator noticed and pointed in my direction. "Yes, you, at the back."
Dozens of heads turned. The room seemed to narrow around me, the air thickening as sound dimmed to the soft rustle of fabric.
I stood. "You've spoken about hunger and sin," I said, my voice roughened from disuse. "About how they shape what we call happiness. But what about repentance?" I paused, unsure why the word felt heavier in my mouth than it should. "If sin is only human appetite, does repenting it serve any purpose? Or is it just another illusion—another form of control?"
Kelman looked at me for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then he smiled—not kindly, but with that quiet approval scholars reserve for questions that cut too close to the bone.
"Repentance," he said slowly, "is humanity's most poetic lie."
A ripple passed through the audience—half amusement, half unease. He ignored it.
"We say we repent to be cleansed," he continued, "but what we truly seek is permission—to keep living with the same instincts that led us astray. Repentance doesn't undo the act. It redefines it. It lets us narrate our guilt into something noble, survivable. It is not the washing of a wound, but the naming of it. The name gives the illusion of healing."
He leaned against the lectern, his voice lowering until it felt almost intimate. "The Greeks had no word for repentance. They had metanoia—a change of mind, not heart. They believed awareness was punishment enough. You live knowing what you've done, and that knowledge becomes your shadow. Whether you carry it with grace or shame, that is your choice."
Someone near the front crossed themselves. The motion drew my eye for a moment, then Kelman's voice caught it back.
"If you are waiting for absolution," he said, "you will wait forever. The universe doesn't forgive. It forgets. That's its mercy."
The words fell like stones into water—no echo, just sinking. I sat again, slow, the seat creaking beneath me. Around me, others shifted, whispering, jotting notes as if what he said were just another theory to debate over wine later.
No one asked another question after that. The silence stretched, not unpleasantly, but with a heaviness that made the air feel older. I sat in the last row, watching him gather his notes, and wondered what kind of dusk I had been living in all this time—and whether I'd ever chosen it, or simply wandered there without knowing.