Prologue: Whispers Beneath the Skin
They came with the silence between thoughts. The pause between heartbeats.
Not with thunder, but with a whisper.
Something old and cold slithered through the cracks of reality, a darkness rising not from the ground, but from memory.
Named only by the witches who feared them, forgotten by the ones they fed on. They didn't need doors. Or names. Or blood.
They needed pain.
The type buried too deep to speak of.
The breed that slowly rots inside the soul.
They felt that pain in him like heat from dying coals – old suffering, smothered and silent, but still burning beneath the ash. It drew them in, a gravitational pull.
In the shadowy corners of the boarding house, something watched. Beneath the floorboards, something breathed.
He had forgotten.
But they had not.
They were forcing him to remember.
That was all they needed.
The hallway stretches too long.
Every door looks the same.
Blood drips down the walls in long, macabre streaks, pooling on the floor.
Damon stands in the old Salvatore estate, fourteen again, though he knew he was not a boy. He has the mind of a man, but the bones of a child, and that sickening disorientation makes him feel like he is drowning in his own skin.
Behind one door, his father's voice echoes, "Weak. Unworthy. No son of mine."
Behind another, laughter – Katherine's – bright and sweet and venomous.
He turns. She is there. Of course she is.
Barefoot, elegant, her black lace dress hugging her frame like a warning, her eyes cruel with affection.
"You never stop hoping, do you?" she asks in a saccharine-sweet voice, circling him like a lovely vulture. "That maybe one day you'll be enough."
He tries to speak. No sounds come. Only breath – shaky, short, useless.
Katherine touches his cheek like he's something she owns. "You want someone to save you." Her hand trails down to his jaw. "But no one's coming, Damon."
Behind her, the wall bends. The floor ripples. In the mirror on the wall in front of him, Damon sees a shadow split from the ceiling. Tall. Thin. Almost human. A silhouette that shifts like smoke underwater. It has no face, but it watches him; it knows him. It whispers in a language that sounds like his own voice turned inside out.
"Lie still. Obey. You wanted this."
The blood ran up the walls this time.
He lurched upright in bed, the sheets tangled around his legs, his chest slick with sweat.
He gasped like someone drowning, one hand clawing at his sternum, the other pressed flat against the mattress as if to ground himself.
The room was dark, silent. Still.
He told himself it was just a dream.
But when he looked toward the window, something stood outside the glass.
No face. No body. Just shadow.
It tilted its head – almost curious.
Then it vanished.
Damon didn't sleep the rest of the night.
By morning, he was already packing.
No destination. No plan. Just an old pull in his chest and the whisper of ghosts he thought he'd buried long ago.
He told himself he was chasing a rumor. Killing time. Watching his brother.
But the truth was quieter.
He was going home.
And something was waiting for him there.