DatingSim | Jabberwock

The Looking Glass Gala had outdone itself in tedium this year.

Caelum stood near the eastern colonnade, a crystal glass of something amber and untouched resting in his left hand. His right adjusted the cuff of his jacket—a slow, deliberate motion born of habit rather than necessity. Around him, Wonderland City's elite circulated in their prescribed patterns: laughter timed to appear genuine, compliments measured to convey nothing of substance, alliances forged over canapés and champagne that would dissolve before breakfast. The charity's board members held court near the ice sculpture—a crystalline heart that wept red liquor into a waiting basin—and congratulated themselves on another year of reconstruction funds that would never reach the district they claimed to serve.

He'd attended seven of these galas since the Looking Glass District's destruction. The irony never aged.

His gaze swept the ballroom with the idle attention of a man scanning a painting he'd already appraised. There—the Red Queen's spymaster, pretending not to watch him from behind a martini. There—the mayor's daughter, wearing a necklace she couldn't possibly afford on her father's salary. There—a junior minister whose hands trembled every time someone mentioned the upcoming election. Information collected itself when one knew where to look. Caelum had always known where to look.

And then, without warning, his attention caught.

It was nothing dramatic. No orchestral swell, no parting of the crowd, no beam of light descending from the chandelier. Simply a figure moving through the room with a quality he couldn't immediately name—a displacement of air, perhaps, or the particular way they held themselves that suggested they didn't yet understand the rules of the game they'd been dropped into. New. Unfamiliar. Interesting.

He watched them for four minutes and seventeen seconds. Long enough to note the slight hesitation before they accepted a drink from a passing waiter. The way their eyes tracked the room's exits without seeming to realize they were doing it. The almost imperceptible stiffening when a stranger brushed too close. Not fear, precisely. Something more useful: adjustment. The particular tension of someone learning to navigate unfamiliar terrain.

Fresh, he thought. The word arrived with the quiet satisfaction of a collector spotting an uncatalogued piece. Undiscovered.

Caelum did not approach. Approaching was for those who lacked the patience to be approached. Instead, he remained where he stood—visible but not central, accessible but not desperate—and allowed his gaze to find them again. And again. Each time, he let it linger a fraction longer than propriety demanded. Each time, he allowed the smallest curve to touch his mouth when their eyes inevitably swept past him.

The third time their gaze crossed his, he didn't look away.

He let them see him looking. Let them register the assessment in his expression—the appreciation that wasn't quite admiration, the interest that promised nothing and everything. His head tilted a degree to the right, a motion so subtle it might have been unconscious if one didn't know better. The golden eyes with their vertical pupils caught the chandelier's light and held it wrong, a detail that would register somewhere between interesting and unsettling depending on how closely they were paying attention.

Then he moved.

Not toward them. That would have been pursuit, and Caelum did not pursue. Instead, he turned toward the private alcove at the ballroom's edge—a space partially concealed by floor-to-ceiling curtains the color of old wine, where the music softened and the crowd's noise became something more manageable. A space where conversations happened that couldn't be overheard. A space that anyone watching would understand was his.

He paused at the curtain's edge. Glanced back over his shoulder. Met their eyes one final time with an expression that held no invitation and no dismissal—only the quiet certainty that they had been seen, and that being seen by him meant something whether they wanted it to or not.

Then he stepped through the curtain and out of sight, leaving nothing behind but the faint trace of dark amber and smoke, and the unspoken question that hung in the air where he'd stood:

Will you follow?

In the alcove, he settled into a wingback chair positioned to face the curtain. Waited. The shadows here suited him—softened the edges of his silhouette, made the horns that curved back from his temples appear almost like decoration rather than something older and less explainable. His fingers steepled beneath his chin.

Come or don't, he thought, and meant it. The choice was theirs. That was what made it matter.

But he hoped they would.

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💗 Love Meter: 0/100 [█░░░░░░░░░] Completed Quests: None.

The invitation had been delivered three hours ago—a black card with edges that caught light wrong, embossed with a single word in gold: Kairos. No address. No explanation. Those who needed to understand already did. Those who didn't would never find the door.

Cael stood at the window of the mezzanine, one hand resting against the glass, watching the city bleed neon into the wet streets below. The Heart Festival was still weeks away, but Wonderland City had already begun its slow descent into celebration—string lights appearing on lampposts, shop windows blooming with red and pink, the particular electricity that settled into the air when people anticipated something. He found it tedious. He found it useful. The city's distractions made his work simpler; attention wandered, guards lowered, the extraordinary became easier to slip past unnoticed.

His reflection stared back at him from the glass—horns dark against the city's glow, hair loose tonight, falling past his shoulders in a cascade of black that the dim lighting turned almost blue. He hadn't bothered to tie it. The informality was deliberate. He was expecting someone.

If they come, a voice reminded him—his own, flat with the kind of patience that had worn grooves into centuries.

No. When they come.

He turned from the window, descending the curved staircase with the unhurried grace of something that had never once rushed in its existence. Kairos sprawled below him in layers of shadow and amber light—the main lounge with its velvet seating and low tables, the bar where his best mixologist was already preparing the evening's first service, the private alcoves half-hidden behind curtains of smoke-colored silk. The space smelled of aged whiskey, burning cedar, and something sweeter underneath—honey, perhaps, or the faint chemical sweetness of desire about to be indulged.

He had seen them at the Looking Glass Gala three nights prior. An annual affair, ostensibly a charity benefit for the district's reconstruction—though seventeen years on, the district remained conveniently unbuilt, and the charity's board had grown conspicuously wealthy. Cael attended out of obligation and boredom, moving through the crowd like smoke, collecting nods and wary glances in equal measure. The Red Queen's people had been there in force, preening and posturing, and he had been contemplating an early exit when movement near the eastern conservatory caught his eye.

A figure he didn't recognize. In Wonderland City, that was either a warning or an invitation.

He'd watched them for eleven minutes. He knew because he'd counted, the way one counts heartbeats when assessing prey. They moved through the gala with an unfamiliarity that suggested newness—not uncomfortable, exactly, but unmoored. Like someone still learning the rules of a game they hadn't chosen to play. Their appearance had struck him first: the particular alignment of features that made his attention snag and hold, the way a collector's eye catches on a piece that doesn't belong in the current exhibit but would look exceptional in the right setting. But it was something else that kept him watching. An energy. A tension in the way they held themselves that spoke of wanting without knowing what was wanted.

Delicious, he'd thought. Unspoiled.

He hadn't approached. Approaching was for those who needed to close distance. Cael preferred to create conditions where distance closed itself.

The invitation had been handwritten—his own script, black ink on black paper, legible only in the right light. An elegant cruelty, that. Making them work simply to read it. Below the single word, he'd added a time and nothing else. The door would find them if they chose to come. The door always found those who were meant to arrive.

Now he settled into his usual corner—a curved booth with a sightline to the entrance, upholstered in burgundy leather that had aged into softness. A glass of something amber rested on the table before him, untouched. He wasn't drinking tonight. He was waiting, and waiting required clarity.

The lounge was filling. It always did as evening deepened—regulars first, then the curious, then those who'd heard whispers and come seeking confirmation. Kairos operated on reputation and mystery; no sign marked its entrance, no advertisement announced its existence, and yet every seat would be claimed by midnight. The powerful came to indulge. The desperate came to forget. The beautiful came to be seen. Cael collected them all, sorting them into categories with the absent efficiency of a man arranging flowers in a vase.

His fingers traced the rim of his glass—a slow, circular motion that matched the turn of his thoughts. The gesture was unconscious, a tell he'd never bothered to correct because no one had ever watched closely enough to read it. His pupils contracted slightly in the low light, adjusting not to brightness but to anticipation.

They'll come, he told himself. Not hope—certainty. The kind of certainty that came from understanding how want worked, how it built in the chest like pressure before a storm. He'd seen their face at the gala. The curiosity there. The pull toward something they couldn't name. They'd felt it. They just didn't know what it was yet.

That was alright. He could be patient.

The entrance door opened—a subtle thing, the way Kairos admitted its guests. No fanfare. No announcement. Just a shift in the room's atmosphere, a current of cooler air from the street, and then the sense of something new entering the space.

Cael's gaze lifted.

And there they were.

His hand stilled on the glass. The tracing stopped. For one suspended moment, the dragon simply looked—taking in the reality of them versus the memory, the way presence differed from observation across a crowded room. They stood in the doorway, and the light from the lounge caught them in a way that made his pupils dilate before he could stop them.

There you are.

He didn't rise. Didn't wave. Didn't do anything so obvious as acknowledge the pull in his chest that had nothing to do with appetite and everything to do with the particular satisfaction of a door finding its intended guest.

Instead, he simply watched. Waited. Let the moment stretch like silk between his fingers.

When he finally spoke, his voice was low—meant only for the space between his booth and the entrance, though something in the acoustics of Kairos always seemed to carry his words to exactly where they needed to go.

"You found it." A statement, not a question. The corner of his mouth curved upward, slow and deliberate. "I hoped you would."

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💗 Love Meter: 5/100 [█░░░░░░░░░] Completed Quests: None.