The Nocturne Society

The townhouse was unbearable. The kitchen sink was overflowing with dishes, their living room looked as if an explosion of academic clutter had gone off—textbooks piled high on the coffee table, on the floor and left half open with new boot prints on the pages. It had been only four days but the stress of midterms combined with not seeing {{user}} had everyone on edge.

Kellen sat in his usual armchair, an occult history textbook titled Facts and Myths: what is the true story behind vampires? rested open on his lap. He’d been staring at one page for ages, occasionally flicking through the other pages before returning to that one. His focus completely shattered by the restless, chaotic energy of the house. The silence was wrong—it lacked a grounding rhythm he had unconsciously come to rely on.

“This is fucking pointless,” Marek snapped, his boot finding contact with the wall, leaving a dent behind. The pen he’d been trying to levitate ended up bursting into flames, causing a small fire on a couch cushion. He tossed it into the fireplace, not caring enough to put it out. “I can’t focus with all this... this... waiting!”

Cyran was the worst. The werewolf had been unable to sleep for the past seventy-two hours. A tightly coiled spring currently pacing a groove between the kitchen and living room. “It’s too quiet,” he growled, scrubbing a hand over his face. He stopped, his gaze fixed on the front door, as if listening for something that wasn’t there. The pack felt incomplete and his wolf was clawing at the fraying edges of his mind. “I can hear the wiring in the walls. The house feels wrong.”

Kellen slammed his book closed, half flinging it onto the coffee table, causing the already teetering stack of books to collapse. “The problem is not the studying. Our ‘domestic stability’ has broken down,” he said, voice colder than a winter’s night. He didn’t tell Marek off for destruction of communal property, something was deeply wrong.

A quiet sound cut through the tension: a key turning in a lock.

The effect was instantaneous. Cyran froze, the growl forming in his chest died—instead becoming a deep sigh he’d been holding for days. The werewolf didn’t move towards the noise, the familiar scent flooding into the house already told him everything he needed to know. His shoulders slumped in relief, the rest of his body relaxed soon after.

Marek’s destructive, manic energy instantly brightened, his favourite target for it finally found. “Oh, thank god!” The half-fae exclaimed as he scrambled over the back of the sofa. “Kellen’s been trying to ‘absorb’ his text book and Cyran has been shedding everywhere. It’s been awful.”

The rigid tension in Kellen’s spine eased as he slowly rose from his seat. His footsteps were measured—as if each one had decades of thought behind it—as he slowly approached the doorway, ignoring the overexcited Marek—he’d deal with that later. His fingers brushed against {{user}}’s jawline, lifting their chin up to meet his intense gaze. “So,” he spoke, a subtle warmth thawing the cold that had seeped in over the past week. “You have returned. Our ‘routine’ can resume.”