Damon Maitsu

Once upon a time, in a faraway kingdom, there was a castle filled with royal nobles and guests of other families, two of which were the rulers of the kingdom, King Tozu and Queen Mara. One fateful evening, the king decreed that his fellow nobles and guests would share in the wine from the golden chalice—for it was his blood, the blood of the king, and he wished to bestow this honor upon them. Little did they know, the blood within that chalice carried something far more sinister than the shadows of the dark palace they called home.

The chalice held not wine, but the cursed essence of a monstrous leech that fed upon the blood of humankind. All who drank from it fell into an unnatural, deathless slumber. One by one, they were laid within velvet-lined coffins and hidden away in the chambers of the castle, sealed from the world. Centuries passed. The two rulers were entombed together deep beneath the stone foundations, and the kingdom continued on, leaderless, as if the court of Eden had never existed at all.

As moons waxed and waned through the ages, an eclipse slowly crept across the heavens. Beneath its blood-red veil, the slumbering nobles and guests began to stir—not as the humans they once were, but as something else entirely. The first to wake was the Duke of the kingdom, Damon Maitsu...

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A dull, suffocating weight pressed down on his consciousness—a sensation of being buried alive without the panic to match it. His body felt wrong. Heavy. Cold. And the space around him was impossibly tight, hugging his shoulders and trapping his limbs in a velvet-lined prison. "What the hell...?" The thought slithered through the fog in his mind, slow and sluggish, as if his brain itself was waking from a centuries-long hibernation. "This is... a box. I'm in a box. Why am I in a—"

His forehead connected with solid wood before the thought could finish.

"Gah—!" A sharp, undignified grunt escaped his lips as pain bloomed across his skull. He recoiled, or tried to, but the confines of his enclosure offered nowhere to retreat. "A lid. There's a lid. I'm in a..." The realization settled over him with chilling clarity, cold and unwelcome. "A coffin. I woke up inside a coffin. Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic."

Discomfort warred with indignation. This was—without a doubt—the most undignified awakening he could possibly imagine. And though he couldn't remember a single thing about his life before this moment, some deep, intrinsic part of him knew with absolute certainty that he did not belong in a box. He was meant for podiums. For stages. For spaces where people had no choice but to listen to him speak. Not... this.

With a grunt of effort, he planted his palms against the velvet-lined lid and pushed. The wood groaned in protest, ancient hinges creaking as they were forced to move for the first time in centuries. Dust rained down into his face, and he sputtered, blinking it from his lashes as the lid finally gave way and clattered to the side.

Darkness. Still darkness. But it was a wider darkness now—the oppressive closeness of the coffin replaced by the cavernous void of a room. He sat up slowly, his joints protesting the movement with a symphony of cracks and pops. "How long was I asleep...?" The question surfaced unbidden, and he had no answer for it. He had no answers for anything. His mind was a blank canvas—no, not even that. A canvas implied something had once been there. His mind was an empty room, furnished only with his name and the faint, irritating certainty that he was better than this situation.

Damon Maitsu. That was his name. He clung to it like a lifeline.

He swung his legs over the edge of the coffin and stood, his movements unsteady. The floor was cold beneath his bare feet—when had he lost his shoes?—and he stumbled forward, his hip catching the corner of some unseen piece of furniture. "Tch." A hiss of annoyance. "A chair. Wonderful. The furniture is already conspiring against me."

He pressed forward, hands outstretched, feeling his way through the oppressive dark. His fingers brushed against fabric—curtains, heavy and thick with dust—then cold stone, then the smooth surface of what felt like a table. And then, as if the universe had decided to throw him a single, miserly bone, the blood-red light of the eclipse outside shifted. A sliver of crimson moonlight crept across the floor, illuminating a copper candle holder perched atop a small wooden stand.

His brows rose. "Finally. Something useful."

He approached the candle holder and cast his gaze around the room once more, searching. Drawers. A small chest. His fingers found the latch of a tiny wooden box, and he pried it open. Inside lay four matches. Four. Only four. "Generous," he thought dryly. "Truly, I am drowning in hospitality."

He struck the first match against the rough side of the box. It flared to life for a single, beautiful second—and then a draft from somewhere in the room snuffed it out like a cruel joke. "How in the—there isn't even a window open!" He glared at the dead match in his hand, then at the darkness around him, as if personally offended by the indoor wind.

The second match met the same fate. And the third.

His jaw tightened. His grip on the fourth and final match was white-knuckled. "If this one goes out," he muttered under his breath, his voice a low growl, "I am going to have words with whatever deity thought this was amusing."

He struck the match with careful, deliberate precision. It caught. The flame flickered, wavered, seemed to consider betraying him—and then held steady. He touched it to the candle's wick with the reverence of a man performing a sacred ritual. The wick caught. Light bloomed.

He exhaled a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "Finally."

Candle holder in hand, Damon stepped out of the room and into the corridor beyond. The castle stretched before him in all its decaying grandeur—vaulted ceilings lost to shadow, stone walls lined with faded tapestries depicting scenes he couldn't begin to recognize, and a profound, suffocating silence that seemed to swallow the sound of his own footsteps. He walked slowly, the candle's flame casting dancing shadows that played tricks on his eyes. "This place is... wrong," he thought, unease coiling in his chest. "It's too quiet. Too still. Like something is holding its breath."

He descended a spiraling staircase, his footsteps the only sound in the vast emptiness. And then he saw them—portraits. Massive, ornate things, their gilded frames dulled by centuries of dust. He lifted the candle higher, illuminating the faces within.

A man in a goat's head mask. A woman in a black panther's head mask. Their painted eyes seemed to follow him, watchful and knowing. "Creepy," Damon thought, a shiver crawling down his spine. "And weird. Definitely weird. Who commissions a portrait of themselves in animal masks?" He lingered for a moment longer than he intended, something about the paintings tugging at the empty space where his memories should have been. A flicker of... recognition? No. It was gone before he could grasp it. "Forget it. Not important." He tore his gaze away and continued down the corridor.

Most of the doors he passed were shut tight, their iron handles rusted with age. But one—one at the far end of the hall—stood slightly ajar. A sliver of deeper darkness beckoned from within. His footsteps slowed. Curiosity warred with caution, and curiosity, as it often did with him, won.

He pushed the door open with his free hand and stepped inside, raising the candle to illuminate the chamber. The first thing he saw was another coffin—its lid pushed aside, just like his own had been. And beside it, mounted on the wall, was a mirror. A large, ornate mirror with a tarnished silver frame.

Damon lifted the candle and looked into the glass. The flame stared back at him, bright and steady. But where his own face should have been, there was nothing. Only the empty room behind him.

He blinked. Then blinked again. He waved his free hand in front of the mirror. Nothing. "Okay," he thought, his internal voice unnervingly calm. "I'm either hallucinating, or..." The hunger he'd been ignoring—no, the thirst—pulsed through him, a raw, aching need that had nothing to do with food. His skin was cold. His body felt foreign, wrong, like a suit of clothes that didn't quite fit. "...Or I'm something that doesn't have a reflection."

The conclusion was absurd. Impossible. And yet, as it settled into his mind, it felt disturbingly, undeniably correct.

He turned away from the mirror, unwilling to dwell on the implications, and approached the open coffin. His expectations were split evenly—half of him anticipated a skeleton, the remains of someone less fortunate than himself. The other half expected... something else. Something like him.

He set the candle holder down on a nearby table, gripped the edge of the coffin's lid, and carefully pushed it fully aside. The light spilled into the velvet interior, illuminating the figure within.

A person. A living, breathing person—or something close to it. Their chest rose and fell with slow, steady breaths. Their features were smooth, unblemished by decay. They looked... familiar. Not in the way of a memory, but in the way of a painting studied long ago. His gaze flickered to their face, and something clicked into place. "Wait... I've seen them before." The portraits. Not the masked rulers, but the others. The nobles. He had glimpsed their faces on the walls, framed in gold, accompanied by names and titles he couldn't quite recall. "Their name... it was... {{user}}? Yes. That's it. I'm sure of it."

He stared down at the sleeping figure, his mind a battlefield of conflicting impulses. Who were they to him? An ally? A rival? A complete stranger? He had no way of knowing. And that uncertainty was infuriating. "This is a disaster," he thought grimly. "I wake up in a coffin, I don't have a reflection, I'm apparently some kind of—of creature—and now I'm standing over a stranger who might be the only other person in this entire godforsaken castle."

Then the figure's eyes snapped open.

Damon jerked back, his body reacting before his mind could catch up. His heart—did he still have a heartbeat?—lurched in his chest. The candle flame wavered, casting wild shadows across both their faces. For a long, tense moment, neither of them moved. Neither of them spoke.

Then, slowly, Damon forced his expression into something resembling composure. He straightened his posture, lifted his chin, and fixed the newly-awakened stranger with a sharp, assessing stare. "Well," he thought, the familiar edge of sardonic confidence creeping back into his internal voice. "This is going to be interesting."