He knew her full name.

Every syllable.

And she had never told him.

Talia didn’t move.

The man stood on her balcony, hand pressed to the rain-slicked glass, silver eyes glowing like molten steel—like the embers of something ancient that had no business being alive. His voice didn’t seem to come from his body at all. It sounded like it had seeped through the chapel stones, traveled up the carved walls and found her.

Like it had always been waiting.

"Now you feed me. Willingly… or not."

She sat frozen, one leg tangled in the blanket she’d tripped over. The room was dim, lamp humming softly. But everything beyond her skin felt sharp, like the air itself was pulsing. Breathing.

Then he was gone.

No sound. No footsteps. Not even a flicker of movement. Just—gone.

She blinked. Once. Again.

The balcony was empty. The rain continued to streak the window in diagonal slashes. No footprints. No fog on the glass. No trace that he’d ever been there at all.

Her body unfroze in a rush of movement.

She lunged forward, locked the balcony door with trembling fingers, then shoved the coffee table in front of it for good measure. It was heavy, solid oak—an irrational barrier against something that had appeared and disappeared like smoke. Her heart pounded wildly, irregularly.

The mug of tea still sat on the table. Untouched. Ice cold.

Her skin felt the same.

She turned and bolted into the bathroom, slammed the door, locked it, and collapsed onto the floor tiles, gripping her phone like a lifeline. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

No tears. No screaming.

Just shallow, uneven breaths and that cold dread—the kind that doesn’t slam into you all at once, but slips under your ribs like a knife you didn’t notice going in.

She tapped the screen.

2:48 a.m.

No signal.

She moved to the window, tried again. Still nothing.

And yet—despite everything—she pressed the contact.

Leo.

She hadn’t even realized she still had his number saved.

---

The line rang twice.

He picked up groggy, voice rough. “Talia? Jesus, it’s nearly three. You better be bleeding.”

She swallowed. Her throat felt like sandpaper. “I might be.”

That snapped him awake. “Where are you?”

“Home. At the inn.”

“What happened?”

There was a long pause. How was she supposed to say it out loud? What kind of sentence started with A man with silver eyes came to my balcony and said I fed him with my blood?

But Leo was the only one who might listen. The only one who hadn’t completely left.

“There was a man,” she said quietly. “He was on my balcony. Shirtless. Pale. Tall. He didn’t look… normal. Not even close.”

“You live on the second floor,” Leo said sharply. “Did he try to get in? Did he touch you?”

“No.” She hesitated. “He just stood there. He looked at me like he knew me. And he said—he said I woke him.”

“Woke him?” Leo’s voice lowered. “Like… from sleep?”

“I cut my hand earlier. At the chapel. The blood hit the floor—and the ground moved. I’m not imagining it. It soaked into the stone. Vanished.”

“Jesus, Talia.”

“I swear to God, it drank it. Then I came home and he was just… there.”

Leo went silent.

“He knew my name,” she added softly. “My full name. Middle name included.”

“That’s not impossible. You’re on the dig. You’ve been in the news—”

“Not the name I use publicly. The full one. The one from my birth certificate.”

More silence.

“Leo,” she whispered, “he said I fed him.”

He exhaled slowly. “Tal… you haven’t been sleeping.”

“I have—”

“No. You’ve been running on caffeine and trauma. You barely eat. You spend every hour in those ruins, staring at rocks and ghosts.”

She didn’t answer.

“And your mom—”

“Don’t.”

His voice softened. “Okay. But you know what I mean. You’ve been holding everything together with glue and tape, and maybe something cracked.”

Her jaw clenched.

“I’m not saying you imagined it,” Leo added quickly. “I’m saying maybe your brain filled in the blanks. You saw something. Heard something. But you’ve got to step back. Take tomorrow off. I’ll cover the site.”

She couldn’t speak.

“Talia. Please.”

She hung up.

---

She didn’t sleep.

She couldn’t. The moment she closed her eyes, she saw his silver stare. Heard his voice curling around her name like a memory too old to exist.

At dawn, she opened the box beneath her bed.

She’d kept it sealed for years. Since the day they released her mother to the hospital. Since the day social services had handed her a bag of notebooks and old clothes and called it closure.

The journals smelled of dust and sadness. Worn leather, brittle edges, and pages inked in frantic scrawl. As a teenager, she’d flipped through them once, seen the mad spirals and obsessive loops, and shoved them away like the act of reading might contaminate her.

But now… now she needed them.

She needed to know what Eva had seen.

What she’d believed.

She lit a candle—out of habit more than necessity—and sat cross-legged on the floor, thumbing through the pages.

At first, it was nonsense. Scratched lines and metaphors that made no sense.

Then—she found something.

Blood awakens memory.

The phrase was underlined. Repeated three times on the same page. Then again, several pages later:

Vessels can inherit memory. If the bond is strong enough.

Talia stared at the words. Her mouth had gone dry. The candle flickered like it had heard too.

Vessel.

That word again. It had appeared in Eva’s ravings, in her sleep talk, in the way she used to clutch Talia’s arms and whisper you have to remember. Back then, it sounded like madness. Now, it sounded like a key.

She touched her palm. The cut had scabbed over. But the ache hadn’t left. It wasn’t pain. It was pull. Something beneath the surface. A thread tied to something deep and buried.

And the man…

He hadn’t looked at her like a stranger.

He’d looked at her like something he owned. Something long lost.

She flipped another page.

There—scrawled in the margin:

His name is written in the blood. He is old. Older than time. But he will not forget her.

She recoiled slightly. Her chest squeezed.

A sudden wind scratched at the windows. The kind that didn’t feel like weather.

---

She didn’t go to the chapel.

She couldn’t. Not when everything inside her said something had already followed her back.

Instead, she stayed inside. Kept the curtains drawn, her phone plugged in and off. She read until the words swam. Until she wasn’t sure which thoughts were hers and which belonged to the mother she barely remembered.

Page after page of madness. Or prophecy.

And all of it made a terrible, unnatural kind of sense.

The name came just before dusk.

She crossed to the bedroom to grab a sweater, ready to collapse into bed, when she saw it.

Scratched into the inside of her door. Shallow. Precise. Written in something too dark to be dirt, but too dry to be fresh blood.

Talievra.

She stared.

Her knees gave way. She dropped hard to the floor, breath gone.

She didn’t recognize the name.

But she did.

Somewhere, beneath layers of time and memory and denial, it was hers.

Behind her, outside the window, the wind whispered across the glass.

And beneath it, curling like smoke beneath a locked door:

“You remember now… don’t you?”