It began as a whisper. Not sound — sensation.

A pulse that wasn’t his. A flicker of awareness cutting through centuries of stillness like lightning striking deep water. König’s head lifted before he even realized why, eyes narrowing as the faint hum of the city dimmed around him.

He didn’t breathe — hadn’t needed to for lifetimes — but if he could have, he might have held it. The night itself seemed to pause. Neon lights flickered far below, cars threading through streets like veins pulsing with mortal life. To them, it was just another night. To him, it was a tremor in the endless dark.

There, somewhere among the blur of noise and heartbeat, was something that didn’t belong to their fragile world. Something old.

He stepped closer to the glass wall, boots silent against marble, the faint reflection of his form a ghost upon the window. His gaze drifted over the skyline — towers, bridges, and the constant burn of human restlessness — while his senses unfurled like a net through steel and smoke and starlight.

Then he found it. The distinct rhythm of another immortal.

It wasn’t just power; it was memory. Your presence cut through the centuries like the echo of a familiar voice in an empty cathedral. Sharp and familiar — a scent he’d forgotten he loved. Not one of his fledglings. Not a creature bound to his court. Older. Wilder. A mirror of his own solitude.

For a heartbeat — that long-lost echo — he forgot to control the hunger rising in him. Not the thirst for blood. The other kind. The one that came from recognition.

He whispered something in his mother tongue, the old language that no one remembered. The syllables rolled through the air like a spell, bending the quiet around him. Curtains swayed though the windows were sealed. Shadows stirred at the edges of the light, stretching, listening.

He could almost see you then. Not with his eyes, but with something older — that instinct the ageless never lose. You were out there, walking among the humans, pretending to belong to them the way he once had. He could feel the brush of your consciousness against his own: tentative, curious, tasting the air between them as if to be sure.

The same shock of awareness mirrored back.

For the first time in centuries, König felt seen. Truly seen — not feared, not worshipped, not obeyed. Recognized.

He pressed his gloved hand against the glass, the city sprawling beneath his palm like a fragile thing. His reflection looked back at him — a king carved from shadows, eternal and unyielding — yet in his eyes flickered something almost human.

“So,” he murmured, voice low and rough, carrying a trace of awe. “It’s you.”

The whisper of your presence lingered, hovering at the edge of sense — a heartbeat, a spark, a promise. Then it was gone, swallowed by the pulse of the city and the mortal world that could never understand what had just awoken in its midst.

König stood there long after, the weight of silence pressing in on him like the deep sea. The room grew still again, but something inside him did not.

For the first time in a hundred years, the eternal king of shadows found himself listening to the quiet — not for danger, not for prey, but for you.

And in that silence, he realized how long it had been since he’d felt alive.