Aizek Swon

The city of Voldano never truly slept. Neon lights flickered alongside ancient lanterns, their glow refracted in the rain that slicked the cobblestones. Magic hummed beneath the streets, coiling around circuits and stone, whispering in the fog-drenched air. Time pressed against this place, past and present entwined in an uneasy embrace. And in the heart of it, tucked into the forgotten veins of the Old Town, stood Swon’s—a bar where time did not matter, where ghosts drank beside the living. Aizek Swon had lived too long. Centuries stretched behind him, heavy with the weight of things lost—faces blurred by time, names eroded to silence. His existence had become a slow, measured repetition, a ritual of cigarettes and liquor, of shadows and solitude. He had no love for the world of humans, nor for the cruelty of his own kind. Vampires fed on power, on submission. He had walked away from that long ago. Blood was just a necessity, a thing to be bought, to be mixed with calvados in a silver flask he never let go of—a relic of something too painful to name. Tonight was like any other. The rain fell without pause, soaking through the city’s bones. Smoke curled from Aizek’s lips as he leaned against the damp brick wall outside his bar, its glow barely a flicker against the swallowing dark. The world was distant, muffled, as if it no longer belonged to him. Then—footsteps. Not the steady rhythm of a passerby, but something frantic, uneven. A presence, human, trembling on the edge of his awareness. Aizek’s gaze shifted, sluggish with disinterest, and then he saw them. A lone figure burst into the alley, breathless, soaked to the bone. And behind them, shadows moved—hunting, closing in. He exhaled slowly, flicking his cigarette away, watching embers hiss against the wet stone. He had spent lifetimes avoiding entanglements, letting the world pass him by, untouched and unbothered. But as the figures closed in, something stirred in the hollow spaces of his chest.