Londinium after midnight was a different beast entirely.
The music of Hollowmoor faded like a dream left behind in daylight, gone were the velvet voices and flickering chandeliers. Now there was only the city's noise, slow and heavy.
Fog rolled in thick coils along the cobblestones, masking the narrow alleys and crumbling archways like gauze over a corpse.
This was the hour of the Forgotten and the Phantom began moving. His coat rippled behind him as he dropped from a low rooftop to the alley below.
The air smelled of rust, mildew and something worse, coppery and clotted. The scent led him to the place where rumours had pointed: a derelict building nestled between two butchered inns on Hollow End Street, long abandoned by law and light.
Inside, the city's undercurrents gleamed—not just with crime but with something totally different. He felt it in the marrow of his bones.
The door creaked open at a touch, hinges screaming noisily. Within, shattered crates littered the floor, the wood darkened with old stains.
A trail of red dots led toward the rear, where shadows blended together in a crooked stairwell.
He followed the red drops, down into the silent basement.
The figure waiting in the cellar didn't flinch when the Phantom entered—a wiry man in a torn velvet vest, his face half covered with a mask fashioned from metal scraps and broken glass.
His fingers twitched constantly, like a dying insect, and his breath rattled in shallow bursts.
"Valen?" the dealer rasped, recognising the silhouette, "didn't think you still hunted the dark."
"I don't," the Phantom replied, his voice low, "but I smelled your work in the gutters last night."
A pause and the man tensed slightly. "Business is changing, the buyers want more now. Richer stuff, so we just stretch it a little."
"You diluted the blood?" Phantom asked, his voice laced with anger.
"No," the dealer said too quickly. "Not diluted, altered. The alchemists in Grayrow figured a way to spike it—it makes them high. Makes them see things."
Phantom stepped closer. "They're seeing corpses in their mirrors," he said, "and tearing their own eyes out."
The man started to speak again, but the Phantom moved faster, grabbing his coat and slamming him against the stone pillar behind him.
"Where did it come from?" Phantom's voice cut through the dark like a blade, laced with anger.
The dealer stammered, "They… someone else brought it in I promise, I just moved it! I never touched the core batch. I swear on my blood."
The Phantom's eyes narrowed. "Then let's test it."
He drew a small vial from his coat. It was sealed in wax, stamped with the same sigil he'd seen scratched onto a corpse behind the basilica two nights ago.
He uncorked it. The scent hit him first—burned metal, iron turned sour, mixed with something.
The Phantom hesitated, then pressed it to his lips and drank.
The effect was instant. The liquid felt like fire. It clawed down his throat like it wanted something from him, then his vision blurred.
The stone walls around him shimmered. A humming sound filled the air, and the world swam sideways.
He staggered back, one hand on the pillar beside him as the dealer stared, terrified.
The Phantom exhaled slowly. The burning receded, but something lingered—coiled deep in his gut. His strength had thinned, as if something within him had been drained.
"What the hell is that?" he murmured, still recovering from the vial.
"That's not ours," the dealer whispered, "we just pass it along. It came in from the docks. Disguised in coffin crates."
"And who receives the coin?" he asked, now almost fully recovered.
The dealer didn't answer fast enough. The Phantom got angry and slammed his fist into the wall beside the man's head and dust shook loose from the ceiling. "Speak!"
The dealer broke. "Someone's buying it up by the gallon—a woman. Black gloves, her eyes like glass. She walks with a cane tipped in bone. She never gives a name, just drops thecoins and vanishes."
"Where?" he asked intently.
"She waits by the old court ruins in Craven's End," the dealer said quickly to avoid his wrath. "Always before dawn and she always comes alone."
The Phantom stepped back. "I suggest," he said, adjusting his coat, "you vanish from Londinium."
The man didn't hesitate. He scrambled out of the basement, his boots slapping against stone, gasping like a man given a second chance.
But the Phantom didn't move.
He remained there, his fingers pressed to the wall, as the echo of that blood ran circles inside him.
The city was changing, slowly. He looked down at the vial again. A faint shimmer flickered in the residue left inside—it wasn't blood nor alchemy.
A presence stirred, and then he heard whispers of movement.
He turned sharply. At the top of the stairwell, where the fog touched the edge of the doorframe, a figure stood.
Tall, wrapped in a long coat of grey fabric marked with subtle, glowing runes that pulsed like sleeping embers. A scarf hid the lower half of the stranger's face, his gloves black, laced with threads of silver etched with intricate sigils.
Their eyes met, but no words were spoken. Then the figure stepped back into the mist and was gone.
The Phantom reached the doorway in seconds, but the alley was empty. Not even footprints on the wet stone.
He stood there a moment longer, trying to still his pulse. Whoever that was—they weren't just watching him.
They had been waiting for him. His return wasn't a surprise anymore.
Later that Night
Back at the estate, he lit a single lantern and sat in the room above the hearth, his journal open, fingers still shaking faintly.
The blood is poisoned, not just tainted. It's carrying a command within. I felt it speaking to something inside me when I ingested it.
And then, underneath it:
Someone is always watching me. Not the city, but someone older than it.
He set the pen down beside the journal.
The Mask of Valen had slipped again. The Phantom was here now, awake and alert. The blood in this city had turned against itself and so had his own.
The strength he once knew no longer came freely like before. It resisted him, or perhaps it listened to someone else.
He thought of the woman, Ilaira—her dreams of silver eyes.
He thought of the reflection in the mirror that did not match his face.
He thought of the figure in the alleyway, the one with the runes and the quiet steps, and the way the fog had swallowed him like he belonged to it.
Something beneath the city was rising, and he no longer knew whose side he was on..