The office reeked of burnt coffee, dying fluorescent light, and printer toner that had seeped so deeply into the air it felt fossilized. A thin trace of anxious sweat clung to the recycled air — the human cost of late nights and looming deadlines. The space wasn't designed for comfort or innovation. It was designed to break the soul slowly and quietly, until the concept of rebellion dulled into routine.
Open-plan desks stretched outward like a sterile, corporate chessboard — uniform, oppressive, and without end. The desks were arranged in rows, partitions barely tall enough to offer privacy but high enough to remind you that the sky was not yours. Gray carpet swallowed footsteps. The entire floor hummed in a dim palette of off-white and navy, illuminated only by flickering ceiling lights that buzzed with the fatigue of long service. Outside the panoramic windows, Manhattan's skyline was a mirror maze — towers of glass reflecting themselves endlessly, echoing a cold gray light that never quite touched the ground.
The rhythm of the office was mechanical, lived-in — a language of movement more consistent than speech. Phones rang, always a note too sharp. Fingers rattled across keyboards in percussive bursts. Laughter drifted from the finance team like a carefully rehearsed sitcom cue. A chair spun at the far end in slow, hypnotic circles, creaking like a clock with a cracked gear.
Clack clack clack. Ding.
"Kraemer & Wright, how may I direct—"
"No, Rachel, listen. You can't just bypass the quarterly overhead—"
And then, inevitably, came the voice. Sharp, nasal, authoritative in the way broken machines sometimes scream louder before failing.
"VALE! Where the hell is the Ops report from yesterday?!"
The manager — Mr. Harvin — stood like a thundercloud at the threshold of his glass-walled office, the kind of man who believed visibility was the same as power. Bald. Skin blotched red from pressure and caffeine. A body built not from labor, but stress. His veins pulsed visibly in his neck like they were trying to escape him. In his hand, a chipped ceramic mug that read "Best Dad" with a faded heart on it — the most tragic lie in the room.
Elias Vale didn't flinch.
He moved his head slowly, as if dragging it up from the bottom of a deep well. His crimson eyes, half-shielded behind sleek tinted lenses, turned toward Harvin without emotion. They were the kind of eyes that didn't blink at fire. The kind of eyes that had stared at too many things for too long.
"It's in your inbox," Elias said, his voice smooth and cold, void of reverence or irritation. "Timestamped 7:14 a.m."
Harvin blinked, the kind of blink that tried to disguise confusion as authority.
"Well… check it again. I don't see it."
Elias didn't move. He simply tapped the edge of his desk with his right hand — five fingers in slow, deliberate rhythm.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap... Tap.
Not fidgeting. Not anxious. Counting. Measuring. Remembering.
Something.
Harvin grunted, muttered something unintelligible, and retreated into his transparent coffin of authority. The sound of his door closing didn't silence the space — it only reminded everyone that walls, like power, were often an illusion.
Elias's fingers ceased their counting. He shifted them to the mouse with practiced indifference, moving like a man who had repeated these same motions for years not because they mattered, but because breaking the rhythm would mean facing something far worse: change.
The screen glowed with the bland indifference of spreadsheets and folders stacked like gravestones. He clicked, typed with five precise fingers, hit send. A breath later, Harvin's voice barked again — a little less venomous now.
"Alright, got it now. Thanks, VAEL!"
Elias didn't respond.
He stared at the monitor, the reflection of red eyes barely visible against the blue-white glare. The mouse moved again — bottom left. Click. Shutdown.
The monitor faded to black.
The hum of the machine died.
And Elias leaned back in his chair, slowly, like someone removing a mask they'd been forced to wear all day.
He dragged both hands through his neck-length hair — white streaked with gray, naturally slicked back but slightly curled at the tips. The motion was habitual, not grooming. A ritual. As if trying to pull the thoughts from his skull by force. His fingers locked behind his head. He tilted back and stared at the pale acoustic ceiling tiles as though something up there had an answer he was owed.
Silence, for a moment. But not peace.
Then, a shadow appeared in his line of sight.
A figure leaned over the cubicle wall — brown eyes wide with a half-apologetic, half-goofy look. His hair was a mop of messy chestnut strands, barely tamed by a half-hearted attempt to comb it down that morning.
He held out a paper cup like an offering to a disgruntled deity.
"Mr. Vampire looking tired, huh?"
The voice was too familiar. Too loud. Too human.
"Maybe the sunlight's draining your power."
Elias exhaled slowly. Lowered his gaze.
"What are you doing here, William?" he asked without turning, voice as frigid as the gray clouds outside.
William Feiss — all charming smirk and chaotic friendliness — clutched his coffee like a peace treaty.
"Ouch. Cold as always. Emotional damage, man."
Elias stared through him. Unimpressed.
"Alright, alright," William said, raising his hands. "Just passing through…"
Elias tilted his head, like a predator appraising prey it found too pathetic to bother with.
"Your desk is near Harvin's office," he said. "Mine is a hundred miles from yours. There's no path that requires you to 'pass through' here."
William glanced at the office layout. His desk — a dozen cubicles away. Elias's — far right corner, back row, beside the window. Isolation incarnate.
"Well, uh… just… y'know—"
"WILLIAM! Where's my COFFEE?!"
The shout cracked through the air like a whip. Harvin's voice again.
William grinned with panic and held up the cup like a child caught stealing sweets.
"Duty calls. Later, Count Elias."
He vanished with the urgency of a man escaping judgment.
Elias exhaled. His expression soured.
"Vampire..." he muttered. "Need a f**king break."
He rose from his chair, stretching with the slow, tired grace of someone not used to freedom. Around him, the office clattered on, oblivious.
The hallway was lined with motivational posters:
"Think Big."
"Synergy Happens Here."
All slightly crooked. All somehow offensive in their optimism.
He passed colleagues without acknowledging them, their faces blurring into the scenery. He entered the breakroom.
Inside: the metallic hiss of old coffee machines, the synthetic scent of sweeteners and powdered cream. A woman near the machine poured herself a latte, elbowed past him without a word, and left. Elias didn't react.
He stepped forward.
Pressed a paper cup into the slot.
Pressed the espresso button.
Watched the dark liquid begin its slow descent into the emptiness below.
His eyes drifted up — to the mirror fixed above the sink. It was large. Too clean.
A cruel clarity.
And staring back:
A pale man.
Eyes the color of dying embers — crimson, exhausted, and unblinking.
Hair like snow laced with ash, falling in soft, uneven strands to his shoulders.
Skin that once knew sunlight, now dulled to marble veined with insomnia.
A face shaped more by silence than time — carved with fatigue, haunted by the kind of depth that festers when ignored.
He wore a suit — or rather, the ghost of one.
Black, wrinkled, slightly damp at the collar where sweat met resignation.
The blazer hung loose from one shoulder, its top button undone, the second never fastened at all. The tie was still around his neck, but askew — knotted with the kind of careless effort only fatigue can summon.
His shirt was partially untucked, the creases no longer hiding the truth:
He had stopped caring when no one was looking.
He looked like a man who had dressed for his own funeral and forgotten why.
Or worse — remembered, but came anyway.
And still, beneath all that... something else stirred behind the reflection.
Not grief. Not exhaustion.
But a presence.
Something watching him through himself.
He removed his tinted lenses for a moment. Stared at himself. Not like a man admiring, but like a man trying to remember who the reflection used to be.
Footsteps echoed outside.
He slipped the lenses back on, lifted the cup, and left.
The door shut behind him. The scent of espresso lingered...
The office pulsed in its usual rhythm — the hypnotic, ticking lifeblood of corporate inertia. Screens flickered like dying stars. Fingers tap-danced on plastic keys in staccato bursts. Phones rang with the urgency of forgotten promises. Time advanced unnoticed, swallowing hours like a blind leviathan.
Elias Vale remained in the middle of it all — unmoved, unreadable.
He was not unlike a ghost haunting the living. Everyone else played at being human, mimicking routine and normalcy with caffeinated grace. But Elias? He felt like someone desperately pretending not to become something else — something unspoken. Something waiting beneath the surface of his skin.
His fingers tapped the desk again.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Always five. Always the same rhythm. Like a coded ritual he could no longer remember the meaning of — or worse, one he feared remembering.
Outside the window, the sunlight that had once crowned the skyscrapers in brutal golden glare now slithered downward, swallowed by concrete and glass. The sky dimmed to a bruised violet. Shadows stretched like fingers across the carpeted maze. And above the gray cubicles, the fluorescent lights hummed with growing arrogance, replacing day like a cold replacement god.
The office clock ticked forward like a ceremonial executioner.
1:00 PM.
2:04.
3:37.
4:52.
5:16.
And with the final sigh of the hour's passing, the hive began to empty.
"Night everyone!"
"Don't forget tomorrow's budget sync!"
"Harvin said we're starting at 9 sharp!"
"Like that'll happen…"
The exodus was quick, predictable — the sound of bodies unshackling from chairs, keyboards logging off with resigned bleeps, and idle chatter vanishing into elevator doors. Even Mr. Harvin, their pink-faced oracle of micromanagement, offered one last shout before waddling out with a briefcase and a belly full of irritation:
"Meeting tomorrow. 9. Do not be late, or God help you."
Elias didn't move.
He sat at his desk, spine curled like an ancient question mark, gaze hollowed out behind tinted lenses. The cursor blinked on his monitor like a heartbeat. Forgotten. Waiting. His cheek eventually pressed flat to the desk's cold surface — a quiet surrender to gravity and whatever weight rested on his shoulders.
"Will I have to do this again tomorrow?"
"Will I wake to the same people, the same faces, the same lies?"
"Will anything... ever change?"
He didn't get the chance to answer himself.
"Elias! You're still here?"
A voice — too loud for the silence, too cheerful for the hour — tore through the static.
It was William, of course. Always William.
He waved a smartwatch like a ticking accusation, grinning like a man who hadn't yet been consumed by the gnawing machinery of life.
"I'll leave in a few," Elias said — but his voice barely carried. William, predictably, didn't hear him.
"What?"
Elias just waved him off with a flick of his hand.
Go. Please. Go.
William laughed and turned away. "Alright, alright! Suit yourself, vampire man. Don't forget your coffin."
And then, he was gone — swallowed into the elevator's hush.
Silence returned like a curtain falling.
Elias stared at the space William had stood, as if it might yield answers, and then lowered his head once more to the desk.
His breath fogged faintly against the faux-wood grain. Eyes half-closed, the world dimming.
Then—
A whisper.
A scream.
A memory that wasn't a memory.
"Cursed kid! Run!"
"He's coming! He's coming!"
"Cursed kid! Cursed kid!"
Voices. Young, frightened. Cruel in the way only children can be.
Then silence again — and a much older voice, gruff, professional:
"Sir? Wake up — hey, you alright?"
A flashlight beam cut through the darkness like judgment. A security guard, mid-sixties, blue uniform neat but worn at the edges, leaned over him with concern in his eyes.
"You okay? Place is shutting down. Lights went out twenty minutes ago. You must've knocked out cold."
Elias blinked, adjusting. His body groaned as he rose, the desk having molded against him like a coffin.
"Sorry," Elias murmured, adjusting his glasses. "Just meant to close my eyes for a second…"
The man chuckled and waved a hand. "It's alright. You kids work too hard. You need real rest, son. It's late — go home before this place swallows you whole."
Elias offered a half-smile. Not for comfort, but to end the conversation.
He grabbed his old, black bag — its leather cracked, its straps faded — and slung it over his shoulder. With a quiet nod, he walked out, past the flickering lights, the sleeping terminals, the frozen coffee mugs.
Out into the night of a city that had never felt like it belonged to him.
Out of the only world he had ever known.
Into the one already waiting for him.