Shadows of the Silent Witness

In the alley’s dim spill of light, Jaims locks onto the journalist’s eyes. The human’s breath catches, their posture loosening as the compulsion takes hold.

Jaims closes the distance. The journalist stands rooted, helpless, as if the dark itself is holding them upright for him.

His bite lands, and the hunt turns intimate. The journalist’s resistance collapses into a trance, their body going slack against the wall.

Something impossible ripples through the scene, the body seeming to thin and surrender in shimmering streams that surge toward Jaims. He drinks in silence, keeping the alley sealed away from the street.

A faint sound drifts in from the diner door, a scrape of movement and a muffled voice from inside. The night remains unaware, for now.

The last of the struggle goes out of them in a single shudder. Jaims draws the bloodless body close for a final pull, and then the force in the alley releases its hold. The journalist collapses limp against the brick, emptied and still.

A wet red smear marks Jaims’s mouth, and a few dark drops fall to the pavement. The drain leaves his hands steady, but the silence after it is harsh enough to hear the diner’s fluorescent hum beyond the wall.

Inside the doorway, the waitress freezes in place, one hand half-raised, her face gone pale as she stares toward the alley. She has seen enough to know something is wrong.

The journalist does not answer. Their body lies slack at Jaims’s feet, the wiped laptop still clutched tight against their chest like a dead weight.

A chair scrapes inside the diner, and the doorway light shifts as someone turns toward the sound. The alley is no longer private.

Jaims is already moving when the waitress tries to retreat. He catches her arm and turns her back before she can reach the door, close enough that her panic has nowhere to go but inward.

The sentence breaks apart under Jaims’s gaze. Her hand slips from her mouth, then goes slack at her side, while the other stays trapped in his grip.

Behind her, the diner light flickers across the doorway, and the body in the alley remains still. The waitress stares at Jaims with frightened, uncertain eyes, as if waiting for permission to remember or to forget.

Jaims Tepes leaves Roadside diner behind and arrives at Castlevania.

The alley gives way to stone and shadow. Jaims slips through the darkness, and the city’s noise falls away behind him as the passage swallows the last spill of diner light.

He emerges inside Castlevania’s inner halls, where cold air hangs under vaulted ceilings and old masonry drinks the sound of his footsteps. The route behind him is gone.

Ahead, a long corridor stretches past black iron sconces and carved arches, silent except for a faint draft threading through the stone.

On the floor near Jaims’s path lies a torn strip of paper, fresh against the dust, as if dropped in haste.

Somewhere deeper in the hall, a door settles shut with a soft, deliberate thud, and the hush after it feels watched.

Jaims stands alone in the corridor, the castle opening before him, with an unfamiliar trail at his feet and nowhere to hide the fact that someone else has just moved through here.