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??The Breaking Point

Dorian

Past

I was eighteen when my world ended.

It should’ve been a night like any other.

Silas and I had plans, cheap whiskey, dark rooftops, the kind of laughter only twins understood.

We’d survived the gauntlet of school, of expectations, of hiding what we really were. Two boys with fangs behind their smiles and a future paved in shadow.

We were born together. Bred together. One scream split in two.

But I never made it to him.

I got word just past midnight. My father’s voice, shaking, broken in a way I’d never heard before. He didn’t say the word dead at first.

Just Silas.

And then blood.

And then… Nothing but a silence that swallowed my name.

I ran.

Faster than a vampire should in human streets. Faster than logic. Than breath. Than thought.

But I was too late.

And I will never forget what I saw.

Silas wasn’t just killed. He was emptied . Drained of everything that made him real.

His eyes were open but gone. A sigil was carved into his chest, one older than time, still burning as if the blade had been dipped in hellfire.

The scent in the air wasn’t human. Not shifter. Not witch.

It was something else.

Old. Hungry. Wrong.

I knelt beside him and screamed so loud it fractured every street lamp for two blocks. Magic flared from me that night for the first time, wild, necrotic, violent. I didn’t even know what I was doing, but the sky turned black, and the wind howled with grief.

The ground cracked beneath my knees.

The light in me dimmed with his.

And from that broken silence, the madness was born.

Not a voice. Not a demon.

A truth.

There would never be justice for people like us.

The man who killed Silas? He wasn’t mortal. He wasn’t registered. He didn’t even exist in the system.

A scholar of forbidden rites. A priest of something buried beneath the Gate. He wanted Silas’s blood for the ritual. Said twins carried mirrored magic. That he only needed one of us to open what lies behind the Veil.

So he killed him.

Ripped my world in half to find a key that wasn’t even his.

Or so I thought.

And when I tried to go to the authorities, both human and otherwise? They laughed. Shrugged. Said the Veil didn’t concern their courts. That my brother’s death was unfortunate . That some sacrifices served the greater arcana.

They told me to let it go.

That’s when the Madness took over.

Not a scream.

A whisper.

They’d never stop until the Gate opened. Unless you stopped them first.

I was eighteen. No title. No influence. Just fangs, rage, and a dead twin in a cold box. So I made a decision that night.

I would rise. I would enter the halls of justice they used to hide. I would wear the mask of a man.

Become their defender. Become their executioner.

And I would hunt them all, every creature, every name whispered in shadow, every ancient soul tied to Silas’s death and any other death that reeked of injustice.

Let them hide behind wealth, behind bloodlines and old power. It wouldn’t save them. Not from me. I would kill them one by one, trial by blood, verdict by fire.

Two years.

Two years since Silas’s blood stained the pavement. Since his eyes went dark with a sigil carved into his chest. Since my soul cracked open and something ancient crawled out.

I hunted the man responsible, Varun . If you could call him a man. He was something else. A parasite in human skin. Old magic wrapped in robes of the church that hid what he truly was under tailored suits.

And when they caught him?

He walked.

Bought his freedom with blood-soaked money and a grin too wide for a mortal mouth.

The courts called it justice.

I called it insult .

I’d done everything right. Followed the rules. Collected evidence. Pushed through every barrier the system placed in my way.

But justice wasn’t built for people like me. And it sure as hell wasn’t built for people like Silas.

So I stopped pretending.

The night Varun walked out of that courthouse, I followed.

For four nights.

Not from rooftops or dark corners. I sat across from him at restaurants. Brushed his shoulder in crowded elevators. Left my scent in the air, just enough for his animal brain to itch with a danger he couldn’t name.

He knew something was coming.

Just not what .

He’d killed Silas. Lied in court. Smiled when the verdict came down. The system held him up like a trophy, untouchable. Untouchable to them.

But not to me.

The third night, I left a message. Not words.

Teeth.

Two of them. Human. Child-sized. From the pouch he'd kept as a trophy, only now it was mine. Wrapped in silk, delivered to his office by a woman with no eyes and a smile like a cracked doll.

He didn’t sleep that night. I watched him pace from across the building, perched on a ledge like a gargoyle, the wind curling around me as if it, too, was hungry.

By the fourth night, he ran.

Good.

I love a good workout.

I followed him to the industrial zone, an abandoned warehouse. He didn’t know this city like I did. Every alley here knew my name.

Every wall bore my marks.

The air stank of rust and ghosts. Blood from decades past. The perfect stage.

I stepped into the open, slow, deliberate, dragging the sound of my boots against the concrete so he'd know I was there.

“Who the fuck are you?” he barked, panic in his voice now, sweat painting his collar dark.

“You know who I am,” I said, voice low, laced with old magic. “You knew the moment you saw my face.”

His eyes narrowed. “You’re that freak from the trial… The brother.”

I tilted my head. “Not anymore.”

I let my glamour slip, just enough.

My shadow stretched and split into antlers and claws. My eyes burned silver. My smile was made of things you don’t see in mirrors.

He stepped back. “You don’t scare me.”

I laughed.

Then I moved .

Vampiric speed wasn’t just fast. It’s a scream through time. One blink and I was behind him, whispering in his ear, “Then why did you piss yourself?”

He turned to run, but I let the shadows grab him, living things, bound to my blood. They held him in place, tendrils curling around his legs like lovers, pulling him to his knees.

“Please,” he choked. “I didn’t mean to kill your brother. It was… An accident.”

“An accident,” I echoed. “You bled him dry.”

He paled.

“I saw it,” I growled, lowering my voice until it crawled beneath his skin. “You made him beg. You made me .”

I let the glamour deepen now. The warehouse shrank. The air thickened with power. Magic radiated from my fingertips as I dragged my nails down his face, not to wound.

To mark.

Ancient runes scorched into his flesh. A curse older than any court. Binding him to me until the last breath.

“You don’t get a quick death, Varun,” I whispered, my fangs descending. “You get to feel it. Every. Fucking. Moment.”

And then I bit.

Not the neck. No, I went for the inside of his thigh, close to the femoral artery, intimate, savage. He screamed, and I drank.

Slow.

Not to feed, but to hurt .

His memories flooded me, Silas sobbing, begging for his life. His voice. His final words. The smell of his fear.

I took it all in. Became it.

And when his blood turned thin, when his body sagged, ready to give… I healed him.

Briefly.

Just enough for one more round.

“Dorian…” he whimpered.

I growled into his skin, “You don’t get to say my name.”

And I opened his chest.

Not with a knife.

With my hand .

Magic surged through me, bones cracking, claws forming, my palm splitting like a monstrous flower. I reached in, pulled out his heart, still beating.

He watched it. He watched it beat in my hand. And then I crushed it.

Varun collapsed in a heap of bone and blood.

I stood there, panting, drenched in crimson, high on justice. The city around me held its breath.

And I whispered into the night, “One down.”

As the words left my lips, I knew this was only the beginning of the justice I set out for those who are guilty to face.

After the kill, I left.

I left the rage. I left the bloodshed. I left the hollow shell of Varun’s corpse in that warehouse.

But something followed me. It always did.

I thought, maybe, I could still save what little was left of me. That a law degree could be my penance. That if I played the game the human way, if I studied, passed the bar, walked the polished floors of the courthouse, I could balance the scales.

But justice was never blind. It was bought. Rigged. Played like a symphony for the powerful.

And I was done pretending I couldn’t hear the dissonance.

That night, after Varun's blood had cooled and the city exhaled, I stared at my hands and understood something, the law would never be enough. It wasn't justice they feared. It was consequence.

I needed them to know. Not the public. Not the press. Not the fools in robes.

The guilty.

I needed the monsters to feel me coming before they ever heard my name.

And so I found it, smooth, dark, and sharp as the truth they kept buried. Obsidian. A single, carved scale. Left behind like a whisper. Like a curse. Never meant for mortal eyes.

My signature.

Not a calling card. A warning. Judgment had a face now.

And it was mine.

Because the system had failed me before, it would fail me again.

I couldn’t fight the rage that simmered beneath the surface, the gnawing hunger that demanded more.

The more I learned about the system, the more I saw its flaws. The more I understood that money and power would always win in the end, no matter how hard you fought.

And I hated it.

I hated how they let monsters like Varun walk free because they could afford to.

So I did what I had to.

I used the system.

I played its rules to my advantage. I used my legal knowledge to get criminals acquitted, knowing full well what would happen after they thought they’d won… I would be the one waiting for them in the shadows.

I had become the very thing I had despised.

The very thing I had sworn to destroy.

A monster harboring the madness within.

Who would've guessed the monster in a tailored suit would spend a over a century quietly gutting the nightmares humanity never even knew were hunting them?