Gents Journey

D.R.A.C.: The Last Blood – Episode I: Darkness

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Rain doesn’t rage here—it remembers. We open DRAC with a cold open that threads a storm-soaked childhood to a glass-walled lab where blood refuses to obey. Dante Roman Orellan Creed carries a mark from a dream he can’t explain and a gift he never asked for. As numbers start repeating and grief reshapes his days, the line between creator and creation blurs: self‑resurrection models mirror old sigils, machines hum like a second heartbeat, and light begins to bow instead of blind.

We move through a taut blend of gothic thriller and bioethics as Dante meets Elra Vale, a geneticist whose calm feels like déjà vu. Their work on immunologic regeneration cracks open a deeper pattern: science and omen speaking a shared language. When a hospital blackout turns into a quiet miracle—glass flexing, power grids syncing, and a crowned symbol pulsing across a monitor—Dante learns that control isn’t domination; it’s conducting chaos into rhythm. The story widens from origin myth to leadership manual: resonance over force, accountability over theatrics, pattern over panic.

Anchored by a clear, punchy monologue, we offer five reflection questions designed for real shadow work: the noise you use to avoid yourself, the story that protects you, the inherited beliefs you need to retire, the emotions that surface without distraction, and the parts of your darkness that deserve understanding, not punishment. This is a thriller with a backbone of practical insight—identity, transformation, embodiment, and the courage to pace a room when everything wants you to sprint.

If this arc grips you, tap follow, leave a quick review to help others find the show, and share this episode with someone who needs a nudge toward their own awakening. What does your darkness remember about you?

"True mastery is found in the details. The way you handle the little things defines the way you handle everything."

SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome to the Gentleman's Journey Podcast. My name is Anthony, your host. And today we are starting a brand new series. The name of this series is D-R-A-C. And you know what that spells? That spells Drak. So before I get into this, I just want to kind of this is our kickoff, or just I should say, before I get into it, this is kind of like our kickoff for Halloween. Okay. So this series, before we get into it, is this. This is the last Dracula, the last vampire. And this is really gonna be a thriller. It's gonna remind you a lot of you know the other series that we've done. Gosh, I mean, really a lot of them. Like the Patience of Predators, it'll it'll actually remind you a lot of Patience of Predators and The Death of Peace of Mind is written kind of in that gritty kind of uh vein. So I think you guys are really gonna love it. Like again, this is only going to be for a week. So there's only five episodes. Next week, that's only gonna be five episodes. So every all the series this month in November, they're only five episodes, so they're only for one week. So again, guys, I appreciate you, and let's get into the cold opening. The storm has been falling for three days, steady and patient. It's the kind of rain that didn't rage, but remembered. The Callan house sat on the edge of the city like an afterthought. Brick darkened by water, windows glowing faintly behind curtains that never fully closed. Inside the air was heavy with damp wool and the hum of an old refrigerator. Dante Roman Arielan Creed was seven years old the night the dream came for him. He would remember it forever, though he wouldn't understand it until much later, until the age of thirty three, when blood itself began to whisper back. He'd been sick that week, his mother Margaret said it was the weather, his father Thomas blamed the thin walls of the old house. Dante didn't tell them they could hear the rain inside of him. That each drop against the roof sounded like a pulse echoing through his bones. He lay in bed, small hands clutching a threadbare blanket. Lighting flickered through the curtains, painting veins of white across the ceiling. Then the thunder rolled, not loud, but low, like the drag of something enormous beneath the earth. Sleep took him in pieces, one breath, then another, and then silent. He found himself standing in a corridor made of light and shadow, the floor of black mirror stretching into forever. Shapes moved within the glass, faces forming and dissolving each one with his eyes. A single figure waited at the far end, tall and unmoving, draped in a cloak that rippled like liquid. Come here, the voice said. It wasn't a sound but a resonance, vibrating inside of him. Dante tried to step forward but felt resistance, as if invisible threads anchored him to the spot. The figure raised a hand, crispin light pulsed from his palm, running through the mirrored floor like veins awakening. Do you know why your heart races in the dark? It asked. No, the boy whispered. Because the dark remembers you. The light flared, light and blinding. When Dante looked down the veins had climbed his legs, wrapping around him like living cords, he screamed. The figure only smiled. You will forget this, child, it said. But the blood will never forget. He woke gasping, drenched in sweat, though the room was cold. His nightshirt clung to him, the storm outside had stopped. Only the slow drip of water from the Evs remained. On his left palm a small mark glowed faintly, an intricate shape, like a circle broken by a single slash. He rubbed at it until his skin reddened, but it didn't fade. Mom, he called. Footsteps hurried down the hall. Margaret pushed open the door. Her robe tied hastily. Her hair flattened on one side. Sweetheart, what's what's wrong? He held out his hand, the mark was gone. I had a bad dream, he murmured. She smiled, relieved, brushing wet hair from his forehead. It's just a dream, baby. The storm's over now. She kissed him and tucked the blanket back under his chin. Go back to sleep. She turned off the lamp, leaving only the glow from the hallway. Dante stared at his hand until the shadow swallowed it. Somewhere deep in the house water dripped once twice. Then the rhythm changed. Thump, thump, thump, thump, like a heartbeat in the pipes. Years would pass before he realized that night never ended. It simply hid itself in daylight. But even as he grew, the dream waited. The boy became a man, and the mark became a scar. At twenty nine, Dante Roman Orellan Creed had learned to stop looking for meaning in dreams. He learned to measure everything instead, pH level, plasma counts, oxygen saturation, patterns of decay, and the bright corridors of the Roth biogenics left. He had no use for mystery. The human body, after all, was nothing more than a machine that lied to itself beautifully. He had built a life from logic, white coat, precise movements, sterile gloves that erased all truce of warmth. Yet sometimes in the hum of the centrifuges, he could still hear it. That faint thump thump thump thump beneath the noise. He told himself it was the machine. He told himself it was nothing. But it never was. On a quiet night shift, he stood alone in laboratory three, staring at a vial of blood under the blue fluorescent light. It wasn't human. The sample came from a subject marked DR. three seven C, one of the institute's genetic abnormalities. The blood shimmered when exposed to air, refusing to clot. Dante lifted the vial closer. Under magnification the cell pulsed as if aware of him, their edges glowing faintly red gold. He blinked and looked again, normal. He shook his head and laughed under his breath. You're tired, Creed. You're tired. But his reflection in the glass cabinet behind the counter didn't laugh, it glit, splitting for a second into two versions of himself, one still, one breathing. When the image fused back together, his eyes and the glass were a shade too dark, knowing. He froze. Overhead lights flickered once, then again. Something whispered soft as breath against his neck. You shouldn't have forgotten me. He turned sharply, the room was empty. Only the hum of equipment, glass walls reflecting his pale face. The heartbeat of machines that sounded too human. When morning came he pretended nothing had happened. He logged the samples, wrote his notes, drank bitter coffee, and avoided the mirror in the break room. But by noon his reflection his laptop screen began to separate again. It's a fraction of distortion, as if the heir couldn't decide which of him was real, enough to make him close it. That night at home, he opened an old box from his childhood closet, faded photographs of paper crane, a medical report from when he was seven, and at the bottom, folded between yellow pages was a drawing he didn't remember making. A tall, shadowy figure, surrounded by veins of red ink at the top, and shaky child handwriting the blood that dreamed. Slow, steady, familiar. Dante leaned back in his chair, the memory flickering like a film rail. Lighting flashed across the window and caught his reflection in the glass. This time the reflection smiled first. You were never adopted, a voice murmured from somewhere inside the thunder. You were hidden. Didn't sleep that night, sat in the dark. Art steady but cold. The same pulse thrumming in his ears as one he heard as a boy. Thump, it thump, it thump, it thump outside. City lights bled into the rain. The storm pressed closer to the glass, like a thing with eye. Part one The Blood That Chose Him. The first thing Marba Callahan learned about her son was that he never cried the way other children did. When he fell, when he scraped his knees on the stone steps, there was a short breath, a widening of the eyes, then silence, no sobbing, no trembling lip, only that calm, watchful stillness that unnerved even the gentlest heart. Thomas used to say, He's just thinking. Boys like that see the world before they feel it. But Margaret sometimes caught the boy staring at his own cuts until the blood drew itself back under the skin, leaving no trace but a faint blush of color. She told herself she imagined it she had to. The doctor had called him a miracle baby, after all, gone alone in the woods, wrapped in a wool blanket, though the night had been below freezing, no heartbeat for three full minutes before Thomas, then a volunteer medic coaxed back. They named him Dante Roman Ourelin Creed, a name that felt too large for child, yet somewhere already worn in like an inheritance. By ten, Dante had learned to hide the strange things that happened around him. Lamps flickering when he lost focus, plants in the yard bending toward him even when there was no wind, the heartbeat in the pipes that returned whenever he felt lonely. He spent long afternoons in the attic, sitting beside boxes that smelled of cedar and dust, reading books far too advanced for his aid. Margaret would bring up sandwiches up the ladder, shaking her head at the side of a boy surrounded by open encyclopedias and medical journal. Why not adventure stories, sweetheart? she teased. Why read about blood types and bone marrow? He'd shrug, tracing the diagrams with a finger. Because it feels like it's talking to me, mom. She'd laughed softly, not hearing the sincerity in his tone. The small town of Brimstead was kind to his as eccentrics. The neighbors knew the Callahans as a quiet, bookish couple would adopt a later in life. They forgave the boy's pale complexion, his adversion to sunlight, his habit of staring too long at the horizon. Children whispered that he saw ghosts, adults whispered it was too bright for his own good. He didn't mind either version. He'd always known he was different, but difference didn't frighten him, it only made the world more precise. At twelve, he dissected his first frog for a school project, and fainted halfway through, not from disgust, but because the rhythmic pulse of the animal's dying heart synchronized with his own. When he awoke the frog's chest was whole again, the teacher's scalpel rusted with something darker than blood. It called it a trick of the light. Dante knew better. On the night of his thirteenth birthday, the storm returned, the same patient rain that had baptized his first dream. The Callahan's threw a modest celebration, chocolate cake, two candles shaped like a one and a three, and a second hand telescope from Thomas. When the power flickered, they lit candles, laughing about old ghosts who couldn't stand to miss a party. After midnight, Dante stood by the window, telescope forgotten, watching lightning crawl across the horizon. In the glass his reflection was washed in candlelight. For a moment it seemed to breathe separately from him, then fused again, smooth as a sigh. He didn't scream this time. He whispered I remember. The mark on his palm glowed faintly beneath his skin, a pulse answering another pulse far away. Days later he wandered into the woods behind the house, a place Margaret forbid him to go alone. The ground was soft, still damp from rain. He found the tree where they discovered him as an infant, a tall ash split at once by lightning. Its bark seamed with black veins of resin. He touched the trunk it was warm. Beneath his finger sap moved sluggishly, thick and red as blood. He felt it recognized him. You were never lost. The wind seemed to whisper. You were planted. The whisper left him trembling, but when he withdrew his hand a smear of prison sap trailed at his fingertips, already drying to gold. He pressed the mark against his chest to hide it, but it burned through his shirt warm, steady and alive. That evening he told Margaret that he didn't feel well. She touched his forehead, found it cold, and smiled. Probably just nerves. Thirteen's a big year. He nodded. He didn't tell her that when he closed his eyes he could see the veins beneath her skin as threads of light. See how her pulse slowed when she spoke to him softly. While Thomas's heartbeat always stayed steady and sure like a metronome. He didn't tell her he could hear another rhythm under theirs, deeper, older, matching his own. As summer bled into autumn, small animals began to gather near the Callahan property. Birds nested in the gutters. A stray dog refused to leave the port. The neighbors joked that Dante had a gift with creatures. One afternoon a wounded fox limped from the woods and clapped near their steps. Margaret shrieked. Thomas reached for a shovel, but Dante walked straight to it, knelt, and placed a hand on his flank. Almond eyes met his, terrified, trusting. His breath slowed. The torn flesh knit together under his palm as though time reversed itself. When he stood, the fox trotted into the trees, leaving not a drop of blood behind. Margaret fell to her knees, praying aloud. Thomas couldn't find words at all. Dante simply looked at his hands, feeling faint veins of charisman light recede into the skin, and whispered I didn't mean to. That night, he jumped through the corridor again. The first rack waited at the far end, no longer a stranger. His voice thundered, subdued. Every kindness you offer will cost you twice, it said. But do not be afraid. The blood does not punish, it prepares. When he woke, Don painted the walls in pale gold. His palms were clean yet somewhere beyond the horizon. Something vast had stirred. Callahans would never speak of the fox again. They told themselves it had run up before Dante reached it. They believed their own lie because they had to, but sometimes at dinner Margaret caught her son gazing through her, not at her face, but at the pulse in her throat, for heartbeat. She couldn't breathe. Part two The Gift of Flesh and Iron. The rain had followed him in adulthood. Even when the skies over the city were clear, Dante could still hear it, soft, patient, eternal. Sometimes it lived in the rhythm of the ventilation fans about the laboratory, sometimes in the hiss of the autoclave. It was always near, humming beneath the surface of his work, like a forgotten lullaby. By twenty nine, he'd become the youngest lead research at Roth Biogenics Institute. A glass walled fortress that promised salvation through science. Gordor smelled of antiseptic and ambition. Machines whispered like mechanical heart. Dante moved through them with quiet precision. White coat buttoned to the throat, his name printed in clean black letters on the bed, DRA cre. He had long stopped wondering why the letters of his name looked like a cipher. Dante's specialty was a immunologic regeneration, a study of blood's capacity to repair itself. Officially, his team was tasked with engineering proteins that accelerated wound closure. Unofficially his work reached deeper. He had developed an algorithm that could predict cellular rebirth, a pattern so perfect that when he ran the simulation, the digital veins on the screen formed the same spiral he'd once seen glowing beneath his skin. He told himself it was a coincidence, yet every breakthrough felt less like discovery and more like memory returning. He had lived alone in an apartment above the river, minimalist and cold. The walls were bare, the furniture angular, only the microscope on his kitchen table looked alive, red light binking faintly as if it breathed. On sleepless nights he studied his own blood samples, documented animalities he couldn't publish, the way his cells resisted decay, the way they multiplied faster when moonlight touched the slide. He recorded each result in a journal bound in black leather, marking the pages with dates and symbols he couldn't translate. One night, as he wrote, a drop of his blood slipped onto the page. Instead of drying its spread into branching line, forming the same sigil that once burned on his palm. He tore out the page, heart hammering, but when he glanced at his reflection in the window, the mark remained there too, shining faintly beneath the glass. The pulse inside him had whispered keep going. The next morning brought Elra Vale. She joined his team as a geneticist, arriving with a stack of notebooks and the calm certainty of someone who already lived this life once before. Her eyes were strange grey gold, shifting color under light, and her voice carried the unhurried tone of someone who never lost arguments. Dante noticed. During their first conversation, that hum in the laboratory changed pitch, and she spoke machines lying themselves to her cadence. You've been working on regeneration models, she said, scanning his announce. But this isn't just about healing. You're mapping reclusion, life folding back into itself. He hesitated. You make it sound almost mystical. Everything is if you look close enough. She smiled for the first time in years. Dante felt the air warm. Weeks become months. They work together long after the other scientists have gone home, their faces lit by monitors and the occasional flash of lightning through the windows. She challenged him, disarmed him. Sometimes she caught him staring too long at a blood sample, lost in thought. What do you see? He'd ask. He'd answer honestly. A pattern that looks like it's waiting. Arrow never laughed. Maybe it is. Late one evening power flickered. The backup lights bathed the lab in chrism. Dante stood at the center table, French poised above a sample of his own serum. We've reached the limit, he said quietly. If the model holds, the cells should rewrite their own decay. You mean self resurrection? she corrected. He glanced up. Her tone was clinical, but her pupils had dilated. The hum of the centrifuge deepened until it sounded like it was almost chanting. He injected this serum into the petri dish. The reaction was immediate, the cell shivering, merging, splitting again. A thin line of vapor rose, and for an instant, the pattern resembled a circle broken by a single slide. The mark his mark. But then it dissolved. Elra excelled slowly. You did it. He shook his head. No. It did it so. After that night, Dante's dreams changed. A quarter of light returned longer now, lined with vessels instead of mirrors. At the end the first rack waited, thrown carved from bone and iron, a crown of pulsing veins circling his head. You built what you already are, the figure said. Science is the only language you remember best. When Dante woke his hands ached, as if he'd been holding something heavy. He began wearing gloves to work. Aro noticed the change in him before anyone else did. You're thinner, he said one morning. I'm just working too much. And your eyes they look older. She reached off to touch his cheek, but hesitated when his skin felt cold. Her fingers came away faintly red though. Emergency lights came in, a deep red haze. Dante looked up, saw veins forming in the condensation on the windows, branching like frost but alive. The first rack's voice filled the room, low and vast. Not through sound but through blood. You seek the cure because you cannot accept the gift. What gift? Dante whispered. The one that made you flesh and iron, the one that remembers itself through you. The machines hummed, responding to the vibration in his chest. A drop of blood slid from his nose, glowing faintly before vanishing into the floor. When the lights returned, Arwa stood at the doorway, expression unreadable. What did you hear? she asked softly. He met her eyes. Nothing I can explain. And don't explain it, she said. Show me. Outside lightning struck the river and held for full ten seconds, the water glowing as if the metal had been poured through its veins. From a distance the city seemed to breathe slow, heavy and alive. And somewhere in that pulse, Dante realized that the line between creator and creation was already gone. Part three The Year of thirty three. By the time Dante turned thirty-three, his life settled in a cemetery. The Institute called him doctor Creed now. His work had been published in medical journals, cited by surgeons who had never heard the hum that threaded through his equation. His office overlooked the river, his name pate gleamed and brushed seal. He arrived early, left late, and moved through the halls with the kind of calm earned only by those who have stopped believing in accident. He told himself he was content. The rain had stopped following him months ago. Yet sometimes when he locked the lab at night, he could taste the iron in the air, faint and sweet, like the breath before lightning. His apartment was immaculate, books in alphabetical order, every instrument polished, every plant alive despite the lack of sunlight. On the wall above his desk hung a frame photo of Margaret Thomas Callahan, smiling on the pier somewhere along the Pacific coast. Their hands were clasped, his adapter's mother, hair lifted in the wind. He had sent them the camera years earlier and never asked where they had gone to take the picture. He'd like to imagine it was someplace warm, someplace where the sky forgotten out a storm. The phone rang just after midnight on a Thursday. He almost didn't answer. Calls at that hour meant either discovery or death. It was the second. The words came flatly through the receiver. Accident. Both pronounced dead at the scene. We're sorry for your loss. Then the line went quiet, leaving only the hum of the refrigerator and the sound of his own pulse, counting back. The funeral took place under an indifferent sky. No thunder, no rain. Just that still presence before a stone that never come. Dante stood alone beside the twin coffin. The miniature spoke of faith reunion. The words passed through him like smoke. He had dissected their body enough times to know the difference between comfort and chemistry. Yet at the first handful of soil struck the wooden lid, a chill rolled through him so deep that he felt older than grief. He saw for a heartbeat vain spreading through the earth like roots of prison glass, connecting both coffins to his shoes, to his hands, the mark that had never fully faded from his palm. Blood is a circle, a voice murmured inside him. What leaves return? He looked up sharply and But the mourners hadn't heard. Only the chlorose responded, winging outward in a spiral that mirrored the shape of his sock. He went back to work the next day. That's what Tyonsis did. Elra found him in laboratory three. Sleeves rolled to the elbows, dismantling the centrifuge as though he could rebuild meaning from machinery. You should be home, she said. I am home. You sit beside him close enough that the reflection emerge from the stainless steel at the table. They were good people. He said Saf I know. Then why weren't why are you not angry? He looked up. Because anger belongs to the living. That night he dreamed again of the corridor, but the light was different, warmer. At its end, the first rack sat waiting, hands folded over the armrest of the throne. Turn a pulse with the slow rhythm of a colossal heart. You have buried those who borrowed you, the voice said. Their blood returns to the river. Yours begins to flood. Dante's throat tightened. Why now? Because a line before you has ended. You are the continuation. He wanted to deny it, to say he was nothing but a man built from chance and curiosity. But the walls around him shimmered, revealing rivers of red light threading through the dark. Each vein bore a name, Roman, or then Creed. Stretching backward in the centuries at the center, his own heart glowed brightest. When he woke, dawn was gray and heavy. Clock read three hundred thirty three AM. From that morning on the numbers followed him. Case files number thirty three landed on his desk. Lab temperatures stabilized at thirty three degrees. Oldo receipt for a conference in Vienna read room three hundred thirty three. Every pattern of repetition, every repetition reminder. He started to keep notes again, scribbling symbols between data entries. The language came on its own, curves and sigils that felt carved rather than written. He told no one, not even Allo, though she began to sense the chain. You're haunted, she said one evening. By what? By something that calls itself truth. He almost laughed. Her eyes were steady and gold in the low light. He realized she meant it. Weeks later during a solitary meditation, a habit she encouraged to quiet his mind, Dante felt the air thicken around him. The heartbeat returned no longer an external, but layered beneath his own, slower, older, infinite. He saw the corridor again, but this time he walked. Each step echoed with a sound of blood moving through arteries larger than street. The first track rose from the throne, a sound of metal unfolding. Now you see, the figure said. Science and faith are not enemies. They are siblings of the same parent memory. I'm not you, Dante said. I'm human. You are what happens when the vine forgets itself and must be reminded. Figure reached out a hand, veins glowing like molten iron. Dante hesitated and touched it. A searing cold raced through him. For an instant he saw everything, the night he was found beneath the ash tree, Margaret's trembling hands, the fox reborn, Alber's eyes reflecting light. And beyond it all, image of a man kneeling in a circle of fire, whispering an oath that sounded like his own name. He gasped and tore the contact away. His vision shattered. He was back at his apartment, kneeling on the floor, blood trickling from his nose. The clock on the stove blinked three hundred thirty three. The next day he found Elra, waiting outside his office. He held a folder of research data, but her expression carried something heavier. You're changing, he said quietly. Everybody does. Not like this. The air around you feels charged. He looked at her hands. Veins beneath her skin glowed faintly gold, pulsing a rhythm with his own heartbeat. For a moment he thought she saw it too. Alara, what are you? She smiled sadly. Same as you only a few steps behind. We were never strangers, Dante. We were chosen to find each other. Before he could respond, she pressed the folder into his hands and walked away. Inside were pages of his own research rewritten, reorganized, annotated with in her own delicate handwriting. At the bottom of the last page a single line. When the blood completes its circle, two will stand where one begin. He read it again, then felt the pulse in his rest answer like a drum beat. That night the rain returned for the first time in years. It struck the windows in a rhythm too precise to be random. Three beats, pause, three beats, pause. Dante stood at the glass and whispered, I hear you. The voice of the first wreck came from within his chest, no longer distant. Then you are ready to remember what you were before you were born. Lightning split the sky, his reflection blurred, not glitching, not lagging, but dividing, as though the air itself could no longer hold the difference between man and myth. And for the first time, Dante didn't look away. Part four The Awakening The first sound was rhythm of machines. Not the steady human rhythm of breath and or heartbeat, but the precise and different pulse of technology. A monitor hummed softly in the corner, measuring life in thin green lines. Fluorescent light pressed against Dante's eyelids pale and endless. When he opened his eyes, the ceiling greeted him like an empty sky, white, featureless, sterile. He could taste metal in the air, the faint tang of antiseptic and electricity. His throat burned when he tried to swallow. A thin IV line snaked from his arm to a clear bag that swayed each time the vent above him exhaled. For a moment he couldn't move. The world existed as vibration, the hum of the light, the tick of the monitor, the far thunder of footsteps somewhere beyond the door. Every sound had a shape now. He could see it behind his eyes, waves, pulses, small earthquakes in the air. He remembered glass, streams, the way everything bent inward before exploding outward. Then nothing. He turned his head slightly. The room around him was small, curtains drawn, a single chair near the wall, bars wilting in a plastic vase. Someone had tried to make the space kind. They failed. The door stood half open. Outside the hallway smelled of coffee and bleach. Voices drifted in fragments, nurses speaking softly, wheels rolling, someone laughing too loud. Each voice carried its own gravity, he could feel where they were without looking. He closed his eyes again and reached for a silence. It didn't come. The silence now had layers, machines breathing, wires trembling, water sliding through distant pipes. Beneath all of it a slower sound moved like a tide. A heartbeat, but not his. He sat up too quickly, the monitor complained, beeping high and shrill. The heartbeat on the walls quickened to match his own. Stop, he whispered. Sound obeyed for a moment, and faintly the lights flickered overhead. He stared at his hands, the ivy shook against his skin, tiny bubbles forming in the tube. His fingers tips tingled. The pressure and the pulse under them felt wrong, off tempo and heavier. The nurse passed the doorway, glanced in her froze. Oh my god, you're awake. He didn't answer. She stepped closer to the bed, on her chest catching the light. Easy, sweetheart. You've been out for two days. That's just the monitor spiked again. Her words trailed off as the overhead light dimmed, then brightened, for her lifted slightly as if static filled the air. Mr Creed, she said, voice shaking now. I'm going to get the doctor. She turned, but the door clicked shut by itself. The lech slid home with mechanical precision. Dante's voice was barely audible. Please don't move. The machines around him began to sing. Heart monitor, ventilation on her hum. Even the clock on the wall, they all formed a single rhythm, each beat echoing the next. The nurse stepped back, pressing against the wall. What are you? He squeezed his eyes shut. I can't stop hearing it. What? The blood, everyone's it's all one sound. The light above them flared white. A ball burst, raining glass across the floor, but each shard hovered for a breath before landing softly, as if the air caught them. The nurse gasped and ran for the door. It opened this time slowly, grudgingly, and slammed against it after she fled. The room fell into semi darkness, lit only by the thin glow of the monitor. Dante pressed his palms over his ears. Stop, he whispered, please stop. The heartbeat in the wall slowed. The IV stand rattled once, then went still. He lowered his hands. For a few seconds everything was perfect silence. Then from the far side of the curtain, another monitor began to beep, not fast, not slow. Same rhythm as his. He stood, legs weak but steady. Or felt warm beneath his feet. He reached for the curtain. Don't said a voice. He froze. It wasn't human in all that exactly. It came from the static in the monitor, from the breath of the vent. You can't hide from what you are. He stepped back. Who's there? Voice answered from everywhere No The blood. Remembered. His chest tightened, he looked at the line of the IV, dark red now pulsing faintly inside the tube. He ripped it free. The wound didn't bleed, it simply closed, the skin knitting itself in seconds. The smell of ozone thickened in the room. The heart monitors across the hallway spiked in chorus, alarms layering to a single rising note. Dante stumbled backwards into the chair, gripping the armrest until his knuckles whitened. A voice softened. You survived the first call. The next one won't be so kind. I don't want it. Want has nothing to do. He turned towards the window. The blinds trembled through the air, even though it was still. Beyond the glass the city lights flickered, street lamps signed, old blocks of power dripping, sequenced like a wave. I didn't ask for this. Light above him buzzed and steadied. Voice faded into the hum of machines. A nurses shout echoed from the hall. Others joining, footsteps running, the clatter of carts. The monitor beside him blared a single continuous note. His vision swam. He whispered, please, please not again. The windows bowed inwards, glass bending without breaking, every light in the corridor flared white. Then silent. When the staff burst into the room, the machines were dead, screens were black, the air smelt faintly of burnt dust. Dante lay motionless on the floor, eyes half open, all steady but distant, as though the body was deciding whether to keep him. It lifted him onto the bed. The doctor barked orders, someone shouted for power to the monitors. As the equipment became alive again, a faint red symbol pulsed briefly on the heart rate screen, two intersecting circles forming a crude crown. No one noticed it before it disappeared. Outside, the city went dark, block by block, light snuffed out in a spreading pattern only the hospital stood lit. A single island of power in a sleeping world. Dante's eyes fluttered once, his lips moved without sound. The machines beeped again, slow, deliberate, like something ancient learning to breathe through him. Then he went still. Not the sterile white of hospital bulbs, but real color, the kind that carried warmth. A faint gold spilled through the blinds, cutting the room into slanted stripes. The monitors hummed quietly again, steady this time. Outside the city was stirring, unaware it had slept in darkness. Dante lay still and watched us drift through the light. The moats rose and fell like tiny planets, each one pulse faintly responding to something inside of him. He felt different, lighter and yet impossibly heavy inside his chest. The nurses had stopped checking on him every hour. He heard the whispers in the hallway. Stable now, miracle. Don't question it. The doctors had left notes about blood work they didn't understand. The machines read normal, but the air around him wasn't. He turned his palm up and for a moment the sunlight on his skin seemed to breathe with him, brightening when he inhaled, dimming when he exhaled. He flexed his fingers, and the light followed, slow and obedient, like a tide moving to pull of a moon it had always known. He whispered not accident. The window pane vibrated softly. Outside birds crossed the sky in formation, wings catching fire in the dawn. The heat didn't reach him, but he felt its rhythm, the way their flight beat through the air like a second heartbeat. He slid from the bed, bare feet touched the cold tile, but he hardly felt it. The IVs and wires were gone now. I wanted trust him enough to move freely, or maybe they'd simply forgotten him. Or creaked once. The sound traveled through the metal legs of the bed, to the frame of the room, and to the walls, and back into him, the feedback loop sang like a note only he could hear. For the first time, it didn't hurt. He walked to the window. The city stretched below, cars glinting, windows waking, few pedestrians clutching coffee cups, ordinary life rebuilt overnight. Yet beneath the hum of it all, he could still feel the heartbeat of the blackout. The pulse had retreated, underground, slow but awake. He pressed his hand against the glass. The morning light bend around his fingers, refracting into five sharp beams that crawled up like a wall, searching vain. When he closed his fist, the beams folded into one. The hospital monitor blinked behind him, then clicked off, and then clicked back on, resetting by a minute. He smiled, small and uncertain. You listen now? The voice from the night didn't return. Only the steady sound of his own breath answered him. He tried again, this time softer. You can hear me. Show me I'm not alone. Nothing. He turned away from the window, half relieved. The chair in the corner creaked, he froze. The chair had not been there before. A folded housepagon rested on the seat, and on top of it a silver pen, the same kind, the same weight, the same ink that once had written his name into existence. He reached for it slowly. The metal was warm as if it had been writing. When he uncapped it, the tip gleamed faint red before settling into black. He set the point against the scrap of paper on the counter and wrote one word. Remember, the ink dried instantly. The letter shimmered, then sank into the paper until it looked blank again. He frowned, turned the page over, nothing. When he set the pen down, the word appeared faintly in light across the floor, projected from nowhere, burning white against the tile. Okay, he whispered. So that's how you speak. He lifted his eyes to the window again. The sun had climbed higher, washing the rooftops and fire. The light reflected off the glass towers and lanced through the room, sliding across his face, it didn't blind him. It bowed. Something shifted inside his chest, deep and electric. For heartbeat he felt everything, the traffic lights, the hospital power grid, the slow turn of the earth. All of it connected by the same invisible current threading through his veins. A knock at the door broke the trance. Mr Creed, a nurse peeked in, tentative smile. Good morning, how are you feeling? He looked over his shoulder, voice calm. I'm awake. She stepped inside, card in hand. That's good to hear. We were worried. You were out for quite a while. These lights are ridiculous today, aren't they? He nodded. They're stronger. Slower fair, maybe? She laughed lightly, setting the chart on the table. Dante watched her reflection in the window. Every time she spoke, faint ripples moved through the light, bending around her outline like water, disturbed by sound. She didn't notice. When she left he remained facing the sunrise. The air in the room began to shimmer again. Light pulled around his feet, rising like mist. He closed his eyes and lifted his hand slowly. A golden haze followed, circling his fingers. He twisted his wrist, and the light obeyed, folding itself into a thin thread that coiled around his arm before dissolving back into the air. No surge, no collapse, just control. He laughed under his breath, startled by the sound of it. The echo came back softer, almost under the voice laughing with him. Then faintly a whisper, you're learning. He opened his eyes, scanning the room, the voice was gone. The machines blinked steady green. Outside the first true morning of the new world rose over the city. For the first time since he could remember Dante, didn't feel haunted by the dark. Inside him, the dark was quiet now, watching, patient. He whispered to the light, then teach me. The vines tilted on their own, letting the full sun spill across him. Everything that had broken began to hum again, monitors, vents, the hidden power lines in the walls, all moving to the rhythm of one steady heartbeat. Dante's monologue. It's been four days since I left the hospital. The air here feels different, it's thicker, like the walls are holding their breath, waiting for me to do something I haven't named yet. The old clock in the hallway still skips every third second, but now I can feel the pause before it catches up. It's strange how time itself begins to hesitate when you do. I said I was lucky. I keep hearing that word, tasting it like something metallic. If luck means surviving what should have ended you, then I suppose that's true. But there is a price to that kind of survival, one that waits in silence, reflecting interest. Sometimes in the quiet, I think I can hear the pulse of the house. Hum of the refrigerator, the sigh of the pipes, it all feels alive. Like the world is whispering that it remembers me and expects something in return. The sunlight, though, in those curtains doesn't just shine anymore, it bends. It tilts towards me when I think too hard. When I pass the mirror, light ripples around my reflection, as if reality itself hesitates to meet my eye. But deep down, I know exhaustion doesn't make light afraid. Every time I try to write about what happened, my hands tremble, not from fear, but by something else, as if the words themselves are awake where I finish them. Like they're aware I'm no longer just writing them. They're writing me. I used to believe power meant control. Now I think it means accountability for what answers when you call. I still see their faces, the nurse, the student. The panic, but it's not the fear that haunts me. It's the silence that followed. That impossible quiet, like the world had just exhaled through me. It didn't feel dark, it felt sacred. Maybe this isn't a curse. Maybe this is the moment my blood decided to remember what I'm capable of. There's a mirror across from where I sit now. I used to hate looking at it because I didn't recognize who I saw. And I I still don't, but for the first time, I'm not afraid of it. What I see isn't madness, it's clarity. It's truth wearing my faith. Whatever this is, whatever I am, it's awake now. For the first time, so am I. You know, there comes a moment when silence stops being emptiness and becomes a mirror. You know, you stop chasing noise, you stop seeking proof. And all that's left is a steady rhythm of your own heartbeat, asking the only question that matters. Not that you survived, who are you? Dante's awakening isn't supernatural, it's symbolic. It's what happens when life fractures you so completely that the illusion breaks, and the truth you buried begins to breathe again. Most men never reach that moment. They never, I just say, they distract themselves to death, hiding in their routines and their performances and their screens. Because the quiet world would force them to meet themselves. But every fracture is a doorway, every scar, a syllable, and you're becoming. The burn you feel when the truth arrives isn't punishment, it's purification. That's the moment the false self begins to dissolve. We've been taught to apologize for our power, right? To treat darkness as an infection instead of instruction. When you finally stop resisting it, you realize the dark has never been your enemy. It's the womb of what's next. It's where the future version of you is gestating, right? Waiting for you to stop calling him dangerous. Control doesn't come from domination, comes from conducting chaos, from the rhythm of your own inner storm. See, that's that's the real alchemy of awakening. Realizing that harmony and hellfire are siblings, and both are yours to command. And maybe what scares you the most isn't failure. Maybe it's the truth that you're no longer built to hide, and maybe, just maybe, that's what freedom feels like. Let's get into our reflection question. Reflection one. What kind of noise do you keep to use the let me say like this? What kind of noise do you keep yourself from feeling alone in your thoughts? What are you escaping from? Number two, are you brave enough to see yourself without the story that protects you or that you use to protect yourself? That is a massive question. Number three, what trait or belief have you inherited that no longer serves you? I'll say this again. What trait or what belief have you inherited that no longer serves you? Number four. What emotions surface when you're not distracted? That's a massive question. And number five. What part of your darkness have you been punishing instead of understanding? I'm gonna tell you, once you go through this, you do this uh what you want to call it, dark work, right? The dark self. There's many words for this. I'm gonna tell you everything that you all the answers you want are in that, I promise you. So, guys, we have started a brand new series, and I'm so excited to share this with you. And I just wanted to take a moment and just thank every single one of you for your love and for your support. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate it. If this is your first time listening, thank you so much for listening. And if you want to support the show, it doesn't cost you anything, and it's super easy to do. Just do these two things. First thing, leave a review, reviews help the show out so much. Second way, share this with a family member or a friend. I'm telling you right now, you like this kind of stuff, they will love it too. And if you want to have a conversation with me, there's so many ways to do it. The first way, which is the easiest way. Is on the description of this podcast, or in the very top, there's a button that says let's chat. You click on that, you and I can have a conversation about this series, this episode, the 300 plus series, or series, uh episodes on Gents Journey. There's a ton of them, right? Uh, second way is going to be through my email. Again, my email as always is anthony at gentsjourney.com. And then last but not least, you can always go to my Instagram. My Instagram is my gents journey. So again, guys, thank you so much for listening today. And remember this you create your reality. Take care.