1. Erebus
EREBUS
Eternity is profoundly overrated.
I reach this conclusion on a Monday night, when streetlights flicker and the fog over Blackthorn Bay hangs low enough to bend the glow into halos.
My boots scrape along the sidewalk with a deliberation I feel no obligation to justify, my hands in my pockets, my mind as untroubled as the graveyard shore.
This is what passes for leisure when you are, for all practical purposes, the metaphysical principle of Night incarnate: you walk, you look, and you remember to blink every so often so as not to alarm pedestrians with your unlidded stare.
Blackthorn Bay, they told me, would be different.
Nobody told me why; nobody ever does. It is a place monsters come because they wish to stop pretending, which appealed to me on a conceptual level.
Millennia as the cosmic custodian of darkness has made me partial to places where people understand that a little night is not always a disaster.
So I walk, and I take in the rare spectacle of creatures less ancient than myself attempting normalcy.
A goblin locks up a dry-cleaning shop, her hands deft as she works the key.
A werewolf walks an ornery spaniel mix that pulls at the leash while the wolf follows with the resignation of someone accustomed to this nightly ritual.
Somewhere overhead, in an apartment above an abandoned optometrist's office, a sprite flickers blue and gold in the window, tapping at a phone with impossible speed.
Most peculiar of all, not a single person looks at me as though I am an oddity.
They see me, of course. At my height, I am difficult to miss, and the cold starfield of my eyes has inspired everything from poetry to panic over the centuries. Here, however, there is no alarm and certainly no cowering. I receive a polite nod from one passerby and bland indifference from another.
I find both surprisingly pleasant.
I walk until the cold begins to amuse me.
I have never truly felt it; I can only catalog its sensory variables the same way I remember the heat of Egyptian sand or the peculiar humidity of Venetian springs.
These are collectibles for me now, accumulated over an existence too long to properly measure.
It is while I am cataloging the exact density of the mist that I smell something I have only ever experienced secondhand.
Coffee.
Coffee is, to me, something of a myth. I have seen the drink in action, watched whole civilizations reorient themselves around small cups of bitterness and observed otherwise reasonable people become intolerable until they consumed one in the morning.
I once watched a philosopher become so enamored with the original Turkish preparation that he declared it proof of the divine.
But to put the stuff to my own lips?
It never seemed necessary.
I do not require stimulation. I am Night, and Night is, by definition, neither awake nor asleep.
Still, I follow the smell.
I do not know why.
No, that is a lie.
I am curious.
Boredom, the most elegant herald of disaster.
The source is a storefront with a purple neon sign proclaiming GHOULISH GRINDS. Beneath it, painted in smaller letters across the window, are the words BLACKTHORN'S SUPERNATURAL COFFEEHOUSE.
The interior is nearly empty. The seating is a mishmash of battered couches and antique tables, the sort of curated thrift that passes for fashionable in coastal towns. A single customer, something lizardlike in a flannel shirt, is dozing in a beanbag chair in the corner.
Behind the counter, a woman is cleaning an espresso machine with the solemnity of a priest tending an altar.
Her name tag reads CALLIOPE in careful block letters.
I enter.
The bell above the door jingles, and Calliope looks up with interest, followed by a quick calculation. Apparently deciding I am neither dangerous nor troublesome, she smiles.
"Hey. What can I get you?"
I approach the counter.
The menu is a blackboard nightmare of colored chalk.
Espresso. Drip. Pour-over. Cold brew. Macchiato. Mocha. Cortado. Flat white. Cappuccino.
There are syrups and sizes and suspiciously gothic house specialties with names like Coffin Nails and Necromancer's Nitro.
I read the menu twice before realizing I do not know how to proceed.
I have no frame of reference for what any of these things mean. More importantly, I am unaccustomed to consuming much of anything at all. I am exempt from hunger, thirst, and most other metabolic impositions.
Calliope watches me for another moment.
"First time?"
I meet her gaze. Lying accomplishes nothing and usually slows things down.
"Yes."
Her mouth twitches. "Coffee or Ghoulish Grinds?"
"Coffee."
That earns me a smile.
"Okay. We can work with that." She leans against the counter. "What do you like? Sweet? Dark and bitter? Spicy? Fruity?"
This is the sort of question that, millennia ago, might have occasioned the invention of the Socratic method.
"I am not certain. The aroma is pleasant."
"That's a start." She studies me, though not in the cautious manner I am accustomed to. "Chocolate?"
I consider it.
"I have enjoyed chocolate."
"Excellent. We're starting with a mocha." She reaches for a cup. "Regular milk okay?"
"Yes."
She turns to work.
The machine hisses and whirs while she moves around it with easy confidence, her fingers finding everything without looking. I sense she is wondering about me, or at least where I belong in the taxonomy of this town, but she does not ask.
I approve.
A minute later, she sets a paper cup in front of me. A bat wearing a top hat decorates the side.
"Go slow," she warns. "First-timers sometimes get the spins if they slam it."
I lift the cup and take a drink.
The first sensation is heat, followed immediately by sweetness and bitterness and something far stronger underneath. I swallow, surprised by the riot of flavor.
For one strange second, the world seems sharper.
Not literally. My senses cannot be augmented by roasted beans.
Yet somehow, I feel more firmly inside it.
Calliope is watching me.
"Well?"
"It is good."
"You look like you just got hit by a truck."
"Perhaps a small car."
Her laugh is sudden and bright.
Something about the sound catches my attention.
I take another drink.
"Would it kill you to make it stronger?"
She blinks, then grins. "Not to brag, but that's the closest thing to a compliment I've gotten all day."
She takes my cup, adds another shot, and returns it.
I drink again.
It is agony.
It is perfect.
A smile threatens the corner of my mouth, and I allow it.
Calliope notices.
"Okay, tough guy. Before you vibrate through the wall, you need food."
"I do not require food."
"Neither do half my customers. Humor me."
She disappears behind the pastry case and returns with a cranberry scone streaked with white icing. She places it on a small plate and slides it across the counter.
"I did not order that."
"I know."
"Then why are you giving it to me?"
"Because it's almost midnight, it'll be stale by tomorrow, and you just put three shots of espresso into a body that's never had coffee." She pushes the plate closer. "It's on me."
I look at the scone.
Then at her.
There have been offerings made to me throughout history. Wine poured onto soil. Fires lit beneath moonless skies. Prayers whispered into darkness by people desperate for concealment, protection, or mercy.
Every gift came with a request attached.
This woman wants nothing.
"Eat it," she says. "Trust me."
So I do.
It is crumbly, tart with cranberry, painfully sweet with icing, and exactly the right counterweight to the bitterness of the coffee.
Calliope smiles. "Better?"
"Yes."
"See? I saved your relationship with coffee."
"I was unaware we had entered into a relationship."
She laughs again.
There it is.
That peculiar sensation returns.
I want to hear the sound again.
Calliope moves away to wipe down the counter, and I carry my coffee and scone to a table near the window. I could leave. There is nothing keeping me here, and I have wandered through thousands of towns without feeling compelled to linger in any of them.
Yet I remain.
From my table, I watch Calliope finish her work. She wipes counters, stacks cups and wakes the sleeping lizard creature long enough to inform him that the shop is closing soon. He grumbles something unintelligible, and she pats his shoulder before returning to the espresso machine.
She is tired. I can see it now in the slight heaviness beneath her eyes and the way she rolls one shoulder when she thinks no one is looking.
Yet when she catches me watching her, she smiles.
"How're we doing over there?"
I glance at the cup.
"The coffee has become less hostile."
"Progress."
"And the scone is very good."
"I'll tell the baker she saved a life."
"My life was not in danger."
"I know. You have a very dramatic face."
I have been called many things throughout eternity.
Dramatic has not generally been among them.
She returns to her work before I can respond.
I finish the scone.
Then the coffee.
The caffeine settles through me with the force of a minor earthquake. This, I suspect, is what the living mean by exhilaration.
The clock above the counter reads eleven fifty-eight.
"You closing?" I ask, although the answer is obvious.
"In two minutes."
I rise and carry the empty cup and plate back to the counter.
"Thank you."
"For the coffee or the emergency scone?"
"Both."
"Anytime."
The word catches somewhere inside me.
Anytime.
Calliope lifts a hand as I turn toward the door.
"Good night."
I stop.
Humans have said those words in my presence countless times, though never to me. Good night is a farewell, a wish for peaceful sleep, an acknowledgment of the darkness I have carried across their sky since long before they had language to name it.
Calliope knows none of that.
She is simply saying goodbye to a stranger.
I look back at her.
"I may return."
She smiles. "I'll try not to poison you next time."
I step outside.
The sidewalk is exactly as I left it: empty and wet, smelling of ocean and rain. Mist spills along the street beneath the glow of the lamps.
Nothing has changed.
Yet as I begin walking, Blackthorn Bay no longer feels like another transit point in the endless march of darkness.
For the first time in longer than I can remember, I find myself wondering about tomorrow.
And whether Calliope will be here when it comes.