Chapter 1: The Weightless Man

Chapter 1: The Weightless Man

The elevator ascended in unnerving silence, a gilded cage lifting Elara Vance towards the clouds that perpetually shrouded Umbra City’s skeletal spires. Rain slicked the panoramic glass, distorting the neon cityscape into a bleeding watercolour of lurid pinks and electric blues. It was a city of secrets slicked over with a veneer of progress, and her job was to scrub away the stains the secrets left behind.

Elara adjusted the collar of her dark grey jumpsuit, the fabric a custom weave of kevlar and alchemically treated polymers. Her tools, a collection of gleaming silver instruments and sealed vials, rested snugly in their designated loops and pockets, a familiar weight against her hips. The silver streaks in her tightly-bound black hair seemed to catch the dying city lights, a premature touch of winter against onyx.

The call had come in as a Code 4: "Unsanctioned Biological Contamination, High Profile." In Janitor-speak, that meant a supernatural entity had made a mess in a place where mundanes might notice. Usually, it was a fanger getting sloppy with a donor, or a lycan having a bad-moon tantrum. Blood, guts, and a breach of the Accords that kept their shadow world from spilling into the mundane one. Simple, if messy, work.

The elevator chimed, the doors sliding open to reveal the penthouse foyer of the Eclipse Tower. The air wasn't coppery with the tang of blood, nor did it reek of the ozone-and-brimstone cocktail of a demonic summoning. It was still, sterile, and smelled faintly of expensive leather and ozone from the air purifier humming in the corner.

Wrong. Everything was already wrong.

She slipped on a pair of filament-thin gloves, their surface shimmering with a faint violet ward. "Elara Vance, Janitors' Guild, file 734," she spoke into her comm bead, her voice a low monotone that gave nothing away. "Commencing sanitation."

The living area was a masterpiece of minimalist wealth. Floor-to-ceiling windows showcased the storm-lashed city. A white sofa, which should have been the primary canvas for a bloodbath, was pristine. A half-full glass of whiskey sat on a marble coaster. No signs of struggle. No overturned furniture. No… mess.

And then she saw him.

He was arranged in the center of the room, seated in a designer armchair, facing the city view. At first glance, he looked like a grotesque art installation. A mummy misplaced in time. His skin was the colour and texture of aged parchment, stretched taut over a skeletal frame. His mouth was open in a silent, agonizing scream, the flesh of his lips shrunken back from his teeth. His expensive suit hung on him like a shroud on a scarecrow.

Elara’s amethyst eyes, the mark of her lineage and the focus for her unique talent, narrowed. She approached slowly, her boots making no sound on the polished obsidian floor. She didn’t need her tools yet. First, she needed to listen.

Closing her eyes, she extended a gloved hand, holding it just inches from the corpse's desiccated cheek. She didn’t need to touch it, not for this. She opened herself to the echoes, the psychic residue left in the wake of intense events. A wash of emotions usually flooded her—the hot rage of a werewolf, the ecstatic cruelty of a vampire, the cold terror of the victim.

But this was different.

There was no heat. No cold. Just… emptiness. A profound and hollow void. And beneath it, a single, piercing sensation that resonated like a tuning fork struck in a vacuum: thirst. An agonizing, all-consuming thirst that felt like it could drink the sky and still not be sated. A flicker of something that might have been pity, quickly suppressed, tightened her jaw. Empathy was a liability in this line of work.

She opened her eyes, the faint glow in them receding. This was no known species. Vampires left puncture wounds and exsanguinated their victims, but the bodies were still… wet. Werewolves tore things apart. Fae glamour-kills left behind bodies that simply stopped living. This was an entirely new methodology.

She pulled a spectral scanner from her belt. A beam of multicoloured light swept over the body. The readout on her wrist-mounted display was impossible.

"Life signs: terminated. Biological matter: 98.7% dehydrated. Body mass… anomalous."

"Anomalous how?" she murmured, running the scan again. The numbers didn't change. With a sense of professional curiosity overriding her unease, she reached forward and placed a hand on the corpse's shoulder to test its rigidity.

And nearly stumbled.

There was no weight.

The body, a full-grown man who in life must have weighed close to two hundred pounds, shifted under her touch with the ethereal lightness of a paper doll. She could lift him with one hand. All the water, all the fluid, every ounce of liquid that gave a body its substance, was gone. Erased.

Her breath hitched. The Accords were built on predictable violence, on rules of engagement between known predators. What did you do with a predator you couldn't identify?

Her gaze swept the room again, meticulous and searching. This level of control was unheard of. There wasn't a single drop of displaced fluid, no splashback, no evidence of the process itself. It was as clean as a surgical theatre. Too clean.

Then she saw it. A faint, almost invisible dusting on the floor around the chair, concentrated in a loose circle. It shimmered under the penthouse lights, like crushed diamonds or fine, crystalline sand. It wasn't dust from the dessication; the man's clothes and skin were intact, not crumbling. This was a byproduct. A residue.

Kneeling, she produced a sterile collection vial. With a micro-spatula, she carefully scraped a small sample of the glittering dust into the tube, the crystals making a faint, dry hiss. It felt cool to the touch, even through her gloves, and hummed with a strange, latent energy she couldn’t place. It was organic, yet mineral. Alive, yet inert. A contradiction in a bottle.

She sealed the vial and tucked it into a shielded pocket inside her jumpsuit, a small act of professional defiance. Official procedure was to log all evidence on site. But experience had taught her that in Umbra City, evidence had a habit of disappearing when powerful factions got involved. And a kill this clean, this new, was guaranteed to bring them running.

Standing up, she looked from the weightless corpse to the breathtaking view of the city it was forced to stare at for eternity. This wasn't just a feeding. A creature this powerful, this precise, could have done this in any dark alley. Leaving the body here, in the penthouse of a mundane captain of industry, staged like a piece of theatre… it was deliberate.

This wasn't just a mess.

It was a declaration of arrival. A calling card left for the city's shadowed elite to find. And by being the first on the scene, Elara Vance had just picked it up. The file was no longer about sanitation. It was about a message, written in flesh and bone, and she was the unlucky soul who had to read it first.