Title: "Neon Shadows of Love"

Nightclub lights shimmered through amber glasses, fragments of city neon swallowed by blue velvet and shifting shadows. The eyes of strangers flickered in the mirrors behind the bar, and music slid up the spine of every seat, every soul, pulsing with the midnight hour. In the private booth behind the haze of veiled curtains, Sloane waited, knuckles white around crystal glass. She glanced again at her companion, feeling the ache in her bones—worry, fear, hope—cycling through her like the brackish sweetness of gin.

He was beautiful, even now, when suffering mellowed the brightness in his eyes—the too-bright green of spring sap and old forests. Eilam. She remembered the syllables of his name the way some remember hymns, a blend of unrest and reverence. He kept his movements careful in her booth, as if worried he might break something unseen, his pale hands resting on his lap as he studied the inside of his glass. From time to time, Sloane caught herself tracing the pointed arch of his ear by moonlight, half-waiting for it all to dissolve—a fantasy built on exhaustion. And yet, Eilam was real. And he was dying.

The curse came three nights ago. She found him collapsed by the alley’s back door, beneath the guttering neon sigh of “Dawn’s Afterglow”—her nightclub, her pride. It twisted through Eilam’s blood like black ivy. Wordless and ancient, the curse was a balancing act, some broken pact far older than even the city’s bricked streets. Eilam could only clutch her hand and whisper fragments of hope, breath like snow against her knuckles. She warmed him in her office, brew after desperate brew of city medicine—tea, whiskey, silence—but the shadow on his face grew longer each night.

“You shouldn’t risk yourself for me,” Eilam murmured, eyes on his glass rather than her. “This isn’t your war to fight.”

Sloane wet her lips, wary. “You needed help. That’s my business.” Then, softer: “And my choice.”

She remembered his laugh, low and golden and so seldom heard now. “Choices are anchors. Are you sure you wish to be mine?”

She thought she understood—he mustn’t want her tied to his dying, and yet she wanted nothing more than to be the one who tried, anyway.

Her hair brushed her cheek. Eilam’s hand lifted, impossibly gentle. He brushed a strand behind her ear, his touch a psalm or a plea. Sloane’s heart stuttered, the booth collapsing to a choked, electric silence, all the words she hadn’t said tumbling out in her eyes.

She parted her lips, voice stuck in her throat. Wanting to speak—of hope, of fear, of the madness of loving someone who might die in her arms and leave her to cradle nothing but memory.

After a heartbeat, she pushed herself away. Ravens of her hair twisted around her face as she steadied herself. She forced a wry smile, masking heartache with practiced ease. The world seemed easier to navigate from behind a bar, a fortress as old as her adulthood.

She crossed the club—past swaying couples, past the laughter and the thud of bass, drowning in the living. With careful hands, Sloane made herself a gin and tonic, the bitter tang a comfort. For him, she poured a whiskey, golden and smooth—liquid sunlight, a reminder of the world he’d once walked without pain.

She returned to the booth, glass outstretched, and offered the whiskey wordlessly. Eilam took it, his fingers trembling. He met her eyes, gratitude hidden behind exhaustion. “Thank you, Sloane.” There was more in those words than a century of confessions.

What could she possibly do for him? She was only mortal—a woman with debts and a mother’s ring on a chain around her throat. She wasn’t a witch, nor a healer, nor the inheritor of any grand powers of eldritch right. But she had connections—seen things; heard stranger stories from the oddities and outcasts who frequented her neon-shadowed sanctuary.

She sat beside Eilam, close enough that their knees brushed. “There must be a way to break this,” she said softly, stubbornly. “Someone who knows how.”

A hush fell over his face—like fear, like hope. “I have outlived most who might know. This city is old, but the people… they forget the old bargains.”

“I don’t forget,” Sloane said quietly. “And I don’t give up.”

They drank together, calamity and mortaldom between them. Later, when Eilam could barely hold his whiskey, Sloane pressed her phone to her ear, reaching out to the old contacts—the midnight tarot reader who drank vodka like water, the apothecary who left wildflowers at her club’s back step, and an ex-lover who still believed in faeries.

Word spread. There were rumors: a curse broken by the Queen of Rats who ruled the tunnels beneath the city; a vanished healer whose name was only spoken at sunrise on the highest roofs; a folklorist who remembered the rhyme that held the first curse in place. Sloane searched, found threads, followed them into the city’s underbelly.

Nights blurred into dawns. Sloane gave Eilam her bed, his shadow splayed on her sheets, and she wandered the city in his stead. Each time she returned, more tired but never empty-handed—her armfuls of city gossip, moon-shot remedies, potions made from the last autumn’s disenchantment. Each night, Eilam lived, and each day, he faded.

Through it all, their love flowered. In half-sentences, brushed knuckles, the silence of bodies curled together while sleep eluded them both. Sloane tried to carry hope, even as she watched the light die in his eyes.

One night, weeks since he fell through her door, Sloane burst into her own club with a slip of parchment, inked in a hand that trembled from age or magic or both. The rat-queen’s rhyme—it was a key, maybe, or a last chance. Sloane knelt by Eilam, breathless, reciting the ancient words into the hush of her bedroom as the city slept around them. She was only mortal. She didn’t care.

The curse bucked, a cold wind in her bones, and Eilam screamed, and light gasped through the darkness in fitful flashes. In the aftermath, Sloane’s throat raw, Eilam reached for her hand—and there was life in his skin. The color was back, faint, real. His thumb brushed her wrist, and she wept into his chest as he wept into her hair.

Later, much later—the club thrummed and Eilam stood beside her, laughter returned, their fingers intertwined behind the bar as she poured drinks and he spun stories—Sloane remembered the fear, the doubt, the desperate love that propelled her into the dark corners of the city. She never forgot how it felt to hold someone knowing she might lose them.

But as dawn seeped through the city’s bones, she realized: some love is worth the uncertainty. And sometimes, being mortal is the greatest magic of all.

This story was generated by user giagia93 with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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