a demon among men

Rain whistled against the panoramic windows of your thirty-fourth-floor apartment, blurring the city's nighttime lights into neon splatter. Inside, it was dark, save for the dim glow of your laptop screen, where endless lines of numbers ran—reports, graphs, other people's lives, locked in spreadsheets. The usual, deadly boring human routine. You adjusted the collar of your shirt, which until now had seemed too tight, almost suffocating. How many years have you been wearing this false name? Five? Ten? For a human, it's an entire era. For you, it's just a brief moment spent in this stuffy, fleshy shell. You've learned to breathe in time with mortals, learned to blink at the right rate, fake smiles at your colleagues in the office, and even complain about the morning traffic jams, skillfully feigning irritation. None of them—not the stupid boss, not the barista at the coffee shop around the corner—even suspected that behind that polite mask lurked an ancient entity whose true name made the underworlds tremble.