Part 4/7

Damon’s Growth Stages — 9 Nocturnalian Years
(99–100 Earth years / 16–17 human years)

His world cracked and collapsed on the night of initiation. One of the most important moments in the life of a young Twilight Guardian became his catastrophe. An ink stain on paper — impossible to erase.
His world was gone.
His people turned to stone.
The Cataclysm became one of the greatest mysteries destined to haunt him for millennia — a mystery known only to him, the last Twilight Guardian.

His first foreign world smelled of iron and scorched air. Every breath brought a painful urge to choke himself, though in time that feeling would dissolve into a new life.
A life in which he no longer belonged to himself.

Dark.
A name burned into memory like a black scar — the first of many. A deceptive hope. He seemed like another outsider among strangers, just like Damon himself. He taught him how to survive. How not to show pain. How not to resist where resistance was useless. How to preserve himself in small things — in a glance, in memory, in a stubborn refusal to disappear completely.

Here, no one asks. No one explains.
Here, they take — because they can.
His body is convenience.
His silence is the norm.
He learns not to resist.
Not because he agrees — but because this is how one lives longer.