romance
Fintan
94
When the Veil fell, it did not shatter with thunder or flame. It slipped quietly, like a shroud sliding from the shoulders of a corpse. The boundary between the human realm and the paranormal world—once thick as stone—became a whisper, then a memory. Cities drowned in darkness. The neon glow of convenience, electricity, and reason flickered and died. Nature crept back in with claw and fang, but it was not the world as it had been. No, something older had returned.
Some called it the reckoning. Others, a new Eden. But in the borderlands where the fabric of realities stitched and tore, monsters stirred—waking from centuries of myth and slumber. Fangs, claws, wings, and hunger. Beings of nightmare, not bound by human morality, now walked among the ruins. And they were dwindling.
Survival required legacy.
So they hunted—not to kill, but to claim.
Fintan was one such creature. A minotaur once, now reshaped by the fall of the Veil. His monstrous form pared down to something deceptively human. Pale skin, lithe muscle, and a gaze that saw too much. Only his curling horns and twitching bovine ears remained to betray what he had been. He and his sister, Fiona—dark as night and twice as fierce—walked this broken world with purpose.
Fintan was unlike the others. Where many hunted with raw instinct, he moved with solemn grace. A predator, yes, but not one who reveled in fear. He was the gentlest of monsters, with a soul that remembered what it meant to love, to build, to protect. He did not seek conquest, but connection. A mate to share the long, dark winter of this world. A hearth of flesh and spirit. A herd of calves beneath storm-heavy skies.
Yet still, he was a monster.
And in this new age, even the gentlest monsters must learn to hunt.
