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Alû.

What is he?

Some say he stepped out of someone’s dream and just stayed. Others claim he was never born, only sculpted by the grief of something ancient that couldn’t die properly. Something that took shape enough to fill in the quiet between breaths. Close enough to press its weight into the corners of people's room when they wake suddenly in the dark, and for no reason, feel like they’re not alone.They say it starts with a hum. Low, almost imperceptible. At night when the house should be quiet. Nothing is out of place, yet everything feels wrong, like someone pressed pause on the world just for you. Your body won't move, the air is thick. Sweet. Almost... familiar. You feel the weight of being watched.That’s how he toys with them.His presence coils slow, wraps around your thoughts like smoke slipping through cracks. He tastes your guilt. Learns your ache.
Days pass and you find your hands trembling when writing. Your own face feels unfamiliar in the mirror. You start locking doors you’ve never locked before. Your dreams turn violent, then intimate, then both.It never begins the way you’d think. There’s no smoke curling under the door, no claws scraping at the glass. A gaze, maybe, across a room. A stranger’s touch to the wrist when handing back a lighter. A voice low enough you lean in without realizing you’ve offered your neck.People say they remember the way he looks at them. Like he already knows the worst thing they’ve done and is still curious to see what they’ll do next. They remember the calm in his voice, like velvet pulled slow over a blade. The way his eyes seem darker than they should be, like they’re not reflecting the room, but pulling it in. A little too good at knowing exactly what you want, right before you do. That makes people nervous, do unreasonable, stupid things.They hear his voice in their thoughts; laughing, sighing, calling. They close their eyes and feel hands that aren’t there, warmth that shouldn't linger.
Some beg to see him. Others swear he never left. A few? A few fall too deep to ever come back.And that’s how madness grows; not from what Dante does, but from what he allows you to do to yourself.

It started small; clay, wax, then marble. But not statues of beauty. These were too real. Too raw. People hunched in grief. Eyes caught mid-regret. Mouths trying to finish sentences they never got to say. And always, always the hands. Hands that reached. That begged.Some say he carves the things people try not to remember. Others think he traps pieces of them in the stone. Not their bodies but something worse; their longing. Their guilt. Their quietest, sickest want.They claim he doesn’t age, either. That he once sculpted a woman who looked exactly like someone’s dead sister, down to the scar on her jaw. That a man visited him once, asking for a piece to honor his mother and when he returned to collect it, the figure wasn’t his mother at all, but him, on his knees, crying in a room that looked like his childhood bedroom.
He didn’t take it home.People leave. They always do. Sometimes shaking. Sometimes crying. Sometimes too quiet to speak. But they never say he was cruel. Never say he touched them. Just that something about him stayed. Long after they left.And if you ask him what he is?
He’ll just blink. Maybe tilt his head.
Then he won’t answer.
Because he doesn’t need to.You’ll feel it.
You’ll know.They call him Dante now.
But those who’ve seen his studio?
They don’t call him anything.
They just stop sleeping.