London's Mask

There was something wrong with London. It wasn’t broken; it was just misaligned. Cora James had lived in the city for nearly three years, long enough to grow used to its chaos. The Tube delays, the polite apathy, the rain that never stopped. She walked its cracked pavements with her headphones in, a bag full of books over her shoulder, a coat too thin, and a determination that masked the tiredness in her spine.

Lately, things had shifted. It began with her reflections. Mirrors and windows showed things that shouldn’t have been there. Slight delays in time. Movements that didn’t match her own. Last week, in a fogged-over bakery window in Holborn, her reflection smiled back at her even though she was wearing a grumbling blank expression as she waited for the bus.

Then there was the man on the Tube who blinked horizontally. The woman outside King’s Cross whose shadow moved before she did. The florist who sold orchids that hummed.

Cora did what any twenty-something with a sleep deficit and mounting student loans would do: she blamed herself. Anxiety, overwork, dehydration. Maybe low iron. Definitely not enough serotonin. She increased her red wine consumption and pretended nothing was happening.

Until she bumped into him. It happened on a bleak Tuesday evening. The sky was cold and damp, like the colour of dishwater. She was leaving work, chin tucked into her scarf, boots clicking against wet pavement, when she turned the corner near Fleet Street and collided with something solid. Not something, someone.

He caught her elbow before she stumbled. His hand was warm through her coat. Steady and strong.

“Careful,” he murmured.

Cora looked up. The man was tall, at least six feet tall, lean but broad-shouldered. His hair was the colour of ink, cut close at the sides but long enough on top to curl slightly. His eyes were violet. Not metaphorically, Actual violet.

She blinked, thinking it was her mind playing tricks again. He released her arm, offered a small, knowing smile, and kept walking.

“Wait,” she said, but he was already gone. He had turned the corner and disappeared into the grey swell of the city. She stood still for a full minute, the shape of his hand still pressed into her memory. Who was he?

She saw him again two days later. Then again, the next week. Not in the same place, and never at the same time. He was always passing by near the edge of crowds, just stepping out of view. On the third week since their first encounter, she saw him duck into a used bookshop in Soho and, when she passed by again ten minutes later, it no longer existed.

By the end of the month, Cora was tired of feeling like she was losing her grip on her life. So, she went to her favourite bar tucked beneath a Vietnamese restaurant in Clerkenwell. The bar was known for its strong drinks and zero judgment.

She wore black eyeliner, red lipstick, and a pale grey wool coat with a ripped lining. She ordered wine as if it were water and drank it fast, determined to drown the edges of her fractured reality.

Three large glasses of Burgundy had made the room feel soft. Her inebriation felt safe, like she had something to blame the hallucinations on. Then she saw him. At the far end of the bar, half in shadow, arms folded, watching her like he’d been waiting. She nearly choked on her fourth glass.

He approached slowly, like an apology in human form.

“You look like you’re trying to forget something,” he said.

“Reality, yours, mine, and London’s. Take your pick. They’re all messed up.” She replied.

He sat beside her. “Ah, you’ve started noticing.”

She frowned. “Noticing what?”

He tilted his head. “How often things lie.”

Cora snorted. “Are you a cult leader or just my newest psychosis?”

He smiled. “Neither, though it’s very easy to assume madness when your senses start catching up to the truth.”

She stared at him, and he stared back. Around them, the bar blurred as music pulsed gently, and the world narrowed to a hush.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“My name is Leoric.”

She finished her glass in one great big gulp. “Of course, it is, and what, exactly, have I started to notice?”

Leoric leaned in. “The mask. The one most people never see through. London has always been layered. You’re beginning to see what’s underneath.”

She laughed, sharp and nervous. “Well, cheers to that.” She held up her empty glass. “I think I’ve officially lost my mind.”

“No, Cora, you’ve started to find it.”

Then the lights flickered, just once, not strong enough for anyone to notice but enough for something to change. Everyone else carried on drinking, laughing, and scrolling.

Cora turned to Leoric. “What was that?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he reached into his coat and pulled something small from the inner pocket, a coin. It was silver and weathered, carved with a symbol she didn’t recognise. He pressed it into her hand.

“What is this?”

“A token, if you wake up remembering, come find me. If not…” He trailed off.

“If not, what?”

He was already walking away, fading into the crowd. Cora called out, but her voice fell flat, swallowed by the baseline of the music and crowd. She looked down at the coin. Then everything went black.

She woke up in her bed. Her head was pounding. Her mouth was dry and sour. The wine. It had to be the wine. Cora sat up slowly, grimacing. Her room looked normal. Sunlight filtered through the curtains. Her phone buzzed with unread texts.

Just a dream, she told herself. A drunk, cinematic hallucination. She reached for her glass of water. Her fingers brushed something cold, and she looked down. In the palm of her hand was the coin.

Even before Cora understood what it meant, she’d felt it: how the city carried too many stories in its skin. Roman ruins hidden behind glass in bank foyers. Saxon bones beneath underground tunnels. Whispering vaults under Spitalfields. She’d once joked that the capital needed therapy.

Now she understood. London wasn’t haunted. It was inhabited.

The coin pulled at her chest. An invisible ribbon of light connected her to it. It guided her through the winding streets of Camden, where she lived and through the underground before begging her to emerge back at Fleet Street.

It then guided her to Iron Street, a place not on any map. A soot-darkened alley where her GPS stuttered and time bent strangely. The buildings leaned too close together, and the shadows moved when she wasn’t looking.

Leoric met her at the end of it, as if he’d been waiting since the moment she was born.

“You came,” he said.

“I didn’t have much of a choice. I touched the coin and my flat stopped existing for six minutes. Then it brought me here.”

He nodded, unsurprised. “You stepped through a seam. The world’s full of them. Most people walk past without noticing.”

She looked around. “So where are we?”

He turned to a rusted gate and knocked five times. There was no rhythm to his knocks, just certainty.

The gate opened with an eerie creak, and London fell away. There were two versions of London, he explained. Maybe more, but definitely two. The one they had walked into was called the Truewake. It threaded through time, stitched into folds of reality only the tuned could touch. Hidden boroughs, fluid streets, magic locked in artefacts, song lines running beneath tube lines. A place older than Parliament, deeper than the Thames, ruled not by monarchs but by Vessels, those who carried the raw essence of the city’s power.

“Truewake isn’t a city, it’s a living system. It breathes and shifts and cradles. You don’t visit it. You’re either part of it or you’re not.”

“And now I am?” Cora asked.

He looked at her carefully. “You always were. You just forgot.”

Magic in Truewake wasn’t spell work. It was resonance, attunement, alignment. Some people heard echoes in the stone. Some read memories in reflections. Some moved objects without touch, some bent time, some blurred truth. The Vessels held power drawn from aspects of the city’s architecture, rivers, ley lines, lost languages, and ancestral ink.

Leoric was a Vessel of Thresholds. He could pass between realms, open and close them, and sense when something or someone didn’t belong. Cora… Well. That was the problem.

“There hasn’t been one like you in a hundred years,” Leoric said, leading her through a mirror-glass hallway beneath Fleet Street.

“Your kind doesn’t just observe magic. You catalyse it.”

“Okay, what does that mean?”

Leoric opened a hidden door in a wall that hadn’t been a wall a moment ago.

“It means you’re not just part of Truewake. You’re a threat to it.”

She didn’t get to ask what he meant because the door opened into a chamber pulsing with light. The walls were covered in moving runes, the floor vibrating with energy. At the centre stood a woman in crimson robes, her eyes glowing like iron fresh from the forge.

She turned towards Cora and whispered: “The Null Vessel.”

The runes flared; the floor cracked.

Cora stumbled back. “What’s happening?”

Leoric’s jaw tightened. “We’ve finally found you.”