The Last Breath of Violet Dallow

“A Dallow never breaks—we weather the storm, even when it takes us.” — Evelyn Dallow

The world had narrowed to the confines of the chamber, as though nothing beyond these walls could ever exist again. Violet’s breaths came ragged and shallow, each one dragging the thick, musty air deeper into her lungs until it seemed she was breathing not oxygen but fear itself. The scent of damp timber clung to her tongue, mingled with the metallic tang of panic that never left her mouth.

The candles, guttering low, carved the room into a theatre of shadows. Their flames rose and fell with every draught, throwing monstrous silhouettes that writhed and twisted across the rough-hewn walls. They seemed alive, malicious, cavorting in a cruel mimicry of freedom while Violet remained bound.

Her wrists bore the story of her struggle. Once soft, unmarred, they were now raw and angry with bruises, the skin broken in places where iron had bitten too deep. Each twitch of her hands sent pain lancing up her arms, a punishment for every attempt at resistance. The chains rattled faintly with her smallest movement, the sound a mocking lullaby.

Her back ached against the cold, unyielding stone floor. The surface pressed every ridge, every cruel angle into her body, turning even stillness into suffering. She longed for something soft, something warm, something human—but here there was only stone, iron, and shadow.

And him.

The Strangler stood before her, not looming in rage but in a kind of dreadful stillness. His presence filled the room, not through movement or speech, but by the sheer void he carried with him. It was as though the air recoiled from his body, leaving a chill in its place. The warmth was gone; the candle flames shivered in his orbit, their light seeming to shrink away from him.

Violet forced herself to look up. To see him.

His eyes were the worst of all.

Cold. Detached. Calculating. They held no spark of compassion, not even the cruelty of enjoyment. Instead, they were flat and clinical—the eyes of a butcher assessing meat, a predator gauging distance before the final strike. They offered nothing human, no glimpse of the man beneath the monster.

In that gaze Violet felt stripped of every layer: not Violet the daughter, not Violet the sister, not Violet the friend. Just flesh and breath, a life counted and measured.

A shiver ran through her, but still she lifted her chin, her battered body trembling against its bonds. She would not meet his gaze as prey alone.

“You’re awake,” the Strangler murmured at last. His voice was flat, stripped of warmth, yet it carried an uncanny weight that sent a cold tremor running through Violet’s veins. “I was beginning to wonder if I’d been… too enthusiastic in subduing you.”

The faint curl at the corner of his mouth was not a smile but a cruel imitation of one, a grotesque parody that made the candles shudder as though recoiling.

Violet swallowed, the movement scraping her raw throat. Her tongue was thick with the copper tang of fear, her voice trembling as she forced it out.

“Why?” she croaked, the single word ragged with desperation. “Why are you doing this?”

For a moment he said nothing, only regarded her with that same detached stare, as if weighing whether she was worth the effort of answering. Then his lip twitched again, that almost-smile.

“Why?” he echoed softly, tilting his head in mock curiosity. “My dear, you ask the wrong question.” His tone shifted, a thread of amusement running beneath the monotone, but never touching his eyes. “It is not about why. It is about inevitability. The natural order. Predator and prey. Hunter and hunted.” He stepped closer, the chains at her wrists rattling faintly as Violet instinctively shrank back. “You were always meant to be here, in this moment.”

His words slithered into her mind, and with them came a memory—unbidden, sharp.

The face. That tanned, weathered skin, the dark stubble rough along the jawline, those piercing eyes that looked through her rather than at her. Recognition struck like a blow, and Violet’s breath caught.

The rain-soaked street. The wild storm hammering down on Broken Hill. The crowd pressing in at the arcade entrance, bodies jostling, elbows and umbrellas clashing in the chaos. That sudden collision, the man she had bumped into—an apology half-formed on her lips before he disappeared into the crowd.

Her heart lurched.

“You’re…” she gasped, eyes widening as the truth crystallised. “You’re the man I bumped into. In the arcade. During the storm.”

For the first time, his expression shifted—not to humanity, but to something far more dangerous. Satisfaction.

His eyes glimmered with a predator’s delight, cold light dancing there as he leaned just enough to let her see the truth in them.

“Ah,” he breathed, his voice now silk laid over steel. “So you do remember.”

He let the words linger, savouring them, before continuing with a soft venom. “That day… that moment of mayhem and confusion… it changed everything. You see, when you collided with me, you nearly cost me something irreplaceable.”

He paused, his gaze hardening, as though daring her to ask what it was.

Violet’s mind worked frantically, threading through fragments of memory like pieces of a shattered mirror. That storm-drenched day replayed itself in her head—the rain, the crowd, the fleeting collision. Something so small, so meaningless, and yet… here she was, bound and broken, with her life tethered to its consequence.

The fear that had lived in her chest since her abduction remained, but now it mingled with something sharper: curiosity. Her voice, though cracked and dry, carried an edge of demand.

“I don’t understand,” she pressed, each word scraping past her parched throat. “What could I possibly have done?”

The Strangler’s lips twitched again, not into a smile, but into that grotesque almost-smile that never reached his eyes. With deliberate calm, he slipped a hand into his coat pocket. The chains at Violet’s wrists rattled faintly as she instinctively recoiled.

When his hand emerged, it carried an object unlike anything she had ever seen.

It was metallic, yes, but its surface shifted strangely under the candlelight, as though it resisted being defined. Not quite silver, not quite steel, its edges shimmered with a dull iridescence that seemed alive. Grooves and markings scored its surface, not random scratches but patterns, deliberate and fluid, as though carved by a hand that understood secrets no human ever should.

Violet’s breath caught.

“This,” the Strangler said, his voice low, reverent, almost trembling with suppressed fervour, “is a Portal Key.”

The words hung heavy in the air, absurd and terrifying all at once.

“It is the bridge,” he continued, lifting it so the candlelight caught its strange surfaces, “between Earth… and Clivilius. A realm beyond your wildest imaginings.” His tone wavered between pride and mania. “When you collided with me that day—when your clumsy little body crashed into mine—I dropped it. In that downpour, I nearly lost it forever.”

He closed his hand tightly around the object, as though still guarding against that long-past mistake.

Violet stared, transfixed. The metallic form seemed to hum faintly, its light not quite matching the flicker of the candles. Her lips parted before she realised she was speaking.

“Clivilius?” she whispered. “What is that? Another… world?”

The Strangler’s eyes sharpened, his usual flatness cracking open to reveal something far more dangerous: fanaticism.

“Oh,” he breathed, his voice trembling with fervour, “it’s so much more than that.” He leaned forward, his features carved into stark relief by the unsteady light. “Clivilius is everything Earth is not. A place of power. Of truths buried so deep your fragile kind could never hope to grasp them. A place where the veils fall, and the illusions of this world dissolve like mist.”

The mask of composure he had worn began to falter, and Violet glimpsed the mania seething beneath. His voice carried a feverish intensity now, like a preacher teetering on the edge of rapture.

Every movement he made was precise, yet theatrical—his fingers caressing the Portal Key as though it were sacred, his steps measured, controlled, as though he performed a dance choreographed by madness itself. His words slipped from his lips with an unnatural grace, as sweet as honey yet bitter with poison, fragments of a psyche unravelled and laid bare in the oppressive silence of that room.

And Violet, bruised and broken, could only watch, her terror tangled with awe.

“You see,” the Strangler went on, his voice low but laced with disdain, “I am not simply the monster your quaint little town whispers about. Not merely a murderer skulking in the dark.” He held the Portal Key aloft for a moment, the strange metal glimmering in the candlelight. “I am a Guardian. One entrusted with the passage between worlds. With the power to traverse the threshold others can only dream of. And you, Violet Dallow”—her name rolled from his tongue like a verdict—“you threatened that power with your clumsy, ignorant interference.”

The words struck her like a blow. Violet’s heart hammered so hard she thought her ribs might crack beneath its rhythm, every beat echoing her body’s frantic plea to survive. But fear had sharpened her mind, honing it to a desperate clarity. Even as dread coiled in her gut, she searched wildly for options—any weakness in the chains, any shift in his voice that might be exploited, any slender chance at escape.

Her voice came before her courage had fully caught up.

“But it was an accident!” she cried, her voice ragged yet rising with a burst of indignation. “I didn’t know—I couldn’t have known! How could anyone know about… this?”

For the briefest instant, something flickered across his face. Not mercy, not quite pity, but something adjacent to regret. A shadow of what he might have been before Clivilius claimed him. Then it was gone, replaced by an expression carved of stone.

“Ignorance,” he said, his tone hardening to steel, “is no excuse.”

He leaned closer, his words slicing the air. “The moment you made me drop the Portal Key—even by accident—you became a liability. A loose end.” His lips curved in a humourless half-smile. “And loose ends, Violet, must always be tied up.”

He began to pace around her, the clink of his boots against the stone floor deliberate, rhythmic, as though each step were part of a ritual. The candlelight clung to him strangely, flaring against his cheekbones, cutting shadows so deep across his face that his features seemed to shift with every pass—never quite the same man twice.

Violet tracked him with her eyes, her throat tight.

Her mind reeled. Guardian. Worlds. The words sounded fantastical, the stuff of Ethan’s murmured theories or the stories Mandy’s grandmother used to whisper. They were too wild, too untethered from reality. And yet—she could not deny what she felt beneath her skin. The cold stone pressing into her back. The weight of iron bruising her wrists. The Portal Key that shimmered with its own strange light. And the man—this predator—whose very presence gnawed at the edges of her reality.

Too real. Too immediate. Too undeniable.

Unbidden, images flickered through Violet’s mind, vivid and cruel in their clarity. Her mother’s gentle eyes, her father’s steady voice, Jasmine’s mischievous grin that could light an entire room. She saw her sister’s laughter, that shrill, infectious giggle that always made Violet laugh too, no matter how hard she tried to keep a straight face. She saw Mandy’s nervous frown, Michelle’s brave but reckless bravado, Rebecca’s steady hand.

They would be looking for her even now. She could picture it—their faces pale with worry, voices calling her name into the vastness of the Outback night, the torch beams cutting through the dark. The thought twisted her insides, a lump forming in her throat so hard it hurt to swallow.

“They’ll find me,” Violet said, summoning strength she didn’t know she had, her voice trembling but still standing against the silence. “My friends, my family—they won’t stop looking.”

The Strangler’s lip curled. It was not a smile in any human sense, but a grotesque mimicry of one, twisted at the edges by cruelty.

“Oh, I’m counting on it,” he said softly. His words slithered through the air like smoke, thin and suffocating, every syllable a quiet cruelty. “Every search party. Every investigation. Every desperate attempt to uncover what has become of you. Each wasted hour, each false lead.” He leaned closer, his voice dipping to a silken whisper that brushed her ear like the promise of a blade. “It’s all part of the game. And the longer it takes… the sweeter the victory.”

Violet’s stomach clenched, bile rising in her throat. She could see them—their frantic eyes, their exhaustion, her parents’ hope fading little by little as the days dragged on. Her disappearance would devour them whole. The Strangler wanted that. Fed on that.

And then Ethan.

Sweet, strange, enigmatic Ethan, whose every word had felt like a door opening into another world. The memory of his half-smile—so warm, so secretive—flared in her mind, a single candle against the encroaching dark. His hand on hers, the way he’d spoken of lights no one else could see, of places where the veil was thin. She had laughed, teased, but deep down she had believed him.

Now she clung to that belief with both hands. It was all she had.

“Ethan,” Violet whispered, the name leaving her lips like a prayer. “He’ll know. He’ll sense something’s wrong.”

The Strangler paused mid-step. Slowly, deliberately, he tilted his head to regard her. For the first time, something like interest glimmered in those deadened eyes.

“Ethan,” he echoed, rolling the name as though tasting it. A faint spark flickered across his gaze, curiosity mingled with scorn. “Ah yes. The boy who fancies himself a psychic.”

The mockery in his voice was a knife, deliberate and precise.

“How quaint,” he continued, his lips curling around the word like it amused him. “Do you truly believe he can save you? That his fumbling intuition, his childish superstitions, can pierce this?” He spread his arms slightly, gesturing to the chamber, to the Portal Key, to the shadows that seemed to move of their own accord. “Do you believe anyone can?”

His question hung in the air like a challenge, cruel and unanswerable.

And Violet, chained and broken, clung to the memory of Ethan’s smile as if her life depended on it.

Fear coiled tight in Violet’s chest, a serpent constricting her lungs, making each breath shallow, ragged. It pressed cold fingers into her veins, whispering of surrender. Yet beneath it, something flickered. Small at first, fragile as a candle flame. Defiance.

She was a Dallow.

The name itself carried weight in Broken Hill. It was whispered with respect in pubs and on porches, invoked as a byword for grit and perseverance. Violet’s mind summoned her mother’s voice—warm, unwavering, repeated so many times it had become stitched into her very bones: “A Dallow never breaks, love. We bend, we weather the storm, but we always stand tall in the end.”

The words pulsed through her now, steadier than her racing heart. They became armour, kindling. From them, Violet forged something fierce and unyielding.

Her wrists burned against the iron, her body trembled with exhaustion, but her voice—her voice was hers still.

“You’re wrong,” she said, and to her surprise, it came out stronger than she felt. She forced her gaze upward, meeting his eyes without flinching. “You think you know everything. That you hold all the power. But you don’t know me. You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

The chamber seemed to contract around her words, the silence thick and watchful. Every creak of the beams above, every sigh of the guttering candles, amplified like a heartbeat in the dark. The shadows writhed across the walls, feeding her fear yet echoing her defiance, as though the room itself was listening, judging.

The Strangler circled slowly, his boots tapping against the stone with the lazy inevitability of a predator in no hurry. His presence was suffocating, his voice the monotone drone of something not entirely human. Each syllable slithered into her ears, seeking to wear her down, to drain the fire she had only just sparked.

“Brave words,” he murmured at last, his head tilting slightly, eyes glinting with that detached curiosity. He prowled around her in deliberate arcs, the chains clinking faintly whenever she instinctively shifted to keep track of him. “But bravery, Violet, is merely another word for foolishness when faced with inevitability.”

He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, a hiss that curled into the marrow of her bones. “Your struggles. Your defiance. They mean nothing. In the end, you’ll break.”

He straightened, resuming his slow circle, the coldness returning to his gaze.

“They all do.”

The words rang out like a sentence, echoing in the chamber until even the shadows seemed to sneer at her.

With each ragged breath, Violet’s senses grew sharper, honed by terror into a blade. Her eyes darted across the chamber, cataloguing every detail, no matter how small. The chains—unyielding, yes, but not perfect. When she shifted just so, there was the faintest give, a fractional slack that whispered of possibility. Above, a slit of a window let in the barest finger of light, pale and cold, a reminder that the world beyond still existed even if it felt impossibly far away. Somewhere in the unseen recesses of the building came the steady drip of water, irregular and hollow, like a clock counting down her time.

Each of these details, insignificant in themselves, became Violet’s lifeline. They were threads she clung to in the suffocating fabric of fear. Threads that, if woven carefully enough, might become a plan. Might become escape.

The Strangler’s voice broke across her fragile concentration, drifting through the candlelit gloom like a lullaby twisted out of shape.

“You’re not the first, you know,” he said, his tone light, almost wistful. That dreamy cadence chilled her more than any of his earlier cruelty; it was the voice of someone reminiscing, someone fondly remembering. “There have been others. So many others.”

His steps carried him closer, slow, deliberate, as though savouring the memory of each word.

“They all thought they were special. That they would be the one to outwit me. To slip the chains. To escape.” He let the words hang, his gaze fixed on her with predatory detachment. “But in the end, they all succumbed to the inevitable.”

Violet’s heart clenched, her pulse thundering in her ears, but she forced herself to keep breathing evenly. She could not let him see the terror that wanted to unravel her.

The Strangler moved with menacing precision, his every step part of a methodical choreography that left little room for error or opportunity. He was deliberate, exact, the kind of predator who never wasted movement. His eyes—icy, dissecting—followed her smallest twitch, the faintest strain of her wrists, as though he were memorising the anatomy of her defiance.

The air grew colder with his nearness, the shadows around him deepening, congealing into forms that writhed like living things. Violet’s skin prickled with gooseflesh, her breath misting faintly in the unnatural chill.

She knew—instinctively, undeniably—that the moment of confrontation was no longer distant. It was drawing closer with every heartbeat, every step of his measured approach.

And she would need all her strength—every scrap of wit, every shred of courage—to endure what came next.

Violet’s mind spun in a maelstrom—fear clawing at her throat, desperation pounding in her skull, and beneath it all a simmering anger that burned hot and defiant. She refused to let him see only her terror. She was not just prey.

Summoning what little strength remained, she arched her back and pulled with everything she had. Her muscles screamed in white-hot protest, tendons taut as bowstrings, her wrists already raw from iron’s bite. The chains rattled violently, the metallic clang ricocheting off the stone walls like gunfire, shattering the suffocating quiet.

But the cruel links held fast.

“Stop it,” the Strangler barked, the word slicing through the air like a whip. For the first time his voice cracked, his mask of calm fissured by sudden, sharp anger. A shadow of something raw—human, ugly—flashed across his face before it was buried again beneath that veneer of indifference.

“You’re only making this harder on yourself,” he hissed, his tone sliding back into its cold monotone, though the edges still trembled with residual fury. “Accept your fate. Embrace it.”

The word embrace hung in the air like a noose.

Violet’s chest heaved, the rattling chains marking her refusal to give in. Her heart thundered, a wild drumbeat in her ribcage, every thud screaming defiance even as her body trembled on the edge of collapse.

The Strangler’s eyes caught the candlelight, glinting with a twisted satisfaction. He was enjoying this—the way a cat relishes the final spasms of a mouse. His gaze devoured every inch of her, drinking in her struggles, her pain, her fight.

Predator. Prey. The inevitability he so loved to preach was written in every line of his body.

And yet—he did not strike.

He advanced instead with a slow, deliberate grace, each step heavy with menace, his shadow spilling across her like an encroaching tide. It was not haste but ritual, the rhythm of a man who wanted her to feel every second of the approach, every heartbeat of dread.

Violet searched desperately for an opening, her mind racing faster than her pulse. A slip. A weakness. Anything. Even the smallest fracture in his control could be enough. Because she had no choice.

There could be no surrender. Not now. Not ever.

“Never,” Violet spat, her voice hoarse yet unshaken. The word struck the chamber like a stone hurled against glass, sharp and unyielding. It was not just a refusal but a declaration of war—an oath to the darkness that clawed at her, a promise she would not die silently. “I’ll never stop fighting. You might kill me, but you’ll never break me.”

For the briefest instant, a flicker of something passed through the Strangler’s eyes—annoyance, perhaps even surprise. Then his expression hardened, and his hands, pale and merciless, shot forward.

Cold fingers closed around her throat.

The world contracted, collapsing to that single, unbearable pressure. Her windpipe crushed beneath his grip, her chest convulsed with frantic urgency, her lungs screaming for air that would not come. Violet clawed at his wrists with raw, bloodied hands, her nails raking uselessly against skin that felt inhuman in its chill. The chains rattled wildly, the sound a terrible counterpoint to her strangled gasps.

Her vision fractured. The edges of sight bled into darkness, shadows pressing in from all sides. Sparks of light danced across her failing eyes, mocking in their beauty. The candle flames blurred, doubled, then dissolved into smears of gold.

Still she fought. Her legs kicked, her body arched, every fibre of her being straining against inevitability. She refused to surrender quietly.

Her thoughts scattered like autumn leaves in a gale. Faces. Voices. Moments. They came in a torrent, fragmented, disjointed:

—Her father’s steady hand guiding hers along the handle of a bike.
—Her mother’s voice humming in the kitchen on warm summer evenings.
—Mandy’s nervous laughter beneath the stars.
—Rebecca’s grip, firm and grounding.
—Michelle’s grin, sharp and fearless.
—Ethan’s eyes, deep pools that had always seemed to glimpse a truth beyond the veil.

And then Jasmine.

Sweet, innocent Jasmine. Her sister’s face rose above the others, radiant and whole, untouched by this nightmare. A beacon of light in the gathering dark. Her mischievous smile, her laughter like bells in the wind, a reminder of the purest joy Violet had ever known.

Her chest convulsed. She summoned the last dregs of her failing breath, forcing sound through crushed airways.

“Jasmine,” she gasped, the name ripped from her lungs, raw and broken. It was a plea, a farewell, a prayer. “I’m sorry. I love you.”

The world bled into black, the last shreds of light collapsing as though even the candles recoiled from what they bore witness to. The Strangler’s hands were pitiless, his grip an iron verdict, ensuring that no witness would live to recount the horrors of his work. Violet’s chest convulsed once more, then stilled, her desperate gasps smothered into silence.

The flickering flames blurred and wavered before her dimming eyes, guttering like dying stars. They were the final vision she carried into the void—tiny, stubborn sparks resisting the darkness, even as they too faltered and went out.

And in that last moment, when her body gave way and the dark surged to claim her, something of Violet refused to yield. A part of her spirit lingered—fierce, unbroken, untamed. It whispered a vow into the oppressive silence of the chamber, a vow no chain could bind, no predator could silence: her story would not end here.

It was a promise. That justice—however long delayed, however twisted its path—would one day find its way to this place.

And so it was that, in the cold and damp chamber that became her tomb, Violet Dallow’s life was extinguished. But her defiance in the face of unspeakable evil did not vanish with her final breath. It echoed, unseen, seeding the world beyond with tremors that would grow into something far greater. The Strangler believed he had claimed another victim, but Violet’s struggle had already set into motion a chain of events that would shake Broken Hill—and Silverton, and beyond—to their very foundations.