The Eternals

Prologue: Perthro

The novelty of the unknown regularly forged a thin mist in nightclubs. People committed themselves to hours of partying with alcohol in handy, gulping it, using it as a safety net. Whether things went good or bad in life, in celebration or in heartbreak, the answer in nightclubs the answer was "drink".

Alcohol was the blood of bars, clubs, pubs, and music took on the role of the pumping of the heart. Beat after beat, the heart counted the passing of Time. Alcohol scrambled with the mere perception of it.

Nobody went to clubs to think, though. Nobody in their right mind, at least. It wasn't necessarily the reason why Taehyung was there either but he couldn't help and observe the dancefloor if it could be called that. Nobody was actually dancing in the classical sense of the word.

That particular club was less like a modern ballroom with lasers and prosecco. It resembled a battlefield where grenades of dopamine were launched at the mania of musical notes erupting in equilibrium. The music was nowhere near reminiscent of poppy sounds one could hear on the radio. It was a harsh, complicated mess about unconventional gloom and doom.

Taehyung had been to clubs before but the one he found himself in that night was special. It had distorted guitars slicing through the crowd, making way for the rough voice of the lead vocalist. Each loud noise of the drums cracked the smog of euphoria, chanting, screaming, and alcohol vapors.

The overindulgence and decadence were exciting.

Chains and too many earrings glistened in the dim light. There was beauty in the pool of black, organized disorder.

In between the four walls of the small bar and the smell of leather jackets, Taehyung somewhat blended with the surroundings because he also did not fully belong there, in that make-shift society. It appeared as if the bar had created its own civilization with different rules and different fonts used for writing band names that no linguist would have had the patience to decode due to the utter foolishness.

And the inhabitants of the bar - they who built the citadel - were going to war, Taehyung imagined. The modern drums sounded like the war drums of age, controlled and hit with full force by a despotic ruler. The crowd screamed. Agony or adoration? It mattered less. They marched.

"Go back to sleep..." roared the vocalist, the sole lyrics Taehyung could understand.

He pushed the ends of his black hair out of his eyes, releasing them for a brief moment off his sweaty forehead. He would have felt superior if the various poor choices he made that night didn't teach him humbleness.

The whiskey glass he chose to drink was a poor choice, for example. Not only did it gain him a suspicious and unamused look from the bartender who needed to climb a beer box to get the whiskey bottle from the top shelf and dust off the neck of it with his heavily ringed fingers, but it was also uncomfortable to hold a glass of liquor while people despised your existence left and right, bumping into you without any care. Proverbial politeness had died as soon as the concert started and new rules were in place. Rules Taehyung wasn't accustomed to. He hadn't read them in any book.

For instance, he didn't realize that sitting in the front meant being pushed and shoved by drunken fellows that jumped, roared, and headbanged. Defeated, he let the crowd push him back to the middle of the room.

Everybody wore ripped jeans or leather pants, yet he came dressed in a pair of expensive maroon trousers and a gray shirt. To say that that he stood out visually was an understatement.

Good, he said to himself and sipped some of his drink, eyes glued to the mid-elevated stage.

He concluded that concerts were for those that liked coordinated chaos and death by gradual asphyxiation. It was by far a pleasant way to go, compared to other methods.