When the night broke

A Gothic artist and a soldier in Cologne when terrorists strike...

It was night and the clothes were meant to both hide and express identity.

Jack sometimes wondered how he and Cas had ever met. They’d met the way mismatched people often do, by accident, in a place neither of them quite belonged. A shared elective at the university, a half-required humanities course Jack needed to tick a box and Cas had chosen because the syllabus sounded “visually interesting.” He’d sat in the back, habit more than preference, posture straight without thinking about it. She’d sat cross-legged on the chair, sketchbook open, hair falling into her eyes as she drew instead of taking notes.

He noticed her boots first. Heavy. Practical in a way that didn’t match the rest of her. Then the black lipstick. Then the way she laughed, soft, as if surprised to find humanity in someone as traditional as he was.

They talked after class. Then again. Coffee turned into walks. Walks into late-night conversations that drifted from art to meaning to silence that didn’t feel awkward.

She liked his stillness. Not the stiff kind, but the kind that looked trained. The way he scanned rooms without appearing to. The way loud sounds made him tense for half a second before he smoothed it away. She told him that she felt at peace just knowing he was there.

Jack was studying IT now, clean systems, logic, things that behaved if you understood them well enough. Before that, he’d been a soldier. Real deployments. Real combat. He didn’t talk about it much, but it lived in the way he slept, the way he reacted to crowds, the way violence still felt frighteningly familiar.

His faith had survived the war, though it had changed shape. Less slogans. More weight. God wasn’t an idea to him, He was someone you clung to when things broke.

Cas lived differently.

She studied art because she wanted to make things that felt true, even if they didn’t last. She called herself agnostic, not out of rebellion but contentment. Her world was noisy and vivid, friends clustered close, music, clubs, exhibitions, nights that bled into mornings without demanding answers about eternity.

She had people everywhere. Jack had few, but he held them tightly.

They didn’t argue much about faith. Not at first. Cas liked that Jack didn’t preach. Jack liked that Cas didn’t mock what she didn’t believe. They stayed on the edges of the subject, circling it carefully, as if both knew it mattered too much to rush.

That night at the cathedral steps, Jack told himself he was just accompanying her. Just being present. That was what love looked like, wasn’t it? Standing where her world gathered. Standing where his didn’t.

Loose black layers, hoodies pulled low, faces half-lost to shadow. They assembled on the steps of the Kölner Dom, directly across from Cologne’s main station, where the city never really slept. The enormous Cathedral built in the High Gothic style was meant to stretch one’s perception to the heavens. The twin West towers soared 515 feet into the sky, and the walls had large windows designed to let the light in. In the night, the cathedral was lit up and visible throughout the city, projecting salt and light to a fallen world. This was no place for Victorian vampires wedded to death and decay; there were no dark corners to hide in anymore.

But people still gathered in the shadow of the light.

They weren’t the Goths Jack had expected. No stiff theatrics, no self-conscious devotion to darkness. They lacked the stiff drama of the God lovers and Satan worshippers who came before them. These were Gen Z kids, fluid, drifting shapes rather than a formation. Black was still the base, but it was broken up by red, gray, white, flashes of blue. Fishnets layered over skin and fabric, mesh tops, safety pins that looked more decorative than defiant. Platform boots. Distressed jeans. Fashion as armor, chaos disguised as intention.

They laughed. Loudly. Easily. Old jokes, shared cigarettes, stories that ended in snorts rather than sighs. Whatever darkness they carried, it wasn’t solemn. It was social.

Jack felt it immediately: he didn’t belong.

He stood out among them like a wrong note, brown leather jacket unscarred, jeans intact, short hair unstyled. Aggressively normal. Cassandra, Cas, didn’t look back to check on him. She didn’t need to. She moved through the group like water, short black skirt swinging, ripped fishnets held together by garters, boots smacking on concrete. Her top showed more skin than he liked. Too much skin for a crowd that unsettled him. He followed her through the shadows.

She laughed, hugged people, bumped shoulders, collected fragments of stories from people who clearly knew versions of her he never would.

“Hey.” She tugged his sleeve. “Don’t get all serious. You’re killing the vibe.”

“I’m not serious,” Jack said. “I’m just… watching.”

She smiled up at him. “i know this isn't easy for you. Just be here. Look, every one of them has a story.”

He looked. He really did.

These people were trying to be real in a broken and artificial world, creating themselves one conversation, one tattoo, one strange design choice at a time. It opened something in him, a recognition of honesty in the mess, and yet he felt out of place. In his heart of hearts, he would rather have been inside the cathedral, a worshipper under stone and certainty, than part of the dark mist swirling around its foundations.

Cas wore black lipstick with black seahorse earrings. Aside from a small butterfly tattoo at the base of her spine, she had none. Many of her friends were more adventurous, piercings, makeup that ignored gender, bodies rewritten as statements. Jack kept quiet about the men in eyeliner, the women who looked like men, the couples that didn’t fit his internal grammar. Silence was easier than judgment.

They took the 16 from the main station toward Chlodwigplatz. On the tram, a few people stared. Most didn’t. The Tsunami Club looked unimpressive, a graffiti-smeared storefront they slipped through almost without slowing.

Inside, the music pressed low and strange against Jack’s chest. Not loud. Hypnotic. He couldn’t tell if the singer was chanting or narrating or calling something up from underground. It wasn’t his world, he preferred heavy metal in the gym, clean aggression, something you could burn calories to, but this felt… ritualistic. The bass slowed his breathing.

When the next band came on, the floor didn’t erupt. People swayed. Talked. Clustered in loose circles. Dancing was optional. Connection wasn’t.

They weren’t dark, Jack realized. Not really.
They were gentle. Acclimated to sadness instead of consumed by it. Making something almost beautiful out of shadow.

He smiled without realizing it, watching Cas laugh.

Then came the screaming.

At first, it was disjointed, muffled, a crash, a shattering of glass, people yelling names, footsteps pounding on the wooden floor. Then they appeared: three black-bearded fanatics, knives raised, eyes ablaze with certainty. The crowd scattered in panic. A man fell sideways, clutching his arm, blood arcing over the floor like ink. Another girl screamed, the tip of a knife sunk into her shoulder.

“Devil worshippers! Filth! You will be cleansed!” one shouted, eyes wild.

Jack's military training kicked in automatically, as he took in the scene: all was chaos, blood, the smell of sweat and fear. It was like he was back on the battlefield. He studied the enemy with a practiced eye. There were three men with knives, middle Eastern origin, they carried blades in both hands and worked as a team. There were already a trail of bodies, many not moving behind them. To deal with them the first priority would be breaking them up. He grabbed a mike stand from the stage where the band had played.

“Cas! Under the stage” he barked. She ran to where he pointed and hid herself underneath, eyes wide.

“Be careful!” she cried.

Jack swung the stand low, hard, into the first man’s ankle. Bone cracked. The man went down screaming. Jack stepped through the chaos, used the fleeing crowd as cover, and drove his boot into the man’s face. The body went still.

He rolled, grabbed the fallen knives. They were slick. Not his blood.

The others turned toward him, shouting. He went low again, slashes to legs, movement never stopping. One attacker stumbled, wildly swinging at a girl in a ripped red top. Jack closed the distance, cut the man’s wrist. Metal clattered to the floor. The second knife came at him, Jack deflected, cut again, then drove steel into neck and chest.

The third man screamed “Allahu Akbar” and charged.

Jack sidestepped. Slashed. Pivoted. Plunged the blade into the man’s back.

Silence fell like a held breath.

Jack stood still, chest heaving, blood pooling around bodies that weren’t moving anymore. He dropped the knives and backed away, letting the moment pass without him.

Cas crawled out from under the stage.

“Jack… oh my god…”

“I had to stop them,” he said, too fast.

People cried. Bled. Whispered. Sirens grew louder.

The police arrived in waves. Questions blurred together. He answered simply.

“They came in with knives. I stopped them.” The club bouncers standing beside him slapped him on the back and nodded vigorously.

“You military?” an officer asked.

“I served,” Jack said. “Not anymore.”

It took hours before they were finally released. Someone had filmed it. He knew that before they told him. The footage was everywhere and so were the opinions.

They walked home at dawn along the Rhine. Cas stared at her phone.

“They’re calling you a killer,” she whispered. “They’re saying you liked it. The blood.”

He reached for her. She pulled away.

“I don’t know who you are,” she said.

They sat on a bench by the river.

“Jack,” she asked finally, voice shaking. “Are you the hero… or the monster?”

“I saved your life because I love you.”

He'd saved her life but now he feared for her soul. She seemed lost and deluded about the stakes of existence, life and death, heaven and hell. Trapped in a pretty black bubble, with her friends, insulated from the larger questions. Surely the events of the night must have opened up her eyes. He felt the distance between them and the dragons that stood in the way to her heart.

“Cas,” he said quietly, “you've been given another chance. You can see that, can't you?”

She didn’t answer.

He wrapped his arms around her. This time she didn’t pull away but rather snuggled into his embrace. She cried into his chest as the sun broke through the clouds and warmed the bench beneath them.

For a long time, neither of them spoke.

Notes ▶︎

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