Prologue: The Assistant
The classroom smelled of chalk and old paper, the kind that turns brittle at the edges and leaves a grit on your fingertips. Half the seats were empty; the other half held students who had come for spectacle more than study. Professor Hadrien's lectures were famous for the wrong reasons.
From the back row came a laugh that tried to be a whisper and failed.
"There he is again. Hadrien's boy toy."
Another voice, brighter and meaner:
"More like his suck-up assistant. Doesn't even have a name of his own."
A few snorts. A heel tapped the tile in slow applause. The assistant—always just the assistant—kept his head down and wrote. He copied the date, the room number, the title Hadrien had scrawled on the board: CAT-OLOGY: FALSE DOGS, SILENCED CATS. His pen moved with the care of someone who had learned to be invisible.
He was practiced at invisibility.
One girl in the third row glanced at him with pity, then quickly turned away when her neighbour elbowed her. Two boys shared a grin and leaned back in their seats as though they'd scored points in a game. Even when he was silent, even when he gave them nothing, they found ways to spend him as entertainment.
In his father's house, invisibility had been a survival skill. The corridors were marble and the voices were knives. His mother—fifth wife, tolerated ornament—learned to walk without sound. He learned it too, because the first time he laughed at a joke the second wife's eldest heard it from three rooms away and decided it was insolence. After that came lessons: the tainted orange juice, the loosened stair rail, the driver who took corners too fast. Bastard child. Cash cow. Mistake. He had been the only son and somehow also the one it was safest to forget.
"Catology!" someone muttered, drawing a circle around the word with their finger like it was a magic trick for children. "The heretic and his pet."
Professor Hadrien, who could hear mockery at any volume, set a palm on the lectern and looked up. His eyes were feverish, but the fever had been there since the assistant first met him. "You laugh," he said, voice carrying, "because you have never been allowed to hear the old songs."
A groan. A stage-whisper: "Here we go."
Hadrien's hand rose, as if to bless and to indict in the same motion. "You have all been sung to sleep by the kennel psalms. You know the God Hymn by heart, even if you don't know you know it. Listen."
He recited in the cadence of chapel bells:
Blessed are the meek,
For they kneel before heaven as hounds before their master.
Blessed is obedience,
For it is the leash that guides the lost from sin.
Blessed is loyalty,
For the faithful dog does not wander.
The words settled like incense and accusation both. The assistant wrote them down with the same clean strokes he used for everything Hadrien said. He did not believe; belief was a luxury people offered their favorites. He recorded. Recording was a job, and jobs kept you fed. Sometimes.
Hadrien's mouth thinned. "And in the ashes of great libraries, in margins priests tried to scour clean, there is the answer that frightens them. A mirror made to show the kennel for what it is. The Dog Hymn."
Chairs scraped. One student stood to leave, made a show of it, and left the door yawning behind him. Hadrien did not slow. The assistant did not look up. He wrote, because that was what he could do.
Time did not pass in weeks. It hardened into years, then into something sharper.
Hadrien's colleagues stopped introducing him at conferences and started cautioning their students not to take his seminars. The assistant packed boxes, and then unpacked them in smaller offices, and then in rooms that used to be closets. When the university cancelled Hadrien's tenure hearing outright, the assistant typed the letter of protest, printed it, walked it to the administration, and watched the secretary drop it into a tray that might as well have been a fire.
He learned how to sleep on trains. How to copy inscriptions by flashlight in a closed archive while a watchman coughed on the other side of the door. How to stand in a vestibule while a priest told Hadrien—calmly, as if refusing a receipt—that any further requests to consult church manuscripts would be denied for the sake of the faithful.
News travelled. Not the kind with headlines. The kind with tight smiles. In Prague, a librarian refused them a reading room and crossed herself twice, murmuring something in Czech he did not understand but whose tone needed no translation. In Fez, a monk set tea down with exquisite politeness, eyes tired, and suggested—for their own safety—that the inquiry end; the tea smelled of mint, sharp and cooling, but the words behind it were warm with warning. In Venice, a deacon with perfect hair called Hadrien "Doctor" the way some people say "criminal," and escorted them, so gently, outside into the glittering sunlight as though he were doing them a kindness.
When the assistant doubled back to pick up a notebook he had left on a table, he heard the deacon murmur to a colleague:
"There goes the heretic's shadow."
The words found him in other places after that. In station cafés. In archive foyers. In the tinny echo of a museum stairwell as a junior curator failed to whisper. Not boy toy now. Not pet. The heretic's shadow. An adult insult for an adult failure. A way to erase a life without needing to unmake it.
He kept writing.
Hadrien's name left programs and entered lists. Security lists. Watch lists. The assistant filled out forms that asked whether he posed a threat, and learned to check the box that said No without laughing. When Hadrien published, small journals declined; when he self-published, booksellers declined; when he gave talks, halls declined and then the city declined, citing permits, citing safety, citing God. Not one God—many. The hymns differed. The discomfort did not.
They slept in places that were not meant for sleeping. They ate from paper when funds were thin. Some seasons the assistant woke to Hadrien's cough and counted the seconds until it quieted. He kept the invoices, the customs forms, and the photocopy receipts. He kept the insults, too, filed somewhere behind his ribs.
"Why is it Alexandria," he asked in one of the narrow kitchens they rented for a month at a time, "and not the others? We have chased copies everywhere. Why do you say the bones are there?"
Hadrien, hunched over a map with the edges gone soft, did not look up. "Because the first fire did not burn clean." He tapped the map—old coastline, newer city—lightly, three times. "Because ash remembers. And because the Dog Hymn is less a book than a wound."
The assistant wrote the sentence down. He did not know why. Perhaps because no one had ever spoken to him in metaphors when he was a child, and so he was learning them now, late, and hungry.
The churches learned their route before they finished planning it. A polite letter from a council arrived, reminding Hadrien of past excommunications. A less polite letter arrived without a return address. Someone broke into the storage unit and scattered their copies and rubbings across the floor, pages furred with shoeprints. The assistant gathered them, pressed them flat again, patched the torn with clean tape. He knew how to put a thing back together after hands that disliked it had had their say.
When they landed on the coast, the air tasted of salt and iron. The taxi driver took one look at Hadrien's face and the assistant's case and said a prayer under his breath. The hotel clerk checked their passports twice and said their reservation had been "misplaced by the system." A priest blessed the cathedral doors the morning after Hadrien asked to see an index and would not meet his eyes when they passed later that day.
If the locals were not happy, the local authorities were angrier still. A uniformed man with a good hat told them to mind the law. A man without a uniform followed them anyway. Hadrien smiled the way he always had and said that history belonged to everyone. The assistant did not smile. He had learned the shape of danger long before he met the professor, and this was that shape.
They walked the ruins the way one walks a graveyard: not because the dead mind your feet, but because it feels like you should mind your own.
Columns shouldered the sky. Sand found every seam. The assistant brushed grit from his notebook and from the face of the broken stone where Hadrien crouched, breath thin, hands careful. "Here," the professor whispered, and the word landed like stepping onto a bridge that might not hold.
The fragment lay where it should not have—tucked in a pocket of stone, as if the library itself had kept one ember hidden in its ribs. Char choked the edges. The center preserved a script that looked less written than cut.
Hadrien's fingers trembled. The assistant glanced over his shoulder at the yawning line of the colonnade, at the figures small in the heat shiver there, at the way the sun turned the air into a blade. He felt, for the first time, as if unseen eyes watched from every broken wall—locals who despised them, priests who had cursed them, ancestors who wanted the ruin to stay buried. The air was too still, too heavy, as though the city itself were holding its breath.
"We should—" he began.
Hadrien began to read.
Blessed are the meek, say the priests of Dogs,
But meekness is only the leash around the neck.
Blessed is obedience, cry the saints of Dogs, Yet obedience is only the chain of slaves.
The sound went out of the day. The wind stopped moving and the birds forgot their throats. Even the distant taxis seemed to stall, engines held, as if the whole city waited to hear a word not meant for it.
Light crawled through the parchment like the first veins of dawn. The assistant saw it and knew, the way he had known about the orange juice and the stair rail and the corners too fast: this was how the world tried to kill you.
"Professor," he said, and the word snapped in the suspended air like a twig under a hunter's boot.
The flame woke.
It was not the kind that eats paper and makes black ghosts on the wind. It was a clean thing, a thing that had never asked wood's permission to exist. It opened without smoke, without ash, a mouth of heat and law. It turned toward the voice that had called it and toward the man who had dared to speak it aloud.
Hadrien flinched. Age put slowness in brave men. The assistant moved.
He had been the target, not the heir. He had been the bastard, the cash cow, the mistake, the heretic's shadow. He had not been a shield. No one had taught him shield. But now his body remembered something his history had not, and he stepped between the mouth of living fire and the old man with the trembling hands.
It took him full in the chest.
Pain is a word that means a hundred animal things. This was another creature entirely. It came with a weight, with a measure, with a grammar older than his bones. It did not beg him to stop it. It told him what would be.
Chains—bright, dark, bright again—wound around him, not around his wrists or ankles but around the part of a person that breathes when the lungs are empty. Seven voices followed, not speaking over one another but waiting their turn like bells in a tower.
You will never be healed,
No hand shall ease your pain.
Cold pressed into his ribs as if a hand had reached through skin to hold bone. The possibility of relief went out like a candle pinched.
None shall take from you, not even mercy,
What is yours will bind in chain.
His blood locked. Choice locked. The clean exit of dying closed, a door leaned shut by a god who preferred endurance to ending.
Hunger eternal, never filled,
Your feast will end in dust.
His stomach writhed. The clean memory of satiety—birthday cake, stolen bread, a bowl licked at midnight—faded to a photograph, then to a rumor.
You will have but half the time of others,
Each day stolen by sleep and rust.
His limbs went heavy. A gravity no one else felt fastened to him, hauling him toward a blackness he had not chosen. He saw the calendar of his life split down the middle, days cleaved like fruit.
Fire will bind your flesh unending,
Its kiss your lifelong brand.
Heat rose under his skin, a blush cast in iron. It was indecent, punishing, and permanent. He could not put it down. It would not put him down.
Weapons will never be yours to wield,
No blade obeys your hand.
His fingers closed on the air where a handle should have been. The air did not become a handle. He was a hand without a tool, a fist without a right.
You will burn the world,
When wrath breaks free at last.
The chains thrummed. Light split every edge. For one breath he stood on a hill and watched cities open like ovens, forests go to powder, seas turn to steam. He did not want it. The vision did not ask what he wanted.
Then the seven were done. The silence that followed had an edge like a paper cut.
And out of the strange quiet, through the work of the fire, a different sound arrived. Not holy. Not a hymn. A small laugh, velvet and amused, curling in his ear as easily as a sunbeam on a floor.
"Even in chains, you shine."
He had just enough time to understand that someone had seen him—not a boy, not a mistake, not a shadow, but seen—and then the world went out like a lamp in a room that had never had electricity to begin with.
Later, they would say no such fragment had ever been catalogued in the ruins; that no permission had been granted to conduct excavations; that no authorities had confirmed a fire. The cathedral would deny having blessed its doors because of two researchers. A council would say it had sent no letter. A museum would say no deacon with perfect hair had ever worked there.
No one would not say anything at all.
The assistant was only a line of soot on the wind, an absence square on a notebook page, a space where a name could have gone if anyone had given him one.
But the laugh—that small, impossible laugh—followed him into the dark—and the dark was not empty.
Final word count: 2,497 words.