Ashford's asylum had never been truly quiet, but the silence after Elise spoke Gregor's name felt like a blade pressed flat against the throat of the world.
Jonathan Ward pressed his back to the door, breath shallow, truncheon clumsy in his hand. On the other side, he could hear the mob gathering their courage again—Reverend Caldwell's voice, sharp as broken glass, Mayor Dunne's trembling attempts to sound like authority, boots scuffing stone. But inside the ward, there was only the dim pulse of the gaslight choking out, and the unbearable sound of nothing where Elise's heart should have been.
Gregor Hale moved like water poured from a tall glass. He held Elise as if she were not dead but sleeping, her braid trailing like black thread across his sleeve. Jonathan wanted to shout, wanted to strike, wanted to pray. He did none of those things.
"She spoke," Dr. Pell whispered from the far wall, eyes huge behind fogged spectacles. "She… spoke."
Gregor didn't look at him. His voice was low, cellar-cool. "She remembered."
Jonathan found his own voice. "What do you mean?"
"That's different from speaking," Gregor said. He shifted Elise in his arms, and for a moment Jonathan could swear her lips moved again—testing air, trying to shape a second word.
Pell made a choking sound. "This is blasphemy. Reverend Caldwell was right—"
"Reverend Caldwell," Gregor said softly, "does not know what it costs to remember." He turned toward the back wall, the one smeared with Elise's frantic charcoal circles. "But she does."
Jonathan's hand pressed harder against the door. Caldwell was still shouting scripture outside, each verse barked like a musket volley. The wood rattled under fists. The iron bolt shivered. The mob wasn't gone—they were gathering like floodwater behind a dam.
"What are you going to do?" Jonathan demanded.
Gregor's iron-colored eyes met his. "Leave."
"You can't." Jonathan gestured toward the sealed wall. "There's no—"
Before the word door could escape, Gregor pressed his palm against the wall of circles. The air changed. The chalked symbols, the faceless shapes, the fox-slitted eyes—they softened, lines smearing, circles unraveling. The plaster rippled like pond water touched by a stone.
Jonathan felt the hair rise on his arms. His father used to say you could smell storms before they broke, that the air carried a taste of copper. The wall smelled like that now: copper, river-silt, something older than rain.
Gregor whispered in a language Jonathan did not know but felt in his molars. Not words. Names. The wall shuddered, sighed, and then—opened. A seam split down the plaster, widening just enough to show a black mouth of corridor beyond.
Pell staggered back. "God preserve us—"
"God," Gregor said, "doesn't keep doors. Men do."
Jonathan swallowed. The seam gaped wider, stone yielding to something not-stone. The smell of damp earth wafted out, mixed with iron and mildew. A drip-drip-drip echoed in the dark, though Jonathan couldn't see any water.
The asylum door behind him shook violently. Caldwell shouted: "Open, in the name of the Lord!"
Jonathan kept his back against it. "I'll open for neither," he muttered.
Gregor stepped toward the black seam. Elise lay pale and weightless in his arms. He looked back at Jonathan once. "Be my threshold."
Jonathan frowned. "Your what?"
"The line no one can cross," Gregor said. "That's all a man is in the end."
The latch rattled again. Caldwell's voice grew nearer, louder, hungry. Jonathan braced himself. "Then I'll stand."
Gregor inclined his head—not quite respect, not quite testing—and stepped into the dark passage with Elise.
The wall began to seal. Jonathan panicked. "Wait!" He shoved himself away from the asylum door and lunged forward. If he let Gregor take her—if he let her vanish into that impossible black—then this night would never stop haunting him. His boots scraped stone. His shoulder hit the seam. And somehow, impossibly, he passed through.
The wall closed behind him. Caldwell's pounding fists went muffled, distant. The shouts of the mob became like voices under water.
Jonathan stumbled into a corridor that should not have existed.
The air was thick, like cloth left in a cellar for years. The stone walls sweated moisture. Niches lined the passage—empty, except for one holding a bundle of sticks bound with iron wire, another cradling a book whose pages rustled though no wind touched them. The corridor sloped downward.
Gregor walked steadily ahead, Elise in his arms, her braid brushing the floor.
Jonathan caught up, breathing hard. "What is this place?"
"A monk made it," Gregor said without looking back. "Long ago. Men who pray too long near God build escapes. Habits."
"You sound like you knew him."
Gregor's lips twitched. "Everyone who hides leaves a shape another hider recognizes."
Jonathan heard something else now. Not dripping water. Not footsteps. A listening. As though the corridor itself had ears. The hairs prickled on his neck.
"You hear it," Gregor said softly.
Jonathan swallowed. "What is it?"
"A librarian," Gregor said, as if that explained anything. "Call it the Archivist. It keeps what men try to throw away."
"Records?" Jonathan asked, glancing at the book in its niche.
"Records. Names. Debts. Doors."
The corridor opened into a chamber carved like a bell. A stone table stood at its center, stained and scarred. The dripping sound grew louder until it became a pulse.
Gregor laid Elise gently on the stone. He closed her eyes with his left hand, then opened them with his right. They stared blankly at the ceiling.
Jonathan hovered, torn between stepping forward and fleeing. Evelyn's face flashed in his mind—his wife, waiting at home with her lamp and her thread, believing her husband kept order in the town. He had no words for what he was seeing.
"What do you need me for?" Jonathan asked finally.
Gregor looked up. His expression carried centuries of sadness dressed neatly, as if folded away in drawers. "To watch. To remember without lying about it later."
Jonathan gritted his teeth. "Is that all?"
"For now."
Gregor drew a silver pin from his coat. Plain. Ugly. Not jewelry, but a tool. He pricked his own thumb. Dark blood welled—thicker, heavier than it should have been. He let a drop fall into Elise's mouth.
Jonathan's stomach lurched. "What are you doing?"
"Asking," Gregor said. "Not forcing."
The drop vanished. Elise did not move. One heartbeat. Two. Three.
Then—
Her jaw opened wider than a human jaw should. The drop disappeared into her throat without swallowing. The chamber flickered with a light that had no source. Jonathan's chest seized.
Her eyes opened.
Not gray. Not human.
Mirror eyes. Jonathan saw himself in them—his own face catalogued, judged, as though by some eternal record-keeper. For one impossible breath, he felt written down.
Her lips moved.
"Jonathan," Elise whispered.
Jonathan staggered backward. "She—she knows my name—"
Gregor's face did not change, but his eyes sharpened.
Above, muffled through stone, Caldwell's voice rose to a shriek of scripture.
The Archivist's chamber pulsed. The niches shivered. The book flapped its pages like wings.
And Elise's mirror eyes fixed on Jonathan with inhuman steadiness.
"Jonathan Ward," she said, her voice raw silk dragged over stone.