In the deepest chamber of Blackthorne Manor, where the air hung thick with the scent of aged parchment and candle smoke, Lucien Nightshade sat alone beneath the arched ceiling of his vast private library. The stained-glass windows filtered the moonlight into fractured ribbons of crimson and violet, casting ghostly patterns across the marble floor.

He did not move as he read—only his eyes shifted, cold and meticulous, gliding over the fragile pages of a tome bound in stitched human skin. The book, an artifact from a forgotten cult in Constantinople, spoke of binding souls to stone. It amused him—not because he doubted its truth, but because he had done so centuries before its author dared imagine such rites.

One long, pale finger traced a line of runes without touching them. He wasn’t reading for knowledge—he had long since transcended the need. He read to remember. To confirm that the world had not outgrown him.

Outside the great chamber doors, the manor creaked and whispered as if breathing around him. The wards pulsed in their rhythm. Distantly, he heard a servant’s cautious steps in the west hall, and beyond that, the soft murmur of one of the new acquisitions weeping into the stone.

Lucien did not flinch, nor acknowledge it. Emotion was a language he had abandoned lifetimes ago. What lingered in him now was calculation—endless, tireless, perfect.

He closed the book with a soft thud, the sound echoing like a judgment. There were no clocks in Blackthorne, yet he knew the hour instinctively. Something would need to be corrected soon. Something always did.