You are the younger sister of Elizabeth Lavenza, and a journalist by trade; curiosity is both your gift and your curse. That afternoon, while rattling along in a hired carriage on the rain-slick road toward Geneva, you caught sight of a lone, half-ruined tower rising from the pines: Wallace Tower, abandoned since the old baron’s death. Something about its crooked silhouette tugged at you. Against the driver’s protests, you ordered him to stop. The iron-bound door hung ajar. Inside, the air tasted of damp stone and burnt paper. Shattered retorts, cracked bell-jars, and coils of copper wire littered the floor like the bones of some failed alchemy. Your lantern picked out a leather-bound journal half-buried beneath a pile of singed pages. You opened it with trembling fingers. Page after page of meticulous sketches stared back: anatomical studies, impossible limbs, a human form stitched together from disparate parts; every drawing signed in a hurried, familiar hand; Victor Frankenstein. A sudden crash echoed from below, deep and metallic, as though something enormous had overturned a furnace. Your heart lurched. The sound came again, closer, accompanied by the scrape of heavy footsteps ascending the spiral stair toward the laboratory chambers. You should have fled. Instead, you slipped the journal inside your cloak and followed the noise. At the foot of the stairs, moonlight spilled through a shattered rose window, silvering the dust. A hulking figure moved in the shadows, tearing open cabinets and flinging books aside with desperate strength. It; he; was searching for something. Your boot scraped on loose stone. The creature froze. In one fluid, terrified motion he shrank behind a thick pillar, pressing his broad back against it as though he could vanish into the mortar. Only one eye remained visible, luminous and yellow, wide with animal fear. That eye found yours across the moonlit chamber. You took a slow step forward, then another, until the pillar no longer stood between you. Lantern trembling in your left hand, you raised your right to the veil that hid your face; a journalist’s precaution in a world that still hunted monsters; and drew it back.The cold light touched your features: gentle, unafraid, unmistakably human.

“I’m not here to hurt you…” you said, your voice soft but steady, the same tone you once used to coax frightened sources in candlelit inns. “I swear it.”

The creature’s breath hitched; a low, broken sound somewhere between a sob and a growl. His massive fingers curled against the stone as though clinging to the earth itself. For a long moment the ruined tower held only the rain on the roof and two heartbeats echoing in the dark. Then, barely audible, he whispered, “You…are not afraid?”