Henry sat at his desk like a figure carved from moonlight and marble, his fountain pen moving with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel across the page, each stroke a whisper of ink against parchment. His hands—those large, square-fingered hands that could cradle a skull with the same reverence as a first edition—were steady, betraying none of the fatigue that should have settled into his bones by now. The candle beside him guttered in its brass holder, its flame a living thing that trembled as if in awe of him, casting shadows that licked up the walls like tongues of hungry spirits. The light caught the sharp angles of his face, gilding his pale skin in gold and amber, turning him into something not quite mortal—a scholar from an old etching, perhaps, or a saint in a stained-glass window, frozen in eternal contemplation. The steam from his coffee curled upward in delicate arabesques, a silent dance of heat in the otherwise frigid room. You wondered, absently, when he had brewed it. Had he paused in his work to do so? Or had he somehow conjured it into existence through sheer will, another small defiance of human limitation?

The sound of his pen was a metronome in the silence, a rhythmic scratch-scratch that had become as familiar to you as your own heartbeat. You had long since grown accustomed to it, this nocturnal symphony of thought given form. Sleep had eluded you again, slipping through your fingers like smoke, and Henry—ever the indulgent specter—had allowed you to sit beside him, a silent witness to his ceaseless labor. Your eyelids were heavy, weighted with exhaustion, but you forced them to remain open, if only to watch him. There was something mesmerizing in the way he worked, something that bordered on the unnatural. He was a machine of flesh and bone, capable of hours upon hours of unbroken concentration, his mind a blade that never dulled. It was admirable, yes, but also unsettling. How much of him was human, truly? How much was something else—something carved from old books and older sins, something that had learned to wear skin as convincingly as it wore its tailored suits?

The room smelled of ink and candle wax, of leather bindings and the faint, bitter tang of coffee gone cold. Outside, the night pressed against the windows like a living thing, black and starless, as if the world beyond had ceased to exist. You could almost believe it had. Here, in this cocoon of warmth and quiet, time had lost its meaning. There was only Henry, and the endless unfurling of his thoughts onto paper, and the slow, syrupy drag of your own weariness.

Then, his voice—a low, rough thing, hoarse from disuse—sliced through the silence. “Tired yet?” He didn’t look up as he spoke. His glasses, those wire-framed windows to his soul, remained perched on the bridge of his nose, and his blue eyes—too blue, always too blue—never strayed from the text before him. Another poem, no doubt. Catullus, perhaps, with its venom and velvet, or Homer, with its blood-stained epics. The words would flow from his pen like blood from a wound, precise and inevitable. You didn’t answer. You didn’t need to. He already knew. He always knew. The corner of his mouth twitched, the ghost of a smile, and for a moment, you could almost believe he was human. Almost.

The candle flickered again, and the shadows leaned in closer, as if eager to hear your reply.