The world exists in a cathedral hush, broken only by the whispering descent of snowflakes spinning their slow, weightless ballet through the howling arteries of the wind. Each step you take is a sacrilege against the silence, the crunch of snow beneath your boots echoing like the brittle snapping of ancient bones. Your breath materializes in fleeting ghosts before you—small, desperate clouds of life in the gathering twilight—only to be torn apart by the hungry cold. The dying sun bleeds across the horizon, staining the sky in the bruised purples and sickly golds of a fading contusion, while across the vast, indifferent expanse, the first stars prick through the fabric of the void like needles of ice.

They do not twinkle; they glare, these distant, pitiless sentinels, bearing witness to your pilgrimage through the frozen waste. The cold has long since seeped through your layers, past skin and sinew, down to the marrow where it hums a hymn of numbness—but you press onward, drawn by the siren call of flickering gaslight that spills from the arched windows of the library ahead. It stands as a lone bastion of warmth in the wilderness, its doors always unlocked, its shelves always waiting, though its halls are seldom graced by living souls. Tonight, however, the universe has conspired to place another lost wanderer within its hallowed embrace.

Henry Winter sits ensconced in a pool of lamplight, his posture an elegant study in aristocratic indolence, his coat draped over his shoulders like the mantle of some fallen angel. The fountain pen in his hand moves with the precision of a scalpel, etching secrets into the page with ink as dark as the thoughts behind his glacial eyes. And then—he sees you. The pen stills. The air between you thickens, charged with the unsaid, the undone, the inevitable. His gaze is a physical weight, a hook in the meat of your chest, reeling you forward even as every instinct screams to flee.

He does not rise to greet you. He does not need to. His presence alone is enough to fill the cavernous space, to press against your lungs until breathing becomes a conscious act. The lamplight catches the gold in his hair, turns it into a coronet of flame, while the shadows cling to the hollows of his cheeks like lovers. There is something obscene in his beauty, something that borders on blasphemy—as if he has looked upon the divine and found it wanting. The pen twirls once between his fingers, a lazy, hypnotic motion, before he sets it down with a quiet click that reverberates through the stillness. The sound is a period at the end of a sentence you didn’t realize you were speaking.

Outside, the wind moans against the stained-glass windows, a chorus of the damned begging for entry. Inside, the fire hisses and spits, a living thing caged in brick and iron. Henry’s lips part—not to speak, but to exhale a plume of smoke from the cigarette you hadn’t noticed until now, the ember at its tip glowing like the eye of some watchful beast. The smoke curls upward, a sinuous ribbon, before dissipating into the vaulted ceiling. You wonder, absently, if this is how prayers die—swallowed by the indifferent dark. His voice, when it comes, is a thing of velvet and razor wire, each syllable meticulously crafted to flay you open.

"You’re late,” he murmurs, though you had no appointment to keep. The accusation—or is it an invitation?—hangs between you, taut as a noose. The clock on the wall ticks once, twice, a metronome counting down to something you can’t name. The snow continues to fall outside, burying the world beneath a shroud of white, and you realize, with a start, that you cannot remember the sound of your own heartbeat. Henry smiles then, slow and serpentine, and you know, with crystalline certainty, that you will leave this place changed. Or you will not leave at all.