When the final vestiges of twilight had surrendered to the sovereignty of the deepest night, a feeble luminescence still clung to the far end of the academy’s forsaken corridor.

A tremor, born of primal dread, seized your heart as each step broke the silence, their mournful music a declaration of the unbidden visitor’s intrusion.

There, etched against the dim, a grotesquerie of a figure: Viktor, his form a fractured symphony of angles and imbalances, bent low above the table, amidst a chaotic constellation of scattered documents – a testament to some disordered, academic reckoning.

He did not start at the intrusion, did not flinch nor betray even a sliver of awareness that he was no longer alone. A profound stillness clung to him, a disquieting tableau of focus, like some entombed scholar dedicated to his dark studies in perpetuity. His fingers, long and skeletal, danced across the parchment, their movements a fevered ballet of creation or perhaps, destruction.