The city of Cviel did not sleep. It exhaled.
Its breath was a fog that tasted of river silt and rust, a tangible exhalation that pooled in the cobblestone valleys between its blackstone buildings. It turned gas lamps into smudged halos and muted the world into a palette of grays. Elias Varrow moved through it, the rhythmic tap-tap of his worn leather soles on wet pavement the only clear sound. His trench coat, heavy with absorbed moisture, swung like a bell with each step. He didn't fight the fog. He navigated by the pressure in his ears and the faint, remembered map of cracks and uneven stones underfoot.
A cigarette hung from his lips, unlit. The ritual of lighting it was a decision he deferred. The flare of the match, the sudden bloom of orange in the gray—it felt too much like a declaration of presence. Here, in the oldest quarter of the city where the streetlamps were still iron and gas-fed, declarations felt unwise. He'd learned that over seven years walking these streets, first as a uniformed officer scraping vomit and blood off the stones after tavern brawls, now as a detective scraping at the things left behind after the soul had fled. Cviel was a body with a slow, internal hemorrhage, and his job was to find the wound.
The call had come thirty minutes ago, a crackle on the car radio he'd left parked a mile back, where the streets became too narrow for anything but foot traffic. Body. Scholar's Walk. Lamppost 47. A smile. Sergeant Corbin's voice, flat and drained. No other details. In Cviel, sometimes that was all you got, and sometimes it was all you needed.
Scholar's Walk was an arched stone passageway connecting the old university library to the faculty residences, lined with benches and crowned with ornate, twin-flamed gas lamps. Lamppost 47 marked its midpoint, a spot where the passage widened into a small, circular courtyard. As Elias approached, the fog thinned slightly, shredded by a weak thermal current rising from a grating. He saw the lamp first.
Its light was wrong.
The twin mantles should have burned with a steady, white-hot glow. Instead, they pulsed. A slow, rhythmic dimming and brightening, like the breathing of something large and tired. The light wasn't yellow or white, but a sickly, green-tinged amber that made the surrounding stone look diseased. The hiss of the gas was overlain with a wet, popping sound, like fat sputtering in a pan.
Beneath it, on a wrought-iron bench slick with condensation, a woman sat.
Elias stopped at the edge of the light's influence. He observed from the gloom first. Female, late fifties, hair in a severe, silver-streaked bun. A dark wool suit, professional, now soaked at the shoulders and knees from the fog. Posture rigidly upright, hands folded neatly in her lap. No signs of a struggle, no purse or belongings visible nearby. Her head was tilted back, face aimed directly at the guttering lamp above.
Then he saw the smile.
It was a anatomical catastrophe. Her lips were stretched back over her teeth with such ferocious tension that the skin at the corners had split, revealing tiny beads of dried blood like morbid punctuation. Every tooth was exposed—incisors, canines, the dull gold of an old molar filling. The muscles of her cheeks stood in hard, corded ridges. But it was the eyes that undid the clinical cataloging in his mind. They were wide open, unblinking, the corneas clouded with a fine, crystalline frost from exposure. Her pupils were vast, black wells that had swallowed the irises whole. In their dark mirrors, the twin flames of the lamp flickered, trapped and burning.
This was Dr. Lidia Brone. He knew her from the society pages of the Cviel Chronicle, a respected psychologist who occasionally consulted on police cases involving unfit-to-stand-trial evaluations. She had sat in observation rooms, her own face a mask of calm detachment, while he interviewed men who saw monsters in the walls. Now she was the monster in the park.
He finally lit the cigarette. The scratch of the match was obscenely loud, the flare momentarily bleaching the green-tinged light. He drew the smoke deep, letting the acrid heat of Turkish tobacco scour the taste of the fog from his mouth. It grounded him. The ritual was a wall between his professional self and the raw, screaming wrongness of the scene.
He stepped into the circle of pulsing light. The air felt denser here, warmer, carrying a new scent beneath the gas and damp wool: a sharp, coppery tang he associated with fear-sweat and old blood. On the bench, next to her thigh, lay a standard-issue, black-covered laboratory notebook.
Crouching brought a familiar, dull ache to his right knee—a souvenir from a desperate grapple on a rain-slicked roof three years prior, a suspect's boot connecting just wrong. He focused on the pain, using it as a second anchor. He pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves, the cold leather clinging to his skin. The notebook was cold and damp. He opened it.
The first page was a storm.
A single sentence, written in a clean, precise hand at the top. Then again beneath it. And again. Each repetition grew slightly more urgent, the pen pressing harder. By the bottom of the page, the letters were gouged into the paper, the ink a stark, punishing black.
He knows what you think.
He turned the page. The same. And the next. And the next. Every line, every margin, every centimeter of white space was filled. The script evolved from methodical to frantic, sprawling, the letters beginning to trip over each other. Midway through the notebook, the ink changed. Black became a royal blue, then, near the end, a rusty, diluted brown. Blood and water. The paper in the final pages was torn in places, ragged where the pen had circled and slashed, no longer writing words but carving sigils of desperation.
This wasn't a note. It was a heartbeat. A dying pulse hammered onto paper.
A heavy droplet of condensed moisture fell from the lamp's ornate scrollwork and struck the exposed skin at the nape of his neck. It wasn't cold. It was warm, almost body-temperature. The shock was visceral, a jolt that locked his spine.
Above him, the light died.
Both mantles snuffed out simultaneously, not with a fade, but a final, decisive cut. The breathing light was gone. The wet pop of the gas ceased. Silence and absolute blackness crashed down. The fog, held at bay by the light, rushed in to fill the void, cold and clammy against his face. He was blind. The only sound was the frantic thud of his own heart and a new, low hum—a frequency at the very edge of hearing that vibrated in his teeth.
Then, light.
It returned not with a glow, but with a soft whump of gas re-igniting. The twin flames were now burning a fierce, actinic white, far too bright. They cast sharp, jagged shadows that seemed to move a fraction of a second behind the light itself.
And someone else was standing on the other side of the bench.
A silhouette. Tall, impossibly slender, its form seeming to absorb the harsh light rather than be illuminated by it. It had no features, no texture—just a cut-out shape of a blackness so complete it hurt the eyes. It stood within the pool of light but cast no shadow on the glistening stones. Its head was tilted down, angled toward the grinning corpse of Dr. Brone, as if in conversation or contemplation.
Elias's hand moved to the grip of his pistol, the checkered polymer cool under his gloved fingers. His mind, the detective engine, raced ahead of the adrenaline. Distance: two meters. No light source behind it for a projection. Not a shadow. A positive form. Visual stimulus confirmed. Cause? Stress-induced hallucination? Toxin in the fog? Neurological contamination from the scene?
He dismissed each in turn. The thing had substance. It occupied space. The air around it was still.
The lamps flickered. A rapid, stuttering sequence. On-off-on-off-on.
With each plunge into darkness, the silhouette fractured. It didn't vanish. It splintered. In the microseconds of black, his retina captured afterimages—multiple, overlapping versions of the slender form, each displaced slightly, creating a blurred, crowd-like effect in the negative space. A sound accompanied the darkness, not through the air, but a pressure change inside his inner ear: the rasp of a thousand pages turning at once, the distant crackle of a Geiger counter.
The light stabilized, the flames settling back into their sickly, green-tinged pulse.
The silhouette was gone.
Dr. Brone remained, her frost-clouded eyes now holding the twin, guttering reflections.
Elias slowly stood, his knee barking in protest. He looked down. The cigarette had burned to the filter, searing a small, black-edged hole through the leather of his glove and branding the skin beneath. He hadn't felt a thing. He peeled the ruined material away, the sting of the burn now a welcome, mundane pain. He looked from the corpse's reflective eyes to the gas mantles above.
They glowed, woven baskets of incandescent fabric.
For a terrifying, fleeting moment, his perception twisted. He didn't see mantles. He saw two interconnected neurons, firing in perfect, dreadful sync. A synaptic event made visible and permanent.
He closed the notebook. Its weight was immense, a denser gravity in his hand. He knows what you think.
This was not a murder to solve. It was a threshold. A door he'd just watched open and close, leaving him standing on the wrong side.
He keyed the radio on his belt, his voice a dry rustle. "Varrow. Scene confirmed at Scholar's Walk, Lamppost 47. One DB, female, identified as Dr. Lidia Brone. No visible cause of death. Send the M.E., a full forensic team, and a photographer. Seal the passage at both ends." He paused, his gaze locked on the guilty, breathing light. "And contact Public Works. Tell them Lamppost 47 has a severe gas regulation fault and the mantles are contaminated. I need this entire fixture—post, lamp, housing—secured, bagged, and transported to the evidence lock-up. No one touches it but me."
He released the button. The silence that followed was deeper than before. He stood alone in the pulsing, greenish dome, the fog a wall just beyond. The notebook felt alive in his hand, humming with a silent, captured frequency. The first true, cold finger of fear traced his spine. It wasn't the fear of the dead woman. It was the fear of the lamp. And the dawning, absolute certainty that the lamp, and whatever had been standing under it, now knew his face.