Estimated reading time — 34 minutes

Saltarello wasn’t the kind of place you stumbled into while looking for cheap plastic beads and a frozen daiquiri on Bourbon Street. Tucked away in the damp, shadowed heart of the French Quarter, it was a sanctuary for the city’s nocturnal intellectuals. The air inside was thick with the smell of old mahogany, expensive bourbon, and the faint, metallic tang of impending summer rain. On the small corner stage, a trio was working their way through a set of light, meandering jazz—a brushed snare, a walking bassline, and a muted trumpet that sounded like a secret being whispered in the dark. The patrons were a curated exhibit of culture: poets in threadbare tweed, painters with paint still under their fingernails, and novelists arguing about syntax over twelve-dollar Sazeracs.

Behind the long, polished curve of the bar stood Jeanine—Jean to the regulars. She was a half-French woman in her late thirties with an athletic, no-nonsense build that suggested she could bounce a rowdy drunk just as easily as she could mix a perfect martini. Her long, dark hair was tied back in a practical braid that swayed as she polished a highball glass. She was currently leaning across the wood, sharing a low, easy laugh with a man who had been occupying the same corner stool for the better part of a decade.

His name was John Lagios. If you looked at him, you wouldn’t immediately think master of modern fantasy, but that was exactly what he was. At forty, Lagios was a soft-looking man. He was blonde, though the hair was beginning to thin at the crown, and he carried a good forty extra pounds that spilled comfortably over the edges of his leather barstool. He was the architect of The Sword of the Riverlands, a sprawling, blood-soaked fantasy epic that had spanned nine massive volumes over the last fifteen years.

Jean liked John. He tipped well and never talked down to her, but there was something about him that always made the hair on the back of her arms stand up just a fraction of an inch. It was a weirdness that was almost imperceptible. It lived in the way he blinked a little too slowly, or how his smile sometimes failed to reach his pale blue eyes, like a man wearing a mask that had slipped a quarter-inch out of place.

“So, book ten,” Jean said, setting a fresh glass of amber liquid on the coaster in front of him. “You going to finally kill off the King of the Ash, or are you going to make your nerds suffer for another three years?”

John offered that slow, slightly disconnected smile. “Suffering builds character, Jean. You know that.”

The welcoming door of Saltarello swung open, letting in a brief gasp of humid New Orleans street air.

Zora stepped inside, letting the door click shut behind her. She was nineteen, a young Black woman with sharp, observant eyes and a worn leather satchel slung across her shoulder—a souvenir from a gap year spent backpacking through the cobblestone streets of Europe. Freshly enrolled in college and armed with a notebook full of half-finished short stories, she had come to Saltarello hunting for the one thing she couldn’t find in a classroom: the Muse. She wanted to be a writer. More than that, she wanted to build worlds. She wanted to write fantasy that felt as real as the damp bricks of the Quarter.

Zora stepped up to the far end of the mahogany and ordered a club soda with lime.

As Jean handed her the sweating glass, the bartender offered the girl a quick, genuine smile of recognition. Zora wasn’t a total stranger; she had ducked into Saltarello a half-dozen times over the last few weeks, sometimes to escape a sudden Quarter downpour, sometimes just to sit in a booth and scribble frantically in her notebook. They had shared a few brief, friendly conversations across the wood—small talk about the brutal local humidity and Zora’s dreams of writing. It was a small, quiet connection, the kind that forms naturally in a neighborhood bar.

Zora took a sip of her soda, her eyes scanning the room, taking in the artists and the pretenders. And then, she stopped.

Her gaze locked onto the blonde, overweight man sitting in the corner. She recognized the profile from the dust jackets of the books sitting on her nightstand. John Lagios. The creator of the Riverlands. Zora’s grip tightened on the strap of her leather satchel, her heart giving a sudden, hard thump against her ribs.

The distance between Zora’s stool and the corner where John Lagios sat felt like a mile of broken glass, but she forced herself to walk it. The jazz trio slipped into a slow, mournful ballad as she stopped a few feet from his elbow. Her hands were sweating against the strap of her satchel.

“Excuse me? Mr. Lagios?”

He didn’t turn immediately. When he finally did, the annoyance on his face was plain, pulling his soft features into a tight, irritated knot. “I’m off the clock, kid,” he said, his voice a surprisingly reedy tenor that didn’t quite match his bulk.

But as he spoke, those pale eyes did a slow, deliberate crawl up and down her frame. It wasn’t the typical, sleazy once-over of a drunk at a bar. It was something colder. He looked at her the way a carpenter looks at a piece of raw timber, calculating the grain, the weight, the yield.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Zora stammered, her words tumbling out in a rush. “I’m Zora. I’m a writer, too. Well, aspiring. I just got back from Europe, and I’m trying to build my own fantasy world, but I’m stuck. I was hoping… maybe you had some advice on finding direction?”

Lagios sighed, a heavy, wet sound, and turned back to his bourbon. “Read a lot. Write a lot. Put your butt in the chair and don’t get up until your fingers bleed. There’s your advice.” He took a sip, clearly dismissing her.

It was a brush-off, plain and simple. But Zora was nineteen, fueled by club soda and the naive, bulletproof determination of youth. She took a step closer.

“I do write,” she pushed, her voice steadying. “But it’s the architecture of it. The way you structured the geopolitical tension in The Crimson Tide—book four. I’m trying to build a magic system that affects the economy, but it feels hollow. It doesn’t feel lived-in like the Riverlands.”

Lagios stopped. The ice in his glass gave a sharp clink as he set it down. He turned his head, looking at her not as a nuisance now, but as a puzzle box that had suddenly sprung open.

“Book four,” he murmured, the weird, disconnected smile returning to his lips. “Alright, Zora. Let’s see how closely you read. Who really poisoned the Archduke of Oakhaven? Because it wasn’t the Elven emissary, no matter what the High Council said.”

It was a trap—a piece of deep lore buried in the appendices and hinted at in passing dialogue.

“It was his own seneschal,” Zora answered without missing a beat, her eyes shining. “The nightshade was traced to the emissary’s gardens, but the seneschal had the antidote listed in his ledger under a false trade name in chapter twelve. He was playing the long game for the Iron Guild.”

Lagios stared at her. For a long, agonizing second, the only sound was the brush of the snare drum from the stage. Then, he nodded. It was a slow, appreciative dip of his thick chin.
“I don’t take pupils, Zora,” he said softly. “I find the mentor-mentee dynamic incredibly tedious. It drains the well.” He paused, letting the silence stretch. “But… I am heading back to my house in the Garden District. I have a certain ritual. A way of mapping the world before the words come. If you want to see how the sausage is made, you can walk with me.”

Zora’s heart soared into her throat. It was the golden ticket. The inner sanctum. “Yes,” she breathed, her face breaking into a brilliant, unsuspecting smile. “Absolutely. Thank you.”

Lagios grunted, sliding off his stool. He tossed a crisp fifty-dollar bill onto the polished wood of the bar. “Come on, then.”

Down at the other end of the bar, Jean was wiping down the espresso machine. She watched the exchange out of the corner of her eye. She saw John Lagios lumbering toward the heavy oak door, and she saw the young, vibrant Black girl trailing eagerly in his wake, clutching her satchel like a shield.

As the door swung shut behind them, swallowing them into the humid New Orleans night, Jean stopped wiping the counter. A sudden, cold knot formed in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t jealousy, and it wasn’t just the protective instinct of an older woman. It was a deep, primal alarm—the ancient, inherited instinct of the lizard brain firing a warning shot into the dark.
He drove a 1988 Lincoln Continental that handled like a hearse and smelled like a used bookstore left out in the rain. The passenger side floorboard was a geological dig of refuse: crumpled fast-food bags, rusted spark plugs and stacks of yellowed newspapers. When Zora hesitated before getting in, Lagios had simply waved a meaty hand.

“Leave it,” he instructed, his reedy voice echoing in the cavernous interior. “People throw away the world, Zora. They lack the vision to see the marrow in the bone. Everything has a frequency. A residual value. You just have to be smart enough to tune into it.”

As they navigated the potholed streets toward the Garden District, Lagios held court. He spoke with the breathless, unearned authority of a man who had spent too long surrounded by people paid to agree with him. He launched into a monologue about the architectural superiority of the Byzantine empire, seamlessly pivoting to the quantum mechanics of string theory. It was a word salad of buzzwords and half-remembered Wikipedia articles. He confidently claimed that the Library of Alexandria was burned by the Knights Templar—a historical impossibility separated by a thousand years.

Zora knew this. She had taken AP European History. But sitting in the dark, smelling his stale cologne and the sour tang of old paper, she just nodded. “That makes so much sense, Mr. Lagios. I never thought of it that way.” She was feeding the beast, trading her intellectual integrity for a backstage pass to greatness.

They turned off the main avenue, the streetlights growing sparse until they vanished entirely. The Lincoln’s heavy tires crunched onto a long, unpaved driveway that seemed to swallow them whole.

The property was a black void in the heart of the city. Acres of overgrown live oaks and weeping willows formed a nearly impenetrable canopy, their Spanish moss hanging down like the ragged hair of drowned women. At the center of this urban forest, sitting atop a colossal, unnaturally perfect hill, was the house. It was a four-story behemoth of classic Greek Revival architecture, its white columns glowing faintly in the moonlight. There wasn’t a single light on inside or out.

“My parents built this,” Lagios said, killing the engine. The sudden silence was deafening, broken only by the ticking of the cooling radiator. “Cost four million dollars in the late eighties. They had the earth trucked in to build the mound. Hubris, really. But it keeps the floodwaters out. Come on.”

He led her up a sweeping flight of stone steps and unlocked the massive double doors. As they stepped inside, Zora instinctively reached for a light switch, but Lagios caught her wrist. His grip was soft, but surprisingly firm.

“No,” he said softly. “I despise bright lights at night. They bleach the imagination.”

He clicked on a single, low-wattage lamp on a credenza. The weak, amber glow revealed a foyer of cold, white marble and towering, gold-leafed mirrors. The mirrors caught the dim light and bounced it down long, silent hallways, creating the illusion of endless, shadowy corridors. The air in the house was stagnant, saturated with the smell of lemon polish and undisturbed dust.

They ascended a grand, sweeping staircase to the second floor. If the first floor was a museum, the second floor was a graveyard. The marble continued, but the space was cluttered with antique furniture—Louis XIV chairs, mahogany armoires, and velvet chaise lounges—all pushed haphazardly against the walls and draped in thick, graying sheets. Dust motes danced lazily in the beam of Lagios’s small pocket flashlight as he navigated the maze of abandoned furniture.

“My study is at the end,” he whispered, though there was no one to wake.

When he finally opened the heavy oak door to his study, Zora felt a brief wave of relief. It was a writer’s room: floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a massive leather-topped desk, and a vintage typewriter sitting next to a modern laptop. He turned on a small desk lamp with a green glass shade.

“Sit,” he commanded, pointing to a high-backed chair in the corner.

Zora sat, her satchel clutched to her chest. She watched, expecting him to pull out a manuscript or open a plotting software. Instead, Lagios engaged in his “ritual.”

First, he removed his watch, placing it exactly in the upper right corner of the leather blotter. Then, he unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a small, tarnished silver tray and a pair of long, surgical tweezers. From his pockets, he began to empty the “value” he had collected. A dead, dried cicada. A rusted iron nail. A clump of coarse, dark hair that looked suspiciously human. A child’s plastic barrette.

With agonizing, breathless precision, Lagios used the tweezers to arrange the items on the silver tray. He didn’t look like a writer plotting a fantasy novel; he looked like a coroner examining stomach contents. He leaned in close, his pale blue eyes wide and unblinking, his breathing growing shallow and wet as he gently stroked the clump of hair with the tip of the tweezers.

Sitting in the dim, dusty corner, the intoxicating buzz of Zora’s ambition finally began to wear off. The cold knot that Jean had felt back at the bar suddenly materialized in Zora’s own stomach. She looked at the heavy oak door they had just come through, then back at the massive man whispering to a dead insect in the dark.

She wasn’t panicking yet. But for the first time all night, Zora realized she was entirely, profoundly alone.

The silence in the study stretched until it felt brittle enough to snap. Zora watched the rise and fall of Lagios’s shoulders as he stared at the clump of dark hair on the silver tray. Finally, he set the tweezers down with a soft clink against the metal.

He turned to her, catching the green light of the desk lamp. The weird, disconnected smile was back.

“You think this is strange,” he said. It wasn’t a question. His voice was smooth, almost hypnotic in the quiet room. “You’re sitting there, clutching that satchel, wondering if you’ve made a terrible mistake following the great John Lagios into the dark.”

Zora’s throat tightened. “No,” she lied, her voice a thin whisper. “I just… I’ve never seen a process like this.”

Lagios chuckled, a wet, rattling sound deep in his chest. “Of course you haven’t. They don’t teach this in your creative writing seminars. They teach you structure. Pacing. Character arcs.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Mechanics. But the soul of a story? The frequency? That requires a tether to the physical world. A grounding wire. Every great writer has one. Hemingway had his cats. Capote had his superstitions. I have… resonance.” He gestured vaguely to the tray. “It’s essential, Zora. If you want to build a world, you have to understand the detritus of this one.”

Zora nodded, a jerky, mechanical movement. “Right. Resonance. I understand.”

She didn’t. She was terrified. The air in the room felt suddenly too thin to breathe. She needed to leave. She needed to stand up, make an excuse about an early class, and walk back down those endless, dark marble hallways.

“But enough about my process,” he said, leaning back in his comfy leather chair. The leather groaned under his weight. “You didn’t come here to watch an old man play with trash. You came here because you’re stuck. Let me see it.”

Zora blinked, the sudden pivot throwing her off balance. “See what?”

“The work, Zora. The drafts.” He held out a hand, palm up. “The architecture you were so worried about back at the bar. Let me see the foundation.”

It was the ultimate bait. The reason she had followed him in the first place. Her ambition, battered and bruised by the last twenty minutes, flared back to life just enough to override her survival instinct. With trembling fingers, she unbuckled her satchel and pulled out a thick sheaf of printed pages. She hesitated for a fraction of a second before handing them across the desk.

Lagios took them. He didn’t just glance at the top page; he began to read. He read with a terrifying, silent intensity, his eyes tracking back and forth across the lines. Zora sat frozen, her heart hammering against her chest. Five minutes passed. Then ten.

Finally, he lowered the pages. He looked at her, and for the first time all night, the weirdness in his eyes was gone. It was replaced by something sharp and calculating.

“It’s raw,” he said softly. “Undisciplined. You rely too heavily on adjectives when a strong verb would do the heavy lifting.” Zora felt a flush of embarrassment heat her cheeks, but then he leaned forward. “But the bones, Zora. The bones are extraordinary. The way you handle the political schism in the second chapter… it reminds me of early Le Guin. Specifically, the original drafts of The Left Hand of Darkness.”

Zora’s breath hitched. Ursula K. Le Guin. It was a comparison so staggering, so perfectly targeted at her specific literary idols, that she almost missed the caveat.

“The original drafts?” she asked, her eyes darting to the immense, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lining the study. She scanned the spines, spotting a battered paperback copy of the novel he had just mentioned.

Lagios followed her gaze and sneered. It was an ugly expression that twisted his soft features. “That?” he spat, pointing a thick finger at the shelf. “That is a corpse. That is what happens when the butchers in New York get their hands on art. Editors. Publishers. They are parasites, Zora. They take a living, breathing world and they hack off the limbs to make it fit into a neat, marketable box.”

He stood up suddenly, the chair scraping loudly against the hardwood floor. Zora flinched, her shoulders jumping toward her ears, but she quickly forced her hands to relax in her lap.

“I’m talking about the real work,” Lagios continued, his voice rising in volume and intensity. “The uncut, bleeding heart of the story. The drafts that are only shared among peers. Among equals.” He looked down at her, his pale eyes burning. “I have them. Upstairs. In the reading room.”

He turned and began to walk toward the heavy oak door. He didn’t look back. He didn’t invite her.

“Wait,” Zora said, her voice trembling. “Why… why are they upstairs? Why don’t you keep them here?”

Lagios paused with his hand on the brass doorknob. He didn’t turn around. “I don’t read where I write, Zora. It contaminates the frequency. The books in this room”—he gestured vaguely to the thousands of spines lining the walls—”are a graveyard. They are here to remind me of what happens when a writer sells their soul to the machine. The truth is kept on the third floor.”

He turned the knob and stepped out into the dark hallway.

Zora sat in the high-backed chair, paralyzed by a violent, internal war. Every instinct she possessed—the cold knot in her stomach, her brain screaming in the dark—told her to run. To grab her satchel, fly down the stairs, and disappear into the humid New Orleans night.

But then, the green glass lamp on the desk clicked off.

Lagios had hit a switch in the hall. The study was plunged into absolute, suffocating darkness. A second later, a weak, amber bulb flickered to life in the hallway, casting Lagios’s massive shadow across the threshold.

He was walking away. Taking her manuscript with him.

Fear, cold and absolute, finally took her hostage. She couldn’t stay in the dark room alone. She couldn’t leave without her work. And God help her, she still wanted to see the drafts.

Zora stood up, her legs feeling like lead, and stepped out into the light to follow him up the stairs.

The third floor was not a graveyard. It was a mausoleum.

Zora stepped out of the stairwell and the air immediately changed. It was freezing—a sharp, dry cold that bit through her thin sweater. The dust and chaotic clutter of the lower floors were gone, replaced by a pristine, sterile expanse. The entire floor had been gutted to form one sprawling, cavernous room.

In the dead center sat a single, overstuffed leather reading chair and a small, polished mahogany side table. But it was the walls that made Zora’s breath catch in her throat.

They were lined with custom-built, floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookcases, but these weren’t open shelves. Each section was sealed behind thick, gleaming glass and secured with solid brass padlocks. The dim lighting—the only illumination in the room—was recessed into the ceiling, casting long, dramatic shadows over the glass. Beneath each locked section was a small, engraved brass plaque bearing a name.

Lagios stepped into the room, and the stagnant, oppressive weirdness that had clung to him downstairs seemed to evaporate. His posture straightened. The reedy tension in his voice smoothed out into something almost jovial.

“Here we are,” he sighed, his breath pluming faintly in the cold air. “My little sanctum.”

He gestured toward the leather chair with a sweeping, theatrical motion. “Sit, Zora. Please.”

Zora moved stiffly, her legs feeling like they belonged to someone else. She sank into the chair. It was obscenely comfortable, the leather soft and yielding, but it felt like sitting in a trap. She watched as Lagios walked to a wooden panel near the heavy oak door. He opened it to reveal an enormous, velvet-lined board hung with dozens of small brass keys.

He selected three with practiced precision.

“I have spent a fortune building this room,” Lagios said, his voice echoing slightly in the vast space. He walked to a section of the glass cases, the brass plaque beneath it reading Le Guin. He slid the key into the padlock. It opened with a satisfying snick. “Climate controlled. UV-filtered glass. It is the only place in this house that truly matters.”

He reached inside and pulled out a thick, bound stack of yellowing, typewritten pages. He moved to another case—Tolkien—and retrieved a leather-bound ledger. He handled them with a reverence that bordered on religious ecstasy.

He brought the manuscripts to the small sturdy table next to Zora’s chair, setting them down gently. To her immense, silent relief, he also placed her own sheaf of printed pages on the table.

“Read,” Lagios commanded softly, leaning over her. He smelled of that unfamiliar metallic tang that clung to the cold room. “Read thoroughly, Zora. Look past the grammar and the syntax. Look at the cross-outs. The marginalia. Understand the soul of the craft before the butchers carved it up.”

He straightened up, forcing his soft features into a mask of extreme, almost painful politeness. The smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m going to make us some tea. Earl Grey. It helps the mind focus.”

Zora’s heart was a frantic bird battering against a cage she had not yet perceived fully enclosing her, but she forced herself to nod. She manufactured a look of wide-eyed, breathless excitement. “Thank you, Mr. Lagios. This is… this is incredible. I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything,” he murmured. “Just read.”

He turned and walked toward the door. Zora listened to the ponderous, rhythmic thud of his footsteps. She waited for the click of the latch, the sound of a lock turning. But it didn’t come. The door remained slightly ajar, his footsteps receding down the dark hallway toward the stairs.

He didn’t lock it, she thought, a hysterical bubble of hope rising in her chest. I can just grab my pages and run.

She leaned forward, her hands trembling as she reached for the Le Guin manuscript. She told herself she would read one page—just to say she had—and then she would bolt. She opened the cover. The typewritten words were faded, the margins filled with frantic, handwritten notes. It was beautiful. It was history. A profound, aching sadness washed over her that she couldn’t stay to study it.

She closed the manuscript and stood up, grabbing her own pages. She took a step toward the door, but her eyes caught the brass plaques on the glass cases nearest to her.

She had been so focused on the titans—the Tolkiens, the Le Guins, the Herberts—that she hadn’t looked at the rest of the room.

She stepped closer to the glass. The names on these plaques weren’t legends. They were new.

Marcus Vance.
Elena Rostova.
David Chen.

Zora frowned, her panic momentarily overridden by confusion. She recognized those names. They were brilliant, rising stars in the fantasy genre. She had read Vance’s debut novel three years ago; it had won a Hugo. Rostova had published a breathtaking novella that same year.

But then… nothing.

They had all stopped writing abruptly. The literary blogs had speculated about burnout, about the pressure of the sophomore slump.

Zora moved down the line, her breath fogging the cold glass.

Sarah Jenkins.

The name hit her like a physical blow. The breath rushed out of her lungs in a ragged gasp.

Sarah Jenkins. She hadn’t just stopped writing. Zora remembered the true-crime podcast she had listened to during her gap year. An independent investigator—an ex-cop—had been hired by Jenkins’s uncle. The police had ruled it a voluntary disappearance, a young woman buckling under the pressure of sudden fame and walking away from her life. But the uncle hadn’t believed it.

Sarah Jenkins hadn’t burned out. She had vanished.

Zora stumbled backward, her hip colliding hard with the table’s wood. The Le Guin manuscript slid, almost falling to the floor.

She looked around the giant, freezing room. There were dozens of locked glass cases. Dozens of names. Some were legends who had died of old age.

But the others. The new ones. The ones who had shown a spark of true, raw genius before the “parasites” could get to them.

Lagios didn’t just collect original drafts.

The horror didn’t creep in; it crashed over her, cold and absolute. She wasn’t sitting in a reading room. She was standing in a trophy case. And John Lagios was downstairs, making tea.

Zora stood frozen for a long moment, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps. Her eyes darted frantically between the brass plaques.
Marcus Vance. Elena Rostova. Sarah Jenkins.

Her mind, trained to analyze narrative structure and world-building, began to connect the horrifying dots with sickening speed.

She remembered Vance’s brilliant, Hugo-winning debut first—a complex political thriller set in a subterranean city. Two years later, Lagios had published book seven of The Riverlands, introducing a sprawling, underground dwarven kingdom with an eerily similar political structure. The critics had praised Lagios for his “homage” to the young, vanished author.

She remembered Rostova’s novella about a blood-magic system tied to the lunar cycle. Book eight of The Riverlands featured a cult of moon-worshipping blood mages.

The literary world thought these young, brilliant writers were inspired by the master. They thought Lagios was honoring their memory by incorporating their themes into his magnum opus.

But standing in the freezing mausoleum, looking at the locked glass cases, Zora understood the monstrous truth. Lagios wasn’t honoring them. He was harvesting them.

He was a malignant narcissist with a God complex, viewing himself as the ultimate curator of fantasy literature. The established authors—Tolkien, Le Guin—were his peers, safely dead and immortalized. But the young, raw talent? They were his acquisitions. He didn’t just steal their ideas; he stole their potential before the “cretins” of the publishing industry could dilute it. He took their lives, locked their original, untainted drafts in this pristine room, and then cannibalized their genius to feed his own sprawling, bloated epic.

He was a parasite feeding on the future of the genre. And he had just brought her here to see if her “bones” were strong enough to steal.

The paralysis broke. A white-hot surge of adrenaline—pure, unadulterated survival instinct—flooded Zora’s system. She didn’t care about her manuscript anymore. She didn’t care about the Le Guin draft. She only cared about the heavy oak door standing slightly ajar.

She bolted.

She hit the hallway at a dead sprint, her sneakers slapping loudly against the hardwood. The third floor was a labyrinth of shadows. She slammed her hand against the wall, feeling frantically for a light switch. Her fingers found the plastic plate and she flicked it up.

Nothing happened.

Lagios hadn’t just turned off the lights; he had disabled the circuit for the entire floor. The environment was designed for this exact moment. It was a hunting ground built by a man who knew his prey would eventually run.

Zora plunged into the darkness, her arms outstretched. She collided hard with a robust, unseen piece of furniture—a draped armoire or a towering grandfather clock—the impact sending a shockwave of pain up her shoulder. She stumbled, her knee cracking against the floorboards, but she scrambled up instantly, driven by blind panic.

Ahead of her, at the end of the long, suffocating corridor, she saw it. A faint, sickly yellow glow spilling up from the stairwell.

She ran toward it like a moth to a flame, her breath tearing at her throat. She reached the top of the stairs, her hand grabbing the polished wooden banister, ready to hurl herself down into the maze of the second floor.

But the light wasn’t an escape. It was a lure.

John Lagios was standing on the landing, three steps down. He wasn’t holding a tray of Earl Grey tea. He was holding a thick, medical-grade surgical sponge, dripping with a clear liquid that smelled sharply of crushed green apples and cold iron.

He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look deranged. He looked utterly, terrifyingly calm.

Zora didn’t stop. She couldn’t. Her momentum carried her forward, and she launched herself at him, a desperate, feral scream tearing from her lungs. “You fat fucking psycho!”

She slammed into his chest, her fists flying, aiming for his eyes, his throat, anything soft. But the moment she made contact, the horrifying reality of their physical disparity set in. Lagios was soft, yes, but he was massive. He absorbed her frantic blows like a stone wall absorbing rain.

He didn’t strike back. He simply wrapped one thick, meaty arm around her waist, lifting her off her feet with shocking ease. Zora kicked wildly, her sneakers connecting with his shins, but he didn’t even flinch.

“People saw me!” Zora screamed, her voice cracking with hysteria as she thrashed against his iron grip. “Jean saw me leave with you! They know I’m here! They’ll come looking!”

Lagios shifted his weight, pinning her arms to her sides. He brought the dripping chemical sponge up toward her face.

“Doubtful,” he said, his voice perfectly level, conversational. “Do you know the crime statistics for New Orleans, Zora? The disappearances? The Quarter is a transient city. People vanish into the swamp every day.”

He pressed the sponge hard over her mouth and nose. The smell was overpowering, an icy, sweet vapor that instantly began to freeze her sinuses, the chemical weight of it bludgeoning her panicked nervous system into submission.

“Chloroform is a vulgar cliché, Zora,” Lagios murmured softly, his breath hot against her ear as she thrashed against his iron grip, fighting to hold her breath. “A cinematic myth relied upon by pulp hacks and dime-store thugs. I detest clichés. I demand precision.”

Zora’s vision immediately began to swim, the edges of the yellow light fracturing into dark, jagged stars. She clawed at his thick wrist, her nails digging into his flesh, but his grip was absolute.

“This is Sevoflurane,” Lagios whispered, his voice taking on a chilling, reverent tone. “Neurosurgeons use it to quiet the highest, most brilliant functions of the human brain before they open the skull.”

Her lungs screamed for air. Her body betrayed her, forcing a desperate, ragged gasp through the wet sponge. The icy chemical fire flooded her brain, short-circuiting her nervous system, and the dark, dusty stairwell rushed up to swallow her whole.

Zora woke to the taste of copper and old blood.

Her head throbbed with a sickening, rhythmic pulse, and her stomach rolled violently. She tried to swallow, but her throat felt like it had been scrubbed with steel wool. The sweet, chemical rot of the Sevoflurane still clung to the back of her tongue.

She opened her eyes. The darkness was absolute, save for a single, harsh beam of white light cutting through the gloom from a small, industrial headlamp mounted on the far wall.

She was lying on a bare, wooden floorboard. She tried to push herself up, her muscles trembling with a deep, bone-deep exhaustion. As she moved her right arm, a sharp, metallic clatter echoed in the small space.

Zora froze. She looked down at her wrist. A solid, rusted iron cuff encircled it, attached to a thick chain that vanished into the floorboards beneath a heavy, scarred wooden desk.

She wasn’t in the basement.

A hysterical, bubbling laugh clawed its way up her raw throat. It was a terrible, broken sound. In every horror novel she had ever read, the monster kept his victims in the damp, subterranean dark. She had hoped, in some desperate, primal-brain corner of her mind, that she would wake up near the earth, near a foundation window she could kick out. But the air here was thin and stiflingly hot, smelling of baked shingles and old dust.

She was in the attic. The fourth floor. The highest point of the humongous, isolated house.

She dragged herself up, her back pressing against the leg of the desk. The single beam of light illuminated her immediate surroundings. It was a writer’s cell. The desk held a stack of blank, high-quality paper and a manual typewriter.

But it was the desk itself that made Zora’s stomach heave.

The wood was deeply gouged. In the harsh light, she could see the frantic, desperate history of the people who had sat here before her. There were deep, splintered scratches near the edge, the unmistakable marks of fingernails clawing at the solid oak until they broke. Dark, rusted stains—unmistakably old blood—were smeared across the surface and soaked into the grain near the chain’s anchor point. The room didn’t just smell of dust; it smelled of copper, sweat, and the lingering, metallic tang of absolute terror.

“Help!” Zora screamed. The word tore from her throat, raw and desperate. “Somebody help me!”

“Save your voice, Zora.”

The reedy, calm tenor came from the shadows just beyond the beam of the headlamp. Zora flinched, her chain rattling loudly as she scrambled backward against the desk.

Lagios stepped into the edge of the light. He was no longer wearing the tweed jacket from the jazz bar. He wore a stained canvas apron over a simple white t-shirt. He looked less like an author and more like a butcher getting ready for the morning shift.

“The walls up here are packed with three feet of industrial soundproofing,” Lagios said, his tone conversational, almost bored. “My parents were paranoid about the noise from the streetcars. You could scream until your vocal cords hemorrhage, and Jean down at Saltarello wouldn’t hear a whisper.”

Zora stared at him, her chest heaving. The reality of the situation—the chain, the blood, the sheer, impossible mass of the man standing before her—finally crushed the last of her naive ambition into dust.

“Why?” she sobbed, the tears finally spilling over, hot and fast down her cheeks. “Why are you doing this? I just wanted to write. I just wanted to learn.”

Lagios sighed, a disappointed sound. He stepped closer, the floorboards groaning under his weight. “And you will, Zora. You will learn. You have a gift. A raw, unrefined frequency. But out there?” He gestured vaguely toward the dark walls. “Out there, they will ruin you. They will take your world and they will commodify it. They will make you write sequels until your soul is hollow.”

He leaned down, his eyes catching the harsh light. The God complex was fully illuminated now, burning with a terrifying, quiet fanaticism.

“Here, your work will be pure,” he whispered. “You will write the foundation of your world. And when it is perfect, when it is truly finished… I will take it. I will weave it into the Riverlands. Your genius will not be lost to the butchers, Zora. It will live forever in my greatness. It is a far better legacy than most writers ever achieve.”

Zora’s breath hitched. She looked at the bloodstains on the desk. “Am I going to die here?” she asked, her voice a tiny, broken thread.

Lagios straightened up. The fanaticism vanished, replaced by the cold, calculating predator she had seen on the stairs.

“That depends entirely on you,” he said dryly. “Marcus Vance fought me for three weeks. He broke his own hand trying to slip the cuff. Elena Rostova refused to eat until her organs failed. They were brilliant, but they lacked discipline. Their ends were… unpleasant.”

He turned and walked toward the heavy door at the edge of the shadows.

“Think carefully about how the next few weeks go, Zora,” Lagios said, his hand resting on the iron deadbolt. “If you cooperate, if you write, you will have the rare privilege of learning from a master before the end. If you fight…” He let the sentence hang in the stifling air, a promise of unimaginable agony.

He reached out and flicked a switch on the wall.

The industrial headlamp died.

The attic was plunged into a darkness so absolute it felt like a physical weight pressing against Zora’s eyes. She heard the heavy clack of the deadbolt sliding into place, followed by the rhythmic, receding thud of Lagios’s footsteps heading down the stairs.

Zora sat in the pitch black, the silence roaring in her ears. The panic didn’t come in a wave; it came in a sudden, paralyzing shock. Her body froze solid, her muscles locking up as her brain short-circuited, unable to process the sheer magnitude of her nightmare. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. She was a ghost, chained in the dark.

And then, cutting through the suffocating silence of the soundproofed room, came a sound that made her heart skip a beat entirely.

From somewhere downstairs, muffled but unmistakable, the brass doorbell rang—a deep, resonant sound that seemed to mock the absolute darkness of the attic.

Zora’s breath hitched. Her first instinct was to scream, to thrash against the solid iron chain until it rattled like a freight train. But the memory of Lagios’s calm, half-bored voice—three feet of industrial soundproofing—choked the sound in her throat. She was buried alive in the sky. She could scream until her lungs bled, and it wouldn’t matter. Paralyzed by the sheer, suffocating weight of her reality, she sat in the pitch black, her tears drying into tight, salty tracks on her face, and listened to the silence.

Three floors down, John Lagios did not panic.

He stood in the second-floor hallway, listening to the echo of the bell. He calmly unknotted the canvas butcher’s apron, folded it neatly, and placed it inside a mahogany credenza. He checked his white t-shirt for any stray marks, smoothed his thinning blonde hair, and descended the grand, sweeping staircase. He was no longer the monster of the fourth floor. He was John Lagios, the master of the Riverlands.

He unlocked the heavy double doors and pulled them open.

Standing on the porch was a tall white man. He was built like a brick wall, with the thick neck and broad shoulders of a career bouncer, but his posture was entirely deferential. He shifted his weight nervously, his large hands twisting together.

“Hi, Mr. Lagios,” the giant rumbled, his voice surprisingly soft. “I’m so sorry for the inconvenience, sir. Truly. But my girlfriend… she really wanted to speak to you.”

The man stepped aside. Standing behind him, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, was Jean.

Lagios’s pale blue eyes locked onto the barwoman. He didn’t blink. “Jean. What a surprise. It’s quite late.”

“I know,” Jean said, her voice tight. She didn’t look intimidated; she looked like a hound that had caught a scent. “I’m sorry to bother you, John. But that girl you left with—Zora. We had a coffee date set for tomorrow morning to talk about some local writing groups. She never texted me to confirm. Did she end up coming here?”

It was a lie. A clumsy, transparent fabrication born of desperation. Lagios saw through it instantly. He saw the muscle she had brought for protection. He calculated the variables in a fraction of a second. If he shut the door in their faces, he confirmed her suspicions. If he acted defensive, he gave them a reason to call the police.

So, he smiled. It was a warm, perfectly calibrated expression of mild regret.

“No, Jean,” Lagios sighed, leaning against the doorframe. “I offered to show her my study, but halfway to the car, she changed her mind. Said she was exhausted from her travels and just wanted to head back to her hostel. I put her in a cab on Canal Street.”

He watched Jean’s eyes dart past his shoulder, scanning the cavernous, pitch-black foyer. The suspicion radiating off her was almost palpable.

“It’s awfully dark in there,” Jean noted, her voice dropping an octave.

“I prefer the quiet,” Lagios said smoothly. Then, he made the pivot. The ultimate flex of a predator in total control. He stepped back and pulled the door wide open. “But you both look terribly worried, and I’m being a rude host. Please, come in. Let’s get some light on the subject.”

Jean hesitated, but Michael placed a gentle, caring hand on her back, and they stepped over the threshold. Lagios moved to the wall panel and began flipping switches.

The grand foyer and the adjoining sitting room exploded into light. immense crystal chandeliers flared to life, banishing the shadows and illuminating the cold, white marble, the gold-leafed mirrors, and the expensive, antique furniture. The sudden brightness transformed the house from a haunted mansion into the eccentric, opulent estate of a wealthy author. It was a brilliant, blinding facade.

“Please, sit,” Lagios offered, gesturing to a pair of velvet armchairs. “Can I make you some tea? Earl Grey?”

“That would be fine, thank you,” Michael said politely, taking a seat. Jean remained standing, her eyes scanning the room.

“I’ll be right back,” Lagios said, disappearing through a swinging door into the kitchen.

The moment the door swung shut, Jean leaned down toward Michael. “Something is wrong,” she whispered fiercely. “The air in here feels dead. And he’s lying. I know he’s lying.”

“He let us in, Jeanie,” Michael whispered back, his brow furrowed. “If he did something to her, why would he invite us inside and turn on all the lights?”

“Because he’s arrogant,” she hissed. “Keep him talking. I need to look around.”

The kitchen door swung open. Lagios emerged carrying a silver tray with three delicate porcelain cups and a steaming teapot. He set it down on the low glass table between them.

“Here we are,” Lagios smiled, taking his seat on the sofa opposite Michael.

Jean forced a tight smile. “Thank you, John. Actually, do you mind if I use your restroom?”

Lagios paused, the teapot hovering over a cup. His pale eyes flicked to Jean, then to Michael, and back to Jean. The smile never wavered. “Of course not. Go to the top of the stairs, take a left, and it’s the first door on your right.”

“Thank you,” Jean said. As she turned to walk toward the grand staircase, she caught Michael’s eye. She gave him a single, sharp nod. Be careful.

Michael nodded back. He picked up the impossibly small teacup in his massive, calloused hands, took a sip, and turned to the monster sitting across from him.

“So, Mr. Lagios,” Michael said, his voice a nervous, polite rumble. “Jean tells me you write books about dragons and stuff. That must be pretty interesting work.”

Upstairs, Jean began to climb into the dark.

The second floor of the Lagios estate was a museum of dust and forgotten wealth.

Jean ignored the first door on the right—the bathroom—and moved silently down the long, marble hallway. Her heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs, but her movements were deliberate and practiced. She had grown up in a rough neighborhood; she knew how to walk without making the floorboards sing.

She opened the first door on the left. A guest bedroom, draped in large, graying sheets. Empty.

She moved to the next. A storage room filled with antique armoires and rolled-up Persian rugs. Empty.

She reached the end of the hall and pushed open a set of wooden carved double doors. The air inside was stale, smelling faintly of dried lavender and old paper. It was the master suite. Lagios’s parents’ room.

Jean stepped inside, her eyes scanning the shadows. She expected to find the classic hallmarks of a monster’s origin story—bizarre shrines, signs of abuse, or the suffocating, obsessive preservation of a dead mother’s belongings. But as she moved to the adjacent oak dresser and clicked on a small brass lamp, she found nothing but aggressive, boring normalcy.

Framed photographs lined the dresser. They showed a handsome, smiling couple—two prominent New Orleans architects—standing proudly in front of various civic projects. In the center was a picture of a young, slightly chubby John Lagios, grinning awkwardly in a graduation gown, flanked by his beaming parents. There were no hidden horrors here. They had died of natural causes a decade ago, leaving their son a fortune and a fortress.

Jean stared at the photograph, a cold knot of doubt forming in her stomach. What if I’m wrong? she thought, the gaslighting of the bright lights downstairs beginning to take hold. What if he really did just put her in a cab?

She turned off the lamp, the darkness rushing back in. She was about to turn and head back to the stairs when a sound stopped her dead.

It wasn’t a scream. It wasn’t a cry for help.

It was a loud, concussive THUD that vibrated through the ceiling directly above her head.

Two floors up, in the pitch-black, suffocating heat of the attic, Zora was fighting a war against physics.

When she had first heard the faint, muffled sound of footsteps two floors below, a desperate, feral hope had flared in her chest. She had tried to scream, but her throat, raw from the chemical burn and the dry heat, only produced a pathetic, reedy croak that died instantly in the three feet of industrial soundproofing. She had rattled the iron chain against the desk, but the sound was swallowed by the padded walls.

She realized with horrifying clarity that her voice would never reach them. The room was designed to absorb sound waves traveling through the air.

But it couldn’t absorb kinetic energy traveling through the floor joists.

Zora didn’t think about the pain. She didn’t think about the consequences. She only thought about the brass doorbell and the fact that someone was down there hopefully looking for her.

She dragged herself up, the iron cuff biting into her raw wrist. She climbed onto the solid oak desk, her sneakers slipping on the bloodstains and the gouged wood. She stood up, her head brushing the low, slanted ceiling of the attic.

She took a deep, ragged breath, closed her eyes, and threw herself backward into the dark.

She didn’t try to break her fall. She needed maximum impact.

She hit the solid wooden floorboards with the full, dead weight of her body. The impact was catastrophic. The air exploded from her lungs in a wet gasp. Her left shoulder took the brunt of the fall, the joint popping with a sickening, audible CRACK that sent a blinding flash of white-hot agony through her nervous system. Her head whipped back, the back of her skull bouncing off the wood with a dull, wet thud.

For a terrifying second, the world went entirely black. But the survival instinct is a monstrous, demanding thing.

Zora gasped, tasting fresh blood from where she had bitten through her lip. She rolled onto her stomach, her left arm hanging useless and agonizingly heavy at her side. Using only her right arm and her legs, she dragged herself back to the desk. She hauled herself up, her muscles screaming, her vision swimming with dark spots.

She climbed onto the desk again. And she jumped again.

THUD.

This time, her hip took the impact, the bone bruising deeply against the unyielding floor. She screamed, a raw, animal sound of pure agony, but she didn’t stop. She dragged herself up for a third time.

Down in the master bedroom, Jean stared at the ceiling. The second THUD rattled the crystal drops on the chandelier in the hallway.

It was the sound of a body hitting the floor. Hard.

All doubt vanished, replaced by a surge of pure, violent adrenaline. Jean knew Michael would have heard it downstairs. She allowed herself a fleeting, deeply satisfying image of her massive boyfriend picking John Lagios up by his throat and throwing him through the front window.

But she didn’t wait for him.

Jean bolted from the bedroom. She hit the marble hallway at a dead sprint, her eyes locked on the staircase at the far end that led up into the darkness of the third floor. She took the stairs two at a time, her breath tearing at her throat. The third floor was pitch black, the circuit still dead. She stumbled over the threshold, her shin colliding hard with the edge of a wooden table.

She cried out, pitching forward and scraping her knees raw against the hardwood, but she scrambled up instantly, ignoring the sting. She felt her way along the wall, her hands slapping against the cold glass of the locked bookcases, until she found the narrow, hidden stairwell leading to the attic.

She threw herself up the final flight of stairs, her hands finding the oaken, reinforced door. The deadbolt was thrown.

“Zora!” Jean screamed, her voice echoing in the narrow stairwell. She grabbed the iron handle and threw her entire weight against it.

The door didn’t budge.

Inside the pitch-black attic, lying broken and bleeding on the floorboards, Zora heard the muffled shout. She turned her head, her vision blurring, and saw the iron handle of the door rattle violently in the dark.

Jean didn’t look for a key. She backed up in the narrow, pitch-black stairwell, raised her leather work boot, and drove her heel directly into the wood beside the iron deadbolt.

Once. Twice. On the third kick, fueled by a mother-bear adrenaline that ignored the tearing of her own muscles, the doorframe splintered. The old oak door swung inward with a deafening crash.

The smell hit her first—copper, sweat, and the sickening smell of decay. Jean pulled her phone from her pocket, clicking on the flashlight. The beam cut through the stifling heat, illuminating the nightmare. Zora was crumpled at the base of the desk, her face a mask of blood and bruised, swelling flesh. Her left arm hung at a sickening, unnatural angle.

“Oh, God. Baby girl, I got you,” Jean breathed, rushing forward. She didn’t waste time on the iron cuff; she grabbed the manual typewriter from the desk, calculating its weight, and brought it down on the blood-soaked, gouged oak where the chain’s anchor plate was bolted. The heavy steel machine smashed into the compromised wood with deafening force. On the third strike, the oak splintered entirely, allowing Jean to rip the anchor plate and its rusted screws violently out of the desk, freeing Zora with the long chain still dangling from her wrist.

Zora sobbed, a wet, broken sound, as Jean hauled her up. “Michael,” Zora gasped, her eyes rolling back. “Where is he?”

“He’s coming,” Jean promised, wrapping Zora’s good arm over her shoulder. “He’s right behind me.”

They hobbled out of the suffocating attic, Jean practically carrying the nineteen-year-old down the narrow stairs. They hit the freezing, pristine air of the third-floor mausoleum, Zora whimpering as the cold bit into her injuries. They kept moving, stumbling down to the dusty, cluttered maze of the second floor.

Jean looked toward the grand staircase at the end of the hall. The brilliant, blinding light from the foyer was spilling up the marble steps.

“Michael!” Jean screamed, her voice echoing off the gold-leafed mirrors. “Michael, get up here!”

Footsteps sounded on the marble. Ponderous. Rhythmic. Unhurried.

A shadow stretched up the wall, and then a figure stepped onto the landing.

Jean froze. Zora let out a high, thin wail of absolute despair, her knees buckling.

It wasn’t Michael. It was Lagios. His white t-shirt was pristine. There wasn’t a drop of blood on him. He looked perfectly, terrifyingly healthy, holding a fresh cup of Earl Grey tea.

“How!?” Jean shrieked, her grip tightening on Zora. “What the hell did you do to him, you fuck!?”

Lagios took a slow sip of his tea. He looked at them not with anger, but with the mild, disappointed annoyance of a professor dealing with unruly students.

“Oh, Jean,” Lagios sighed, his reedy voice echoing in the darkened hall. “You told me yourself once, remember? Years ago, across the bar. Even though you probably thought I was not paying attention because I looked bored, I have excellent social skills. I listen to the frequency of things.”

He took another step up. “I gave him what he used to like so much before you paid for his rehab. Fentanyl. A massive, pure liquid dose slipped right into his cup. He didn’t even gasp, Jean. He simply drifted off, his body forgetting how to breathe before he could even taste the tea. A quiet, peaceful edit for such a cumbersome man. I don’t partake myself, but it’s always good to keep it around for… narrative convenience.”

“You motherfucker!” Jean roared.

She shoved Zora safely behind a draped armoire and lunged.

Lagios sighed, looking genuinely irritated by the interruption. He dropped the teacup, the porcelain shattering on the marble, and caught Jean’s flying fists with shocking speed. He didn’t throw a punch; he simply stepped forward, using his massive, three-hundred-pound frame like a battering ram. He slammed Jean against the wall, his thick, meaty hands snapping up to wrap around her throat.

“I didn’t need you,” Lagios grunted, his thumbs pressing brutally into her windpipe, lifting her toes off the floor. “But it is convenient. The police will assume your junkie boyfriend relapsed, killed the girl in a paranoid rage, and then you. A tragic, common Quarter story.”

Jean’s vision exploded with dark stars. Her lungs screamed. But Jean was a bartender in the French Quarter who walked home alone at 3 AM. She didn’t fight fair.

Her right hand dropped to her hip. Her fingers found the cold, hard handle of the belt knife she kept sheathed at the small of her back. She drew it in a single, fluid motion and drove the four-inch steel blade directly into Lagios’s massive, soft belly, ripping it sideways.

Lagios’s eyes went wide. The grip on her throat vanished.

He stumbled backward, his hands flying to his stomach as a torrent of dark, hot blood spilled over his pristine white shirt. The mask of the calm, superior intellectual shattered completely. The God complex, wounded and bleeding, roared to the surface.

“Bitch!” Lagios screamed, a wet, gargling sound of pure, narcissistic fury. “After so many years, this is how you repay my brilliance!?”

He lunged for her again, his hands reaching out like claws.

But Jean had found her opening. She didn’t hesitate. She stepped into his guard, raised the bloody knife, and slashed it in a vicious, horizontal arc across his throat.

The blade bit deep. The arrogant rumbling of John Lagios stopped instantly, replaced by a wet, horrific hiss.

He staggered, his thick hands flying to his ruined throat as hot, dark blood poured through his fingers. His cold blue eyes bulged, staring at Jean in absolute, uncomprehending shock.

In the sprawling, nine-volume mythology of his mind, he had established one absolute, unbreakable law of the universe: a mere mortal could never strike down a god. And John Lagios was the god of that world. The Creator. The Architect.

As his knees buckled and the brilliant light of the chandelier began to dim, his final, fading thought wasn’t of fear, or pain, or even the talented young women he had stolen away. It was a surge of pure, narcissistic outrage. His dying brain simply could not process that a bartender from the French Quarter in a cheap pair of jeans had dared to find a plot hole in his masterpiece.

He took one step backward. His heel caught the edge of the top marble stair.

John Lagios fell. He tumbled backward down the grand, sweeping staircase, his massive body colliding heavily with the marble steps, leaving a thick, dark smear of blood all the way down. He hit the floor of the blindingly lit foyer with a sickening crunch, twitched once, and lay still.

Jean stood at the top of the stairs, her chest heaving, the bloody knife trembling in her hand. She looked down at the master of the Riverlands.

“Fuck your brilliance,” she spat into the silence.

She turned, gathered the sobbing, broken Zora into her arms, and together, they limped down the stairs, stepping over the corpse, and walked out into the humid New Orleans night.

Six months later, the neon sign above the Saltarello jazz bar flickered and died for the last time. The windows were papered over. The hub of nocturnal intellectuals was gone, the magic permanently drained from the room.

Across the city, a television in a small, brightly lit apartment played the evening news. The anchor’s voice was grim.

“…authorities are still cataloging the evidence found in the third-floor ‘mausoleum’ of the late fantasy author John Lagios. The FBI has confirmed that the original manuscripts found in the locked glass cases correspond to at least fourteen missing young authors over the last decade. The literary world remains in absolute shock…”

In the corner of the apartment, sitting at a small, cheap desk positioned directly in front of a large, open window, Zora typed.

Her left arm was still in a sling, and a pale, jagged scar cut through her eyebrow. She wasn’t writing about elves, or geopolitical magic systems, or the Riverlands. The fantasy was dead.

She hit the Return key on her laptop. The screen glowed with the first chapter of a new book. It was about a dark, suffocating house, a monster who hid in plain sight, and the terrifying, visceral reality of the blood on the floorboards.

Zora was writing horror. And it was going to be a masterpiece.

Credit: Alex T.S Driva