I watched him quit the library, the stained-glass doors latching behind him with a quiet click.

I waited a full ten minutes before I began to search through the drawers. I hoped to uncover correspondence—letters between him and Lennox, or perhaps him and his mother—and sifted through reams of blank paper, corked inkwells, bundles of quills, sticks of wax, candle tapers, a bronze stamp, an amethyst cluster, a sack of lemon drops. And then my fingers caught on a sharp edge of parchment. A square calling card. I drew it into the light.

By the seventeenth of November, it read in elegant handwriting. I held the card against a page in the book of nightmares, to compare it with Phelan’s handwriting. The script was similar in slant and embellishment, but there were a few differences. I didn’t believe Phelan had written this mysterious date down, but perhaps his mother had?

I returned the card to its place in the drawer. But my mind hummed with questions and thoughts. After a while, I decided to return to work. The next new moon was only eight days away, and I still had volumes to cover, new spells to forge in preparation.

I turned a crinkled page in Phelan’s recordings, skimming until my attention was hooked by a particular nightmare. Stunned, I leaned closer until I could taste the dust of the pages, and I read Phelan’s account:

Knox Birch is standing in a great hall of shadows. At first, he does not know where he is, but by the creeping cold on his skin, he feels like he has been here before. When the sunlight begins to flood through the windows, he sees the banners dressing the stone walls—blue banners emblazoned with stars and moons—and he realizes where he stands: the fortress in the clouds. He can feel the great depth of the mountain beneath him, and it is strange how at home he feels in Seren, even though he has never stepped foot in the mountain duchy.

Something evil happened here, he thinks.

But his memory wilts the more he attempts to remember why this place is cursed. And soon, he forgets those feelings altogether when the duke’s throne catches the sunlight. Knox is alone in the hall, and suddenly, he desires to claim the empty chair. He takes the first step, believing that he will restore whatever has broken by making himself duke. He takes the second step, and then the third. And that is when a shadow emerges, hissing like wind through cracks in the mortar. The shadow fights him, impedes him.