Casimir wrote until the words ran out of geography.
Not inspiration—geography. The desk had become an archipelago of filled pages, black ink-blood crystallized into verses that seemed to pulse faintly in the gray morning light. He'd moved to the floor when the desk proved insufficient. Then to the walls, pressing pages against the damp plaster, watching his words colonize the space where he'd been living small for so long.
Twenty-three poems. Twenty-three transactions. Twenty-three pieces of himself spent purchasing clarity, precision, manifestation.
Outside, the circle of clear air around his building had expanded. The fog had retreated three streets in every direction, leaving a pocket of terrible vision where people walked slower, spoke quieter, looked at each other with the careful uncertainty of those who'd been suddenly granted sight after years of comfortable blindness.
But Casimir barely noticed.
He was too busy writing, too lost in the exhilaration of finally—finally—having language that worked, that mattered, that didn't just describe the world but prescribed it, insisted upon it, made reality accommodate his syntax whether it wanted to or not.
His fingers had gone completely black now. Not just to the second knuckle—the entire hand, both hands, as if he'd dipped them in midnight and the midnight had decided to stay. The veins ran dark up his forearms, visible through his shirtsleeves, mapping their progress toward his heart like roads on a chart of conquest.
He didn't feel pain. He felt necessity.
The pressure would build—that overfull sensation, like his blood had become too potent for his veins, too meaningful to remain internal—and he would press his thumb to paper and write and feel the blessed release, the glorious emptying, the sense of trading something heavy for something weightless, something trapped for something free.
What had he lost?
Details. Small ones at first, then larger. His mother's eye color. The name of his first teacher. The taste of the bread his grandmother used to bake. The smell of rain on the coast where he'd spent one summer as a child. His father's laugh—no, not the laugh itself, but the feeling of hearing it, the sense of safety it had once provided.
Each loss registered as a brief ache, a moment of absence, then was immediately overwhelmed by the presence of what he'd gained: words that worked, language that lasted, poetry that actually did something instead of just sitting pretty on a page waiting to be ignored.
The trade felt fair. More than fair. Essential.
He reached for another sheet of paper.
His hand found only wood. The desk. Empty.
Casimir blinked, surfacing from the fever of composition like a diver remembering air. He looked around his room—every surface papered with his blood-verses. The desk. The floor. The walls. Even the narrow bed had accumulated pages, his handwriting covering them like a rash of truth.
He'd used everything. Every scrap. Every margin. Every blank space in every book he owned had been colonized by his suddenly-urgent penmanship.
No more paper.
The realization arrived with physical weight, like gravity remembering to apply itself. The pressure began building again immediately—that sense of words accumulating, ink-blood demanding outlet, language insisting on expression—but there was nowhere to put it.
He stood on shaking legs. His body felt strange—lighter than it should, as if the ink-blood weighed less than regular blood, or as if he'd been trading density along with memory, substance along with sense.
When had he last eaten?
The question felt academic, distant, like something that mattered to someone else. But his stomach answered with a hollow clench, reminding him that even transformed blood required fuel, that even ink needed organic substrate to transform from.
He patted his pockets. Found coins—one shilling and fourpence. The same amount he'd had yesterday, before the competition, before the bridge, before the bargain.
Before he'd become this.
Paper or food. Food or paper.
The equation presented itself with brutal simplicity. A meal would cost sixpence at minimum—bread, cheese, something to convince his body it was still worth maintaining. That would leave tenpence.
A ream of cheap paper cost a shilling.
He could eat and have nothing to write on, or write and have nothing to eat.
The pressure pulsed in his veins, insistent as a second heartbeat. Words crowded his thoughts, demanding arrangement, threatening to manifest somehow, someway, with or without his cooperation. He thought of the monk Apirael had mentioned—the one whose error had turned a nobleman into a compulsive truth-teller. Had the words leaked out of the monk somehow? Found expression without permission?
Casimir didn't want to discover what happened if he tried to contain this pressure indefinitely.
Paper, then.
The decision felt less like choice than recognition—of course paper, obviously paper, what good was a fed body if his blood-ink had nowhere to go, if the words backed up and poisoned him from within, if he choked on unexpressed language?
He could eat tomorrow. Or the day after. Or whenever someone paid him for something, though he couldn't quite remember what he'd been planning to sell, what skills he'd possessed before this, what Casimir Grey had done for money back when Casimir Grey had needed money for things other than paper.
He grabbed his coat—the black one, napless and fretted, now decorated with additional stains he suspected were his own blood-ink. Pulled it on. The fabric sat strange on his lighter frame.
The door to his room stuck—it always stuck, the wood swollen with damp—but this time when he pulled it opened easily, eagerly, as if the room itself wanted him to leave, to take his transformed presence elsewhere before it contaminated the space further.
The stairs creaked their usual judgment, but quieter, more respectful. As if they'd noticed something had changed, some fundamental shift in the nature of what they were supporting.
Outside, the clear air hit him like a slap.
He'd forgotten. His first poem—the one about anger and clarity—had manifested as literal clarity, pushing back the fog. Now he stood in the center of it, and the visibility was obscene. He could see for blocks. Could see people's faces with uncomfortable precision. Could see the grime on buildings, the rot in windowsills, the exact texture of poverty that London usually permitted the fog to soften.
People stared at him as he walked.
Not obviously—London had taught them better manners than that. But he caught the glances, the double-takes, the way conversations paused as he passed. His hands, probably. The black fingers. The dark veins visible at his wrists where his cuffs had ridden up.
Or perhaps something else. Perhaps they could sense what he'd become, the way animals sense storms—some shift in atmospheric pressure, some change in the quality of his presence.
A child pointed. "Mummy, why is that man's hands—"
"Hush." The mother pulled the child away, but not before Casimir caught the look in her eyes: fear and fascination braided together, the expression of someone who'd seen something that violated category, that existed between classifications.
He walked faster.
The stationer's shop was on Fleet Street, tucked between a printer and a tobacconist. Casimir had been there a hundred times, purchasing paper in quantities that announced poverty—single sheets, small stacks, whatever his coins could justify.
The bell above the door announced him.
Mr. Bartholomew looked up from his ledger—a small man, precisely made, who'd spent forty years selling paper to people who dreamed on it. He'd seen a thousand poets, a thousand aspiring novelists, a thousand clerks with secret ambitions. His face had learned to arrange itself into polite neutrality regardless of what walked through his door.
But when he saw Casimir's hands, the neutrality cracked.
"Good lord," he said, half-standing. "Are you injured? Should I summon—"
"No." Casimir's voice came out rough, unused. When had he last spoken aloud? "I need paper. A ream. Cheap stock. Whatever a shilling buys."
Bartholomew hesitated, his gaze moving from Casimir's hands to his face and back again, as if trying to reconcile what he was seeing with what he remembered of the polite young poet who used to browse his stock with the careful reverence of someone who understood that paper was potential, that blank pages were doors.
"Mr. Grey?" Tentative. "Is that still... are you quite well?"
"Paper," Casimir repeated. "Please."
Something in his tone must have convinced Bartholomew that questions were unwise. He nodded, turned to his shelves, began pulling down a stack of cheap foolscap—the kind with fibers visible in the weave, the kind that bled ink and tore easily but cost less than better stock.
Perfect.
Casimir placed his shilling on the counter. His black fingers left slight impressions on the wood—not stains exactly, but marks, as if the darkness in his hands wanted to spread, wanted to colonize new surfaces.
Bartholomew wrapped the paper in brown parcel paper, tied it with string, pushed it across the counter while simultaneously stepping back, creating distance without being obvious about it.
"Mr. Grey," he said quietly. "I don't know what's happened to you. But I've sold paper to enough desperate men to recognize the look. Whatever you're planning to write—" He stopped. Started again. "Just... be careful. Some things, once written, can't be unwritten."
Casimir picked up the parcel. The paper felt alive in his hands, hungry for his words, eager to be transformed from potential into actuality.
"Thank you for the advice," he said, and meant it. "But I've already written the things that can't be unwritten. Now I'm just continuing the sentence."
He turned to leave—
—and saw her through the shop window.
Lenore.
She was across the street, just stepping out of a carriage, and the morning light caught her in profile: the elegant line of her throat, the careful arrangement of her hair, the posture that suggested grace without having to insist upon it.
She wore gray—not mourning black, but something between, a dress that acknowledged sorrow without surrendering to it. In her arms: a portfolio, leather-worn, probably containing sheet music or scripts or whatever materials actresses carried between performances and rehearsals and the thousand small negotiations required to turn talent into livelihood.
Casimir froze.
He'd forgotten she existed. Not consciously—but in the fever of writing, in the exhilaration of finally having words that worked, he'd forgotten to think about her, forgotten that his decision to become this had been partly fueled by the desire to be worthy of her notice.
Now here she was. Real. Physical. Achingly actual.
And he was—what? A failed poet who'd sold himself for ink? A creature with black hands and dark veins and blood that wrote manifestos? A man who'd chosen paper over food because the words in his veins mattered more than the hunger in his belly?
She turned slightly, and her face came into view.
God, her face.
It held the same composed beauty he remembered from watching her enter the theatre, but now—standing in this circle of unnatural clarity, seeing her without fog's softening—he noticed details he'd missed before.
The faint lines around her eyes that suggested she smiled often, or had, or perhaps just squinted at fine print in poor light. The small scar near her temple, barely visible, that spoke of some childhood accident or adult carelessness. The way she held her jaw—slightly tense, as if she'd learned early that relaxing completely was a luxury women couldn't afford in public.
She was beautiful. But more than that—she was real. Complicated. Complete. Not a muse, not an ideal, but an actual person with her own fears and hopes and whatever compromises she'd made to survive in a city that ate everyone eventually.
The pressure in his veins surged.
Words crowded his throat, demanding expression. His hands—black-fingered, dark-veined—began to shake.
No, he thought. Not here. Not now. Not—
But the ink-blood didn't care about timing. It cared about truth, about precision, about language that was exact enough to manifest.
And the truth was: he'd been trying to write about her since he first saw her. He'd sketched verses in his mind, drafted metaphors, attempted to capture in language what she meant, what she represented, what she was.
But all those previous attempts had been approximations. Descriptions from outside. Observations of surface.
Now—standing here with transformed blood and manifesting words and the terrible clarity of someone who'd traded their comfortable delusions for uncomfortable sight—he could write her truly.
Not what she looked like. What she was.
The cost would be enormous. He knew that instinctively. Writing about another person—really writing them, truly capturing their essence—would require more than memory or sense. It would require something deeper. Something he might not survive spending.
But the words were already arranging themselves. The ink-blood was already moving. The pressure was already demanding outlet.
Casimir stumbled out of the shop.
Bartholomew called after him—concern or warning, it didn't matter. Casimir crossed the street, moving away from Lenore, not toward her, because he couldn't do this in her presence, couldn't risk her seeing what he was about to become, what he was about to spend.
An alley. Narrow. Dark despite the clear air. The kind of London throat that swallowed things.
He tore open the parcel, fumbled for a single sheet, pressed it against the damp brick wall.
His thumb found his mouth. He bit down—not hard enough to hurt, hard enough to open. The blood-ink welled up, black as promise, black as debt.
He pressed his thumb to the page and wrote:
On Seeing Lenore Hart in Morning Light, Unaware of Being Observed
The title alone cost him something—he felt it leave, some small detail of himself evaporating to fuel the precision. What was it? The memory of his first kiss. Gone. Traded. Worth it.
He continued:
She carries grace the way others carry debt— As something accumulated without consent, A weight that looks like lightness to observers Who've never tried to move beneath it.
His hand flew across the page, the words arriving faster than thought, pulled from somewhere deeper than intention:
I have watched men mistake her beauty for invitation, Her composure for coldness, Her refusal to diminish herself for permission. They see porcelain and assume fragility. They see elegance and assume ease. They see her face and forget to imagine What it costs to maintain that architecture In a city that teaches women to crumble.
Each line cost him. He could feel it—memories evaporating like water on hot stone. His grandmother's name. The color of his childhood bedroom. The feeling of his father's hand on his shoulder. Gone. Traded. Transmuted into language that could hold what he was seeing, what he was understanding about this woman he'd been trying to write since he first saw her.
But I have learned to see the infrastructure Beneath the beauty: The discipline. The calculation. The thousand small negotiations required To be talented in public without threatening The men who think they own the stage.
His vision blurred. Not from tears—from cost. He was spending something essential now, something deeper than memory. His sense of smell. Gone. The world suddenly flatter, simpler, reduced by one dimension of perception.
Worth it. Worth it.
She is not porcelain. She is bronze— Something that remembers being molten, Being poured into shape by circumstance, And cooling into a strength that masquerades as decoration Because decoration is how women survive In rooms where strength is considered aggression.
His legs buckled. He slid down the wall, still writing, the page pressed against brick, his blood-ink flowing freely now, the words coming not from his mind but from his blood, from the ink that had learned to see clearly, to speak truly, to capture what others only approximated:
I would write you differently if I could— As the hammer, not the bell. As the storm, not its aftermath. As the author of your own story Rather than the beautiful complication In someone else's narrative.
The cost surged. Something vital leaving. His sense of taste. Gone. Food would never have flavor again. Water would be texture without character. But the words—the words—
But you have already written yourself more precisely Than any poet could manage. Every performance Is revision. Every stage appearance is an argument You're making about who gets to be beautiful And brilliant simultaneously, who gets to demand Attention without apologizing for the demand.
His hand cramped but he didn't stop, couldn't stop, the poem demanding its conclusion, the truth demanding its final lines:
So I will not write you as muse. Will not reduce you to metaphor. Will not pretend my observation Grants me ownership of your complexity. I will simply write what I see: A woman who learned to be bronze In a world that wanted her porcelain, And chose strength that looked like grace Because grace is how strength survives In rooms where power wears a different face.
He lifted his hand.
The poem was complete.
Casimir sat in the alley, back against damp brick, holding a page covered in his blood-ink, and felt the cost settle into his body like stones into water.
Smell. Taste. Gone.
And something else. Something deeper. His ability to—what? What had he just lost that was larger than senses, more fundamental than memory?
He tried to remember being young. Being innocent. Being the kind of person who believed in simple things, in easy answers, in the possibility that good intentions mattered more than consequences.
Gone.
He'd lost his capacity for innocence. For comfortable delusion. For the small mercies of not-knowing that let people sleep at night.
He would never unknow what he now knew. Would never unsee what he'd seen. Would never return to the simple categorizations that made the world manageable.
And the poem—
The page was warm. Not warm like body temperature. Warm like something alive, something breathing, something that had just been born.
The words seemed to pulse slightly, to catch light in ways that physics shouldn't permit. When he tilted the page, the letters didn't just reflect—they responded, as if aware of being read, as if the language itself had become conscious.
This was different from the first poem. More precise. More particular. He'd written about London generally, about systems and structures. This—this was about a person. About Lenore specifically.
What would it manifest as?
He didn't know. Couldn't predict. The mechanism was still new, still learning its own rules. But something would happen. Something would change. Reality would accommodate his words because that was the bargain, that was the price, that was what he'd traded his humanity to achieve.
Casimir stood on shaking legs.
The world looked different now—flatter without smell, simpler without taste. But also clearer. As if the lost senses had been taking up space in his perception, crowding out other ways of seeing.
He carefully folded the poem. Tucked it inside his coat, against his chest, where his heart was still beating its iambic rhythm.
Then he stepped out of the alley, back into the circle of clarity, back into the street where Lenore had been—
—but she was gone. The carriage departed. Whatever errand or rehearsal or negotiation had brought her to Fleet Street had already claimed her.
Perhaps that was better. Perhaps he wasn't ready to be seen yet, not like this, not with black hands and empty veins and the cost of truth written in his diminishing presence.
Casimir looked down at the parcel of paper still clutched in his other hand.
Four hundred and ninety-nine sheets left.
He felt the pressure already building again. More words. More truths. More manifestations demanding birth.
Four hundred and ninety-nine pages to fill before he'd need more money, more choices, more decisions about what to sacrifice next.
He turned toward home, walking through the clear air that his first poem had created, carrying the second poem that might change everything.
Behind him, in the alley where he'd written it, the brick wall was smoking slightly—not burning, but responding, as if the words pressed against it had left an impression deeper than ink, had written themselves into the stone itself.
In three days, flowers would begin growing from that brick.
The wrong kind of flowers. Bronze-colored. Impossibly strong.
The kind that could break through stone.
But Casimir didn't know that yet.
He was too busy walking home with paper in his arms and poems in his blood and the terrible knowledge that he'd finally found something worth more than eating.
Worth more than sleeping.
Worth more than surviving.
He'd found words that worked.
And he would spend everything he had—everything he was—to write them.
The gloves were a problem Casimir hadn't anticipated.
He stood outside a haberdasher's on Ludgate Hill, staring at his reflection in the window glass. His hands—completely black now, fingers like they'd been dipped in India ink and forgotten—pressed against his sides as if trying to hide themselves in the folds of his coat.
A gentleman walked past, noticed, quickened his pace.
A woman with a child crossed to the other side of the street.
Casimir understood. He looked like disease. Like something that spread through contact. Like a warning the body issued when it encountered corruption.
He needed gloves.
The haberdasher's window displayed them in neat rows: kid leather, supple and expensive; cotton, practical and cheap; wool, warm but bulky. His remaining fourpence wouldn't buy the leather. Might purchase the cotton. Probably couldn't afford even that.
He was calculating whether he could steal a pair—whether his new nature included petty theft, whether manifestation extended to making shopkeepers forget to notice—when a voice called out behind him.
"Mr. Grey! Mr. Grey, is that you?"
Casimir turned, hands instinctively curling into fists, hiding the blackness.
Simon. The boy from the reading. Still young, still earnest, still carrying that devastating sincerity that the world hadn't beaten out of him yet.
"Simon." Casimir's voice came out rougher than intended. When had he last spoken at length? "What are you doing here?"
"Walking." Simon approached with the eager, puppyish energy of someone who'd found an unexpected friend. "Thinking about last night. About what you said—about writing the grief, about making them taste it." He paused, noticed something off in Casimir's posture. "Are you well? You look—"
"Tired." Casimir supplied the lie quickly. "I didn't sleep much."
"Neither did I." Simon's face brightened despite the admission. "I kept thinking about your poem. The one you read. They were fools not to choose it. Absolute fools. That bit about the city being a mouth—I've been thinking about it all morning. It's true, isn't it? We are symptoms. We are what it speaks with."
Casimir felt something twist in his chest. Pride, perhaps. Or grief for what this boy would become if he kept believing that truth mattered more than palatability.
"They weren't fools," Casimir said quietly. "They knew exactly what they were doing. They were choosing the poem that wouldn't make their readers uncomfortable. That's not foolishness—that's economy."
"But—" Simon's brow furrowed in that way of people encountering cognitive dissonance for the first time. "But what's the point of poetry if not to make people feel? If not to tell truth?"
"The point," Casimir said, and heard his own bitterness like a third party in the conversation, "is whatever the person paying for it decides the point is. Truth is expensive. Comfort is cheap. The market has spoken."
Simon looked stricken, as if Casimir had just told him Santa Claus was a lie designed to make children compliant.
"I don't believe that," the boy said softly. "I can't believe that. If that were true, why would anyone write at all?"
"Because they can't not write." Casimir felt his hands throb, felt the pressure building again in his veins. "Because the words demand outlet regardless of whether anyone pays for them. Because some of us are cursed with the need to speak even when we know no one's listening."
Simon absorbed this, his young face working through implications. Then, with the resilience of youth, he shook his head. "Well, I'm listening. Your poem mattered to me. It changed how I see things." He smiled—genuine, uncomplicated. "So you're wrong. Someone is listening. At least one person."
The twist in Casimir's chest intensified. This boy. This beautiful, doomed, earnest boy who still believed that one person listening was enough, that mattering to someone meant mattering at all.
"Thank you," Casimir said, and meant it. "That's... kind of you to say."
"It's true." Simon shifted his weight, suddenly awkward in the way of young people attempting casual conversation. "I was walking to the theatre district, actually. Thought I might try to hear her."
"Her?"
"Miss Lenore Hart." Simon's face transformed—not quite infatuation, but something close. The admiration of someone who'd glimpsed excellence and didn't yet understand that excellence could be lonely. "The American soprano. Have you heard her? Her voice is..." He struggled for words, then laughed at himself. "God, listen to me. A poet, and I can't describe a voice."
"Try," Casimir heard himself say. His coat held the folded poem against his chest. The one about Lenore. Written in his blood. Waiting to manifest.
Simon's expression turned serious, taking the challenge genuinely. "It's like... like hearing sunlight, if sunlight could be organized into sound. There's this clarity to it, this precision, but also warmth. She can make you feel things you didn't know you could feel just from the arrangement of notes." He paused, embarrassed. "That sounds ridiculous."
"No." Casimir's voice had gone quiet. "No, that sounds exactly right."
"And she's beautiful," Simon continued, the words spilling out now with the enthusiasm of someone who'd been wanting to talk about this and finally had an audience. "Not just pretty—beautiful in this way that makes you think maybe the world isn't entirely cruel, you know? Like if someone that graceful exists, maybe there's hope for the rest of us."
Casimir thought of the poem in his coat. The lines about bronze and porcelain, about grace as survival strategy, about beauty as a kind of armor women wore in rooms where power wore a different face.
Simon saw none of that. Saw only the surface. The performance. The carefully maintained architecture of femininity that Lenore had constructed to navigate a world that wanted her decorative and compliant.
And that was good, Casimir realized. That was healthy. Simon's admiration was pure precisely because it was incomplete, because it saw beauty and stopped there, didn't try to excavate the infrastructure beneath, didn't insist on understanding the cost of maintaining that grace.
"She's from America," Simon was saying. "New York. Can you imagine? Coming all the way across the ocean to sing in London. That's bravery. Real bravery. Not the kind in poems—the kind where you actually risk something."
"Yes," Casimir said. The poem pulsed against his chest, warm, alive, waiting.
"They say she might perform at the Theatre Royal next week. A small concert, just her and a pianist. I've been saving"—Simon pulled out a small purse, showed Casimir the coins inside with touching lack of embarrassment—"three shillings and eightpence. Almost enough for a gallery seat. Do you think that's foolish? Spending that much just to hear someone sing?"
Casimir looked at the boy—at his eager face, his uncomplicated joy, his willingness to spend almost everything he had on something beautiful and ephemeral.
"No," he said. "I think that's the least foolish thing I've heard in days."
Simon beamed. "You should come. We could go together. I mean, if you'd want to. If you have the coin for it."
Casimir looked down at his blackened hands, still curled into fists, still hiding. "I don't think I'd be good company right now."
"Why not?"
Because I'm becoming something that shouldn't be in polite society. Because my blood is ink and my words manifest reality and I can feel myself disappearing one poem at a time. Because if I sat next to you in a theatre and heard her sing, I might write something that would change her, transform her, make her into whatever my words decided she should be.
"I'm not well," Casimir said instead. "Haven't been sleeping. Haven't been eating properly."
Simon's face creased with immediate concern. "Are you hungry? I have bread—" He was already reaching into his coat.
"No." The word came out too sharp. Casimir softened it. "No, thank you. You're kind to offer. But I'm fine."
"You don't look fine." Simon studied him with the directness of someone who hadn't yet learned that observation could be rude. "You look like you've been writing for three days straight without stopping. My mother used to get that look when she was working on her—" He stopped. Swallowed. "Before she died."
The grief in his voice was fresh. Raw. The kind that hadn't yet calcified into something manageable.
Casimir remembered the boy's poem from last night. About his mother's death. About bread baking. About silence.
"I'm sorry," Casimir said. "About your mother."
"Thank you." Simon's eyes were bright but he didn't cry. "That's why I write, actually. To keep her... present, somehow. To make sure the words don't forget her even if—" He stopped again, collected himself. "That's silly, isn't it? Words can't remember. They're just marks on paper."
Casimir thought of his transformed blood. Of poems that manifested. Of language that had learned to bite back.
"No," he said quietly. "Words remember. Sometimes they're the only things that do."
Simon nodded, seemed comforted by this. "She would have liked your poem, I think. She was practical—worked as a seamstress—but she appreciated people who said true things even when truth was uncomfortable." He smiled, watery. "She used to say that comfort is what people choose when they're too tired to choose honesty."
The words hit Casimir like a fist. He thought of Vane. Of the judges. Of every person who'd told him to be more digestible, more palatable, more comfortable.
"Your mother was a wise woman," he said.
"She was." Simon looked up at the gray sky, blinking back what might have been tears or might have been London's perpetual grime. "I'm going to make her proud. Going to write something that matters. Something that—" He laughed at himself. "Listen to me. Full of grand plans and I can't even win a five-pound competition."
"The competition doesn't matter," Casimir said, and realized he believed it. "What matters is whether you keep writing after you lose. Whether you let rejection teach you to compromise or whether you let it teach you to write better. Truer. More precisely."
Simon looked at him with something like awe. "That's exactly what I needed to hear. You're like—you're like a mentor. Have you published much? Where can I read your work?"
The questions were innocent. Earnest. The boy genuinely wanted to know, wanted to learn from someone he'd decided was worth learning from.
And Casimir had nothing to show him. No publications. No recognition. No proof that his years of writing had amounted to anything except a pile of rejection letters and a bargain with something that wore mourning silk and collected failed poets the way some people collected rare books.
"I haven't published," Casimir said. "Not yet."
"But you will." Simon said it with the certainty of someone who still believed in meritocracy, in the inevitable triumph of talent over circumstance. "You're too good not to. That poem last night—it'll haunt me forever."
Forever is shorter than you think, Casimir thought. And haunting is expensive.
"I hope you're right," he said instead.
They stood in awkward silence for a moment. Simon shifted his weight, clearly wanting to continue the conversation but uncertain how.
"Well," he said finally. "I should go. Don't want to miss the morning rehearsal—sometimes they leave the stage door open and you can hear bits of Miss Hart practicing. It's like... like eavesdropping on angels." He flushed. "That sounds ridiculous too."
"It sounds like poetry," Casimir said. "The good kind. The honest kind."
Simon grinned, pleased. "If I write it down, I'll show you. Maybe we could meet again? Compare work? I'd love to hear what you're working on now."
Casimir felt the parcel of paper under his arm. The poem in his coat. The pressure building in his blackened veins.
"Maybe," he said, noncommittal. "If our paths cross."
"They will." Simon spoke with the confidence of someone who believed in fate, in meaningful coincidence, in the universe arranging itself according to narrative convenience. "London's not that big. Not for poets, anyway. We tend to orbit the same sad circles."
He stuck out his hand for a shake.
Casimir stared at it. At his own blackened fingers, still hidden in fists. If he shook the boy's hand, Simon would see. Would know something was wrong. Would ask questions Casimir couldn't answer without sounding mad or telling truths that would endanger them both.
"I'm sorry," Casimir said, pulling his hands further into his coat. "I'm not well. I don't want to risk—"
"Right. Of course." Simon dropped his hand, not offended, just concerned. "Take care of yourself, Mr. Grey. The world needs more poets like you. We can't afford to lose them to—" He gestured vaguely. "To whatever it is that consumes us."
He walked away, heading toward the theatre district, toward the stage door where Lenore Hart practiced, where her voice made him think of organized sunlight and reasons to believe the world wasn't entirely cruel.
Casimir watched him go.
Felt something crack inside his chest—not breaking, but recognizing. Simon was who he'd been. Who he might have remained if he'd been satisfied with purity of purpose, with earnest admiration, with writing beautiful things that no one read but that made him feel less alone.
But Casimir had wanted more. Had needed more. Had been willing to trade innocence for efficacy, purity for power, the comfortable delusion that good work would eventually be recognized.
And now he stood outside a haberdasher's with blackened hands and blood-ink veins and a poem in his coat that would manifest whether Lenore wanted it to or not, whether it helped her or hurt her, whether it revealed her truth or violated her privacy.
He thought of Simon's words: She's so beautiful. A real American lady.
So innocent. So surface. So completely missing everything that mattered about her.
And Casimir had written deeper. Had seen further. Had captured what the boy's admiration couldn't touch.
Had he done Lenore a kindness? Or a violation?
He didn't know. Wasn't sure he cared. The poem was written. The cost was paid. The manifestation would come whether he second-guessed it or not.
Casimir looked down at his hands. Pulled them from his coat. Studied the blackness, the dark veins threading up his wrists.
He couldn't afford gloves. Couldn't hide what he was becoming.
So he wouldn't try.
Let them stare. Let them cross streets. Let them recognize that something had changed, that he was no longer Casimir Grey the failed poet, the patient one, the polite one who waited in antechambers and made his truths digestible.
He was becoming something else.
Something that wrote in blood and manifested in reality and didn't need permission to speak anymore.
Casimir tucked his blackened hands back into his coat—not from shame, but from practicality. The less attention he drew, the longer he could write before someone tried to stop him.
He turned toward home, toward his narrow room, toward the four hundred and ninety-nine sheets of paper waiting to be filled with whatever truths demanded expression.
Behind him, Simon's voice drifted back on the wind, cheerful and young: "Good morning, miss! Lovely day, isn't it?"
A woman's reply, too distant to make out words, but the tone was warm.
London continuing its business. People being kind to each other in small ways. The world turning without requiring poetry to justify itself.
And Casimir walked through it like a ghost, like a rumor, like something that had already begun to fade from the record.
In his coat, the poem about Lenore pulsed with warmth.
In three days, she would find herself unable to sing anything false.
Every note would be truth. Every performance would be confession. Every aria would reveal exactly what she thought, what she felt, what she'd been hiding beneath the carefully maintained architecture of grace.
It would make her the greatest singer London had ever heard.
It would also destroy her.
But Casimir didn't know that yet.
He was too busy walking home with paper in his arms and hunger in his belly and the terrible certainty that he'd finally found something worth more than kindness.
Worth more than innocence.
Worth more than Simon's earnest belief that beauty meant hope.
He'd found precision.
And precision, he was learning, was the cruelest gift.