Three days.
That was how long it took for the poem to metabolize reality.
Casimir spent those days writing. Filling pages. Emptying himself one verse at a time into the paper that had cost him food, that had cost him sense, that was costing him everything he'd been and transforming him into something he couldn't yet name.
His room had become a scriptorium of blood. Pages covered every surface, layered like scales, each one a small surgery performed on the world's flesh. He wrote about poverty and it manifested as sudden, inexplicable generosity—three families on his street found anonymous donations, enough to pay rent, to buy bread, to postpone their individual catastrophes for another month. He wrote about isolation and the walls of his building grew thicker overnight, the sounds of neighbors suddenly muffled, each apartment becoming its own island of privacy and loneliness.
Small manifestations. Local effects. The mechanism learning its calibrations through repetition.
He'd lost more pieces of himself. His sense of touch in his left hand—the fingers moved, obeyed commands, but reported nothing back. Temperature, texture, pain—all gone, as if that hand had been replaced with a clever forgery that didn't quite understand its purpose. The memory of his first published rejection letter—he knew he'd received one, knew it had mattered, but couldn't remember what it had said, who'd sent it, why it had wounded him. His ability to cry—the mechanism still worked physically, but whatever internal process converted feeling into tears had been disconnected, severed, traded for some poem's precision.
And still he wrote.
Because the pressure never stopped. Because the ink-blood accumulated faster than he could express it. Because stopping felt like drowning, like suffocation, like being buried alive in unexpressed language.
On the third morning, Simon appeared at his door.
Casimir almost didn't answer the knocking. Had been deep in composition, writing a verse about memory and how the city taught people to forget their own faces. But the knocking persisted—urgent, arrhythmic, the percussion of genuine distress.
He opened the door.
Simon stood in the hallway, eyes wide, face flushed with something between terror and exhilaration. He stared at Casimir—at the blackened hands now visible, no longer hidden, at the dark veins that had climbed past his elbows toward his shoulders, at the way Casimir's reflection in the hallway mirror seemed slightly transparent, slightly negotiable.
"Mr. Grey," Simon breathed. "What's happened to you?"
"I'm writing," Casimir said simply. "What's happened to you?"
"It's Miss Hart." The words tumbled out. "Something's—she's—you have to come. You have to see. It's like nothing that's ever—" He grabbed Casimir's arm. Didn't flinch at the blackness. "Please. I don't understand what I'm seeing. I need someone else to tell me I'm not mad."
Twenty minutes later, they stood outside the Theatre Royal.
The crowd announced the change before Casimir saw it.
Normally, theatre-goers arrived with the casual entitlement of those who'd purchased the right to be entertained. They came in carriages, in groups, with the lazy confidence of people who knew the performance would wait for them because they were paying for it to exist.
Not today.
Today they pressed. Hundreds of bodies compressed against the theatre's entrance like water trying to force itself through a crack in stone. The well-dressed elbowed the poorly-dressed without apology. Women's hats were crushed. Men's dignity was abandoned. All of them pushing, desperate for entrance, desperate for proximity to something they couldn't name but could feel—some shift in the atmospheric pressure of possibility.
"It started two nights ago," Simon said, voice shaking. "Her rehearsal. Just her and the pianist, practicing scales. But the sound, Mr. Grey. The sound was—" He struggled. "Wrong. No—not wrong. Too right. Too perfect. Like hearing mathematics sing. Like listening to geometry become music."
Casimir's chest tightened. The folded poem, still pressed against his heart. Three days to manifest.
Three days to transform her.
"People on the street stopped walking," Simon continued. "Just stopped. Stood there listening. Some of them started weeping. One man confessed to his wife that he'd been stealing from their savings—just blurted it out, couldn't stop himself. A woman told her companion she'd never loved him, said it like the words were being pulled out of her. And Miss Hart just kept singing, kept practicing, and every note seemed to—to—"
"Compel truth," Casimir finished quietly.
"Yes." Simon looked at him with something like relief. "Yes, exactly. How did you know?"
Because I wrote it. Because I saw beneath her grace and found bronze. Because I captured her precisely enough that reality had no choice but to accommodate my syntax. Because I made her into what I saw when I looked past the performance.
"Lucky guess," Casimir said.
The crowd surged. Someone shouted. A constable appeared, trying to impose order on something that had evolved past ordering. His voice—trained to command—went thin and reedy when he got close enough to hear what was happening inside the theatre.
Lenore was singing.
Not performing. Not rehearsing. Singing—and the sound came through stone, through wood, through the architecture of the building itself as if walls had learned to be porous to her voice.
Casimir couldn't make out words. Couldn't identify the piece. But he could hear the quality of it—crystalline, mathematical, the kind of beauty that didn't invite appreciation but demanded it, that reached inside the listener and found whatever they'd been lying about and made them speak it.
Near the entrance, a gentleman in expensive tailoring turned to his companion and said, with the flat affect of someone no longer in control of their speech: "I married you for your father's connections. I have never desired you. I think of her—the governess—when we are intimate. I am profoundly unhappy."
His wife stared at him. Then, in the same strange monotone: "I know. I have always known. I stay because leaving would mean admitting I chose poorly. I am also profoundly unhappy. I believe we deserve each other."
They stood there, truth hanging between them like a dissection performed on a still-living patient, neither able to retreat from what they'd just confessed.
Around them, similar scenes multiplied. The crowd, pressed close enough to hear her voice clearly, began confessing. Not dramatically—clinically. Each person's voice going flat, losing affect, becoming merely a conduit for truth that had been waiting for permission to express itself.
"I stole from the till."
"I've been visiting the brothel on Tuesdays."
"I don't believe in God but I'm too frightened to admit it."
"I'm glad my mother died. She was cruel and I'm relieved."
"I love him but I'll never tell him because I'm a coward."
Simon pressed his hands to his ears, but it didn't help. The confessions accumulated, layering over each other, a chorus of unwilling honesty.
"Make it stop," he whispered. "Mr. Grey, what's happening?"
Casimir couldn't answer. Could barely breathe.
This was his poem. His observation. His precision.
He'd written that Lenore was bronze disguised as porcelain, strength masquerading as grace. He'd captured how she navigated rooms where power wore different faces. He'd seen through the performance to the infrastructure beneath.
And the manifestation had taken his words literally.
She couldn't perform anymore. Couldn't maintain the graceful architecture. Every note she sang now was truth—hers and everyone else's. Her voice had become a kind of surgery, cutting through pretense, exposing what people had been carefully concealing from themselves and each other.
The theatre doors opened.
A man stumbled out—the theatre manager, by his dress. His face was pale, eyes wide with something beyond fear. When he spoke, his voice carried the same flat, compelled quality as the confessors in the crowd:
"She cannot stop singing. We have asked her. We have begged her. But every time she tries to speak normally, it comes out as song. And every song compels truth. We are all confessing things we never meant to confess. The pianist revealed he'd been embezzling. The stagehand admitted to arson. I have told my wife I've been unfaithful seventeen times with eleven different women. We are all being unmade by proximity to her voice."
He looked directly at Casimir. Somehow, impossibly, he looked directly at Casimir as if he could see the connection, the causation, the guilt.
"Someone has done this to her," the manager said, still in that terrible monotone. "Someone has turned her into a weapon disguised as art. Someone has made her beauty into something monstrous."
The word hung in the air like an accusation, like a verdict, like the truth it was.
Casimir stepped back. Simon grabbed his sleeve.
"Mr. Grey, you look like you've seen the Devil's own work."
"Worse," Casimir whispered. "I've seen mine."
Before Simon could ask what that meant, a new sound cut through the confessions.
Applause.
Not polite theatre applause. Not the measured appreciation of the cultured. Something feral. Something that recognized it was witnessing something unprecedented, something that shouldn't exist but did, something that violated all the comfortable rules about how beauty was supposed to behave.
The crowd began pushing harder. Fighting to get in now, not away. Because however terrible the compulsion, however unwilling the truth-telling—
She was magnificent.
Disproportionately, impossibly, catastrophically magnificent.
The doors opened fully, and Casimir saw her.
Lenore stood center stage, visible through the entrance, through the pressed bodies. She wore white—a rehearsal dress, simple, unadorned. But her presence had changed. She stood taller, straighter, as if his words about bronze had rewritten her posture. Her face held no expression—not cold, not warm, just clear, like looking at truth that had finally stopped apologizing for existing.
And she was singing.
Still singing.
An aria—Casimir recognized it vaguely, something Italian, something about love and loss and the usual operatic preoccupations. But the way she sang it transformed the meaning entirely. Each note carried weight beyond melody. Each phrase was surgery. Each sustained tone reached inside listeners and found whatever they'd been concealing and pulled it out.
A woman in the crowd dropped to her knees, weeping. "I never loved my children. I wanted them dead. I want them dead still. God forgive me, I've been praying for illness to take them so I can be free."
A man beside her: "I've been planning to murder my business partner. I have the knife. I have the resolve. I lack only the courage to act."
The confessions spread like contagion, each person unable to resist the compulsion Lenore's voice imposed. And through it all, she kept singing, her face serene, her posture perfect, her voice executing the aria with technical precision that had crossed into something beyond human.
She was no longer an actress. No longer a soprano.
She was an instrument. A mechanism. A force that Casimir's words had created and reality had manifested.
Simon was crying. "She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. She's the most terrible thing I've ever seen. Mr. Grey, I don't understand what I'm feeling. I want to leave but I can't move. I want to confess but I have nothing to confess except that I'm terrified and exhilarated and I think I'm going mad."
Casimir pulled him back. Away from the crowd. Away from Lenore's voice. Three streets away before Simon's expression cleared, before the compulsion released its grip.
Simon leaned against a wall, breathing hard. "What was that? What's happened to her?"
"Someone wrote her truly," Casimir said quietly. "And truth, it turns out, is the cruelest gift."
"But—but she's—" Simon struggled. "She's magnificent. She's more than magnificent. She's—"
"Monstrous," Casimir finished. "She's both. That's what makes it tragedy."
Simon looked at him with new eyes. Not suspicion—not yet. But something closer to it. "You know something. You understand this somehow."
"I understand poetry," Casimir said carefully. "I understand what happens when language becomes precise enough to manifest. When observation becomes transformation. When a writer captures someone so exactly that reality has no choice but to accommodate the description."
"That's not possible."
"Neither is what we just saw. Yet here we are."
Simon slid down the wall until he was sitting on the cobblestones, head in his hands. "I came to London to see beauty. To hear her voice. To believe that excellence existed somewhere in this terrible city." He looked up. "But that wasn't beauty. That was—I don't even have words for what that was."
"Precision," Casimir said. "That was precision. Beauty is what we call truth when we can stand to look at it. When we can't—when it's too exact, too clear, too uncompromising—we call it monstrosity."
He thought of his poem. Of every word he'd chosen. Every observation he'd made. Every truth he'd excavated from beneath Lenore's graceful performance.
He'd been trying to honor her. To see past the surface. To recognize the bronze beneath the porcelain.
Instead, he'd turned her into something that couldn't hide anymore. Couldn't perform humanity. Could only be exactly, precisely, catastrophically what she was.
Truth incarnate.
Wearing a white dress.
Destroying everyone who heard her.
"I need to go," Casimir said. His hands were shaking—the black fingers trembling, the dark veins pulsing. "I need to—I need to write this down. Before I forget. Before the cost takes the memory."
"Cost?" Simon looked up. "What cost? Mr. Grey, you're not making sense."
But Casimir was already walking. Back toward his room. Back toward the pages waiting to be filled. Back toward the mechanism that demanded expression even as it consumed him.
Behind him, faintly, carried on London's indifferent wind:
Lenore's voice. Still singing. Still true.
Still magnificent and monstrous in equal measure.
And Casimir understood, with the terrible clarity of someone who'd finally seen their work manifested:
He'd wanted words that mattered.
He'd wanted language that had consequence.
He'd wanted to write something that would change how people saw the world.
He'd succeeded.
And success, it turned out, looked exactly like destruction.
He wrote for six hours straight.
Wrote about Lenore, about what he'd done, about the mechanism of manifestation and the cost of precision. Wrote until his left hand stopped moving entirely—not paralyzed, just absent, no longer receiving commands from his brain, as if the connection had been severed to fuel the language.
Wrote until he'd lost the memory of his own face. He could remember having a face, remember that mirrors had once shown him something, but the specifics—the shape of his nose, the color of his eyes, the exact configuration that had been his—gone. Traded. Spent.
Wrote until the pressure finally eased and he could stop.
The poem—if it could still be called that, if it hadn't evolved into something between confession and autopsy—lay across fifteen sheets.
He titled it: On Becoming the Instrument of Another's Transformation (An Apology Written Too Late to Matter)
Then he folded it carefully, placed it with the others, and understood:
He couldn't undo what he'd done to Lenore.
Couldn't unwrite the poem that had transformed her.
The manifestation was complete. Permanent. She would spend the rest of her life being exactly, precisely, disproportionately what he'd seen when he looked beneath her grace.
Bronze that couldn't pretend to be porcelain anymore.
Truth that couldn't perform politeness.
Beauty that had become burden.
Casimir looked at his hands—one black, one black and motionless. Looked at the pages—filled with his blood, his truth, his guilt. Looked at the mirror—and saw nothing reflected there except the room behind him, as if he'd already begun to fade from the world's record.
And he understood:
This was the mechanism. This was the price. This was what it meant to have words that mattered.
You spent yourself purchasing outcomes.
And sometimes the outcomes were worse than the disease they were meant to cure.
Outside, London continued. Inside, Casimir Grey continued to disappear.
And somewhere in the Theatre Royal, Lenore Hart continued to sing, unable to stop, unable to lie, unable to be anything except precisely what a poet had written her to be.
Three days.
That's how long it had taken to turn a gift into a curse.
To turn admiration into violation.
To turn poetry into something that deserved its own autopsy.
Casimir picked up his pen. Pressed his thumb to fresh paper.
And began writing his next transformation.
Because the pressure was already building again.
Because the mechanism demanded expression.
Because he'd discovered the terrible truth about words that matter:
Once you learn to wield them, you can't stop.
Even when you should.
Especially when you should.