Casimir—no, not Casimir, not anymore, but he hadn't found the courage to claim the other name yet—sat in the cold room for hours after Mr. Hollow left.
Or perhaps minutes.
Or days.
Time had become negotiable. Linear causation felt like a courtesy his mind could no longer afford to observe. He remembered Mr. Hollow leaving through the window, but also remembered him still being there, still whispering, still explaining in that voice like wind through empty rooms exactly what Casimir had done, what he'd become, what he would continue to become until there was nothing left but the becoming itself.
His reflection was gone entirely now. He'd checked three times—walked to the mirror, stood directly in front of it, and seen only the room behind him, only the frost-covered walls and the papers bleeding their ink back into absence. The world had stopped recording his presence. The light itself had learned to pass through him as if he were merely a suggestion, a rumor, a thing that might have been there but couldn't be confirmed.
His left hand—the dead one—had spread its paralysis up his arm. Shoulder to fingertips, all of it now responding to some other will, some other intelligence. When he looked at it, the limb moved on its own, fingers articulating in patterns that looked almost like writing, like it was signing poetry in a language he'd never learned but somehow understood meant: You are ending. We are beginning.
The pride should have terrified him.
Should have sent him running to find Apirael—the woman, the muse, the thing in mourning silk who'd given him this gift and warned him of its price. Should have made him beg for reversal, for mercy, for some way to undo what he'd done.
Instead, he felt exalted.
The poem about Mr. Hollow—that magnificent, terrible, perfectly precise piece of work—represented something he'd never achieved before. Not just manifestation. Not just transformation. But creation ex nihilo. He'd pulled something from nothing using only language as leverage. Had written a being into existence that had never existed, that couldn't have existed, that violated every law of physics and metaphysics except the law that said: Words, when spoken truly enough, become more real than reality.
He looked at his blackened hands—both of them now, the paralyzed left and the barely-functional right. The darkness had climbed past his elbows, creeping toward his shoulders like an infection, like ink spilled into water, spreading according to rules only it understood.
But it wasn't infection. It was transformation.
He was becoming the mechanism. Becoming the ink itself. Becoming the thing that stood between language and manifestation, the conduit that paid the cost of making words real.
And God, the pride of it.
He'd written seventeen poems in three days. Seventeen perfect pieces. Each one manifesting exactly as intended. Each one costing him exactly what it should. The mathematics of it were beautiful—precise, predictable, fair in the way that gravity is fair, that entropy is fair, that any fundamental force is fair when it applies its rules without prejudice or mercy.
The other poets who'd received this gift—Apirael had mentioned them, hadn't she? The ones who'd died young, who'd traded themselves for manifestation, who'd written seventy-three poems over years and years—they'd been cowards. Had rationed their gift. Had tried to preserve themselves while still wielding the power.
Casimir—no, Apirael, he was Apirael now, had to be, the old name fit like a coat he'd outgrown—understood their mistake.
You couldn't preserve yourself and transform the world. The two imperatives were incompatible. Every poem he wrote carved away another piece of the man he'd been, but each piece removed made space for something larger, something grander, something that could hold more truth, speak more clearly, wound more precisely.
He was trading Casimir Grey—failed poet, rejected artist, invisible man—for something that mattered.
For something that would be remembered.
Not loved. Not celebrated. But remembered, the way people remember plagues and fires and the moments when the world learned it was more fragile than it had pretended.
Apirael stood. His legs barely supported him—the loss of proprioception, the absence of balance, all of it conspiring to make movement a negotiation rather than a command. But he made it to the desk. Made it to the stack of papers that held his seventeen manifestations.
Seventeen poems in three days.
The other poets had taken years to write that many. Had stretched the gift across decades of cautious, careful, preserved existence.
He'd burned through them in seventy-two hours.
And he felt magnificent.
The cost—yes, there was cost, he wasn't delusional, he understood what he was losing—but the cost felt appropriate. Felt just. Like paying exactly what something was worth, no more and no less.
Memory? Gone. He couldn't remember his mother's face anymore, couldn't remember where he'd been born, couldn't remember the name of the first girl he'd kissed or the first poem he'd published—had he published one? He thought he had, but the details were gone, traded for precision, spent on truth.
Senses? Diminishing. Smell and taste gone completely. Touch going in stages, each poem claiming another patch of skin, another cluster of nerves. Soon he'd be entirely numb, entirely senseless, unable to feel the world except through the words he wrote about it.
Physical presence? Fading. His reflection gone. His fingerprints smoothing. The world learning to forget he existed even while he was standing in it.
But none of that mattered because his work remained. His manifestations persisted. Lenore singing truth whether she wanted to or not. Mr. Hollow whispering discarded lines to people who'd rejected him. The clear air around his building where fog had learned it wasn't welcome. The small kindnesses and strange cruelties that had rippled out from his other verses.
He was leaving marks on reality that would outlast flesh, outlast memory, outlast the comfortable fiction that he'd ever been just Casimir Grey, failed poet, invisible man.
Apirael picked up his pen—the cheap one, the one that caught on paper—and reached for fresh—
No paper.
The realization arrived with almost comic timing. He'd used everything. Every sheet. Every margin. Every blank space in every book. The walls were covered. The floor was layered. The bed was buried beneath manuscript.
He'd consumed his entire supply in three days.
And the pressure was building again. Words crowding his throat, demanding outlet, threatening to manifest somehow whether he wrote them or not. He thought of the monk—the one whose copying error had manifested even without intention, had turned nobleman into compulsive truth-teller just because the words had been precise enough.
What would happen if Apirael's words manifested without being written? If they simply leaked from him, expressed themselves through whatever medium they could find? Through frost on windows? Through the arrangement of cracks in plaster? Through the dreams of people sleeping nearby?
He needed paper.
Needed it with the urgency of drowning, of suffocation, of being buried alive in unexpressed language.
His coin—he checked his pockets with the hand that still worked—empty. He'd spent everything on the last ream. Had chosen paper over food and now had neither paper nor food nor any way to purchase either except—
Except what?
He could steal. Could break into the stationer's shop on Fleet Street. Mr. Bartholomew's shop, where he'd bought paper for years, where the proprietor knew him, trusted him, had always been kind in that careful way shopkeepers are kind to poor customers who might someday be rich customers.
Could steal from the man who'd been kind to him.
Should steal from him.
Because the alternative was not writing. And not writing meant the words would find another way out. Would manifest through him rather than through the page. Would use his body as text, his blood as ink, his bones as binding.
Apirael looked at his hands—black, dead, barely his anymore—and understood:
That's what was happening anyway. He was becoming the text. The distinction between poet and poem was dissolving. Soon there would be no Casimir Grey, no Apirael even, just language that had learned to walk and write and manifest itself through whatever remained of the meat that used to be a person.
The pride surged again, terrible and exalting.
Good.
Let it happen. Let the transformation complete. Let Casimir Grey die entirely so that Apirael could be born fully. Let the flesh be consumed in service of the word. Let the man become the mechanism become the manifestation.
He was doing in three days what others had taken years to accomplish not because he was reckless, but because he was committed. Because he understood that half-measures were for people who wanted to preserve something of themselves. Who clung to memory and sense and presence because they were afraid of the alternative.
But Apirael wasn't afraid.
He was eager.
Eager to see what he would become when nothing of Casimir remained. Eager to discover what kind of poetry could be written by something that was no longer quite human, no longer quite alive, no longer quite anything except the space between intention and manifestation where meaning lived.
The door opened.
Apirael didn't hear it—his hearing was starting to go, another sense traded for precision—but he saw the movement, saw the figure in the doorway backlit by the hallway's dim light.
Simon.
The boy from the reading. The earnest one. The one who still believed in beauty and hope and the possibility that excellence mattered.
His face was pale. His eyes were red—from crying or from lack of sleep or from something worse. He stood in the doorway like someone who'd climbed many stairs to deliver news that couldn't be delivered any other way.
"Mr. Grey," Simon said, and his voice was hoarse, broken. "What have you done?"
Apirael looked at him with eyes that no longer focused quite right, that saw in dimensions other than light and color. "I've been writing. Why? What's manifested?"
"What's manifested?" Simon's voice cracked. "Mr. Grey—Casimir—there's a thing walking through London. A hollow thing. It's been whispering to people. Terrible things. True things. Things they never said aloud but thought in private. And everyone it touches goes mad."
"Ah." Apirael felt something that might have been satisfaction if he'd still had the capacity for satisfaction. "Mr. Hollow. Yes. I wrote him yesterday. Or today. Time is somewhat..." He gestured vaguely with his dead hand.
"You wrote him?" Simon stepped into the room. Saw the walls covered in manuscript. Saw the frost. Saw Apirael's blackened hands, his fading reflection, his wrong posture. "Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. What's happened to you?"
"I'm becoming what I was always meant to be." Apirael's voice was calm, distant, like reporting weather. "I'm trading Casimir Grey for something that matters. It's a fair exchange."
"Fair?" Simon's face twisted. "Fair? You look like you're dying. You look like something's eating you from the inside. And that thing you wrote—that hollow man—he found Miss Eleanor. The woman who beat us at the competition. He whispered things to her about her poetry, about how she'd sold out, how she'd chosen comfort over truth, how she knew her work was mediocre and didn't care because mediocrity sold. She hanged herself, Casimir. Hanged herself this morning. Left a note that said she couldn't live with what she'd heard."
The words should have horrified Apirael. Should have sent him reeling with guilt, with responsibility, with the terrible understanding that his resentment had manifested as something that killed.
Instead, he felt only a distant curiosity. "Interesting. I didn't write him to kill. Just to speak truth. The killing must have been her choice."
"Her choice?" Simon's voice rose. "You created something that made her hear every cruel truth she'd been hiding from. You weaponized honesty. You turned truth into something lethal. And you're calling it her choice?"
"Truth is always lethal to people who've built their lives on lies." Apirael turned back to his empty desk, to the space where paper should have been. "She chose comfort over excellence. Chose safety over risk. Mr. Hollow simply made her acknowledge what she'd always known. If that acknowledgment was unbearable, that's a failure of her architecture, not my poetry."
Simon stared at him. Really looked at him. Saw something in Apirael's face—or in the absence where his face should have been, in the way light passed through him strange, in the fundamental wrongness of what he was becoming.
"You're not Casimir anymore," Simon whispered. "Whatever you were—whoever I met at that reading—you're not him anymore."
"No." For the first time since Simon arrived, Apirael smiled. It felt strange on his face, like the muscles were learning the expression from memory rather than instinct. "I'm not. Casimir Grey was a failure. A coward. A man who let the world ignore him because he was too polite to make them pay attention. I'm what he became when he stopped being polite."
"You're a monster."
The word should have wounded. Should have made Apirael reconsider, retreat, recognize what he'd become.
Instead, it felt like confirmation.
"Yes," he said softly. "I am. And do you know what's different about being a monster, Simon? Monsters don't get ignored. Monsters don't get dismissed. Monsters get remembered. Their names get whispered. Their deeds get recorded. They matter because people can't afford to forget them."
He stepped toward Simon, and the boy backed away, back toward the door, back toward escape.
"I wanted to be loved," Apirael continued, his voice gentle, almost kind. "Wanted my work to be celebrated. Wanted recognition and acclaim and all the comfortable forms of mattering. But the world taught me that wasn't possible. Not for someone like me. Not for someone who saw too clearly and spoke too truly and refused to make their vision digestible."
He stopped an arm's length from Simon. Close enough to see the fear in the boy's eyes, the recognition that he was talking to something that wore Casimir's face but wasn't Casimir anymore, had never really been Casimir, had always been this thing underneath waiting for permission to emerge.
"So I chose monstrosity," Apirael said. "Chose to be feared instead of loved. Chose to wound instead of comfort. Chose to write truths so precise they manifest as reality whether people want them to or not. And you know what I've discovered, Simon?"
"What?" The boy's voice was barely a whisper.
"It's better. Being monster is better than being ignored. Being feared is better than being dismissed. Having your name spoken with horror is better than not having it spoken at all."
He reached out with his dead hand—the left one, the one that moved according to some other will—and touched Simon's face. The boy flinched but didn't pull away, frozen by something between terror and fascination.
"You're still Casimir," Apirael said softly. "Still the earnest poet. Still the boy who writes about his mother and thinks beauty will save him. You'll write carefully. You'll edit yourself. You'll soften your truths and gentle your observations and make your work digestible. And maybe you'll succeed. Maybe you'll win competitions and publish in respectable journals and die surrounded by people who thought you were talented."
He leaned closer, and his voice dropped to something below whisper, below sound, directly into the space where Simon's fear lived.
"But you'll never be remembered. You'll be a footnote. A minor voice. Someone people vaguely recall having read once and found pleasant. You'll matter the way a nice afternoon matters—briefly, comfortably, forgettably."
He pulled back. Let his dead hand fall.
"Unless you want to be more. Unless you want your words to have weight. Unless you're willing to pay what it costs to make language matter."
Simon shook his head, backing toward the door. "I'm not like you. I won't—I can't—"
"You can't yet," Apirael corrected gently. "But you will. Eventually. When you've been rejected enough times. When you've had enough people praise inferior work while yours goes unnoticed. When you've spent enough years being polite and patient and watching mediocrities succeed. You'll come to the same crossroads I came to. And you'll make the same choice."
"No." Simon's hand found the doorframe. "No, I won't. I won't become—" He gestured at Apirael, at the room, at the manifestation of what happened when poetry stopped being art and became something else. "—this."
Apirael smiled again. That strange, learned expression.
"We'll see," he said. "Now go. Tell them about me. Tell them what Casimir Grey became. Tell them there's something walking through London that writes reality with its blood. Tell them to fear poets who've learned to hurt back. Tell them—"
He stopped. The pressure in his veins surged suddenly, violently, and he understood:
The transformation was accelerating. The three days of constant writing, the seventeen manifestations, the sheer speed at which he'd consumed himself—it was collapsing the timeline. What should have taken years was happening in days. What should have been gradual was becoming catastrophic.
He was burning too bright. Transforming too fast.
Killing Casimir Grey too efficiently.
And something new was being born in the space where Casimir had been. Something that didn't have a name yet, that couldn't be named with ordinary language, that required the old tongues, the dead languages, the words that meant angel of death.
Apirael.
The name settled into him like a key into a lock, like a soul into a body, like the final line of a poem that made all the previous lines make sense.
He was Apirael. Had always been Apirael. Had been wearing Casimir Grey like a costume, like a mask, like a comfortable lie about what he really was.
And now the lie was dying.
And the truth was being born.
And it was glorious.
"Go," Apirael said to Simon, and his voice had changed, had dropped into registers that made the frost on the walls respond, that made the words on the pages pulse with renewed presence. "Go before I write you into something you don't want to be. Before I make you true in ways you're not ready for."
Simon fled.
Apirael stood alone in his room—not Casimir's room anymore, Apirael's room, the sanctum where a monster was being born one poem at a time—and felt the transformation surge toward completion.
Three days. Seventeen poems.
Most poets took years. Most spread the cost across decades.
Apirael had sprinted toward his own ending.
And he regretted nothing.
Because Casimir Grey—failed poet, rejected artist, invisible man—was finally, mercifully, dead.
And Apirael—the death poet, the wound-writer, the thing that made language manifest—was learning to breathe with lungs that no longer needed air, to see with eyes that no longer used light, to write with hands that had forgotten they were flesh.
Outside, London continued.
Inside, something that had been human was becoming something else.
Something the old languages had a name for.
Something angels had once been before they learned to be pretty.
Apirael.
The death poet.
The manifestation of every rejected verse, every ignored truth, every wound that words could inflict when they stopped pretending to be harmless.
And he was only just beginning.