The poem came differently this time.
Not as observation of a specific person—not like Lenore, not like Mr. Hollow, not like any of the seventeen pieces that had manifested with surgical precision. This was broader. Looser. A meditation on London itself, on the geography of suffering, on the way poverty and fog created spaces where violence could gestate unobserved.
Apirael wrote about Whitechapel.
About the narrow alleys that twisted like intestines, digesting the desperate and excreting the dead. About the lodging houses where women sold what remained of their bodies because their bodies were the only currency the world would accept. About the fog that hung heavy as guilt, thick as complicity, teaching the city how to look away from what it didn't want to see.
He wrote about hunger—not for food, but for significance. About how poverty stripped away everything except the need to matter, to leave some mark, to prove existence before death erased it entirely. About how the city taught its poorest that they were invisible unless they became spectacular.
He wrote about knives.
Not murder weapons—tools. The way the desperate used them to survive, to threaten, to carve out space in a world that offered none. About how a blade could be pen and sword simultaneously, could write meaning into flesh when paper wasn't available, when language had been stolen by those who could afford literacy.
He didn't write about him. Didn't name the killer. Didn't describe the murders explicitly. Just wrote the landscape that would make such murders inevitable, the conditions that would birth someone who learned to author atrocities.
Five pages. Black ink-blood tracking down white paper. His hand moving in the strange half-conscious state that came now when the pressure demanded outlet, when the mechanism overtook volition, when he was more conduit than composer.
Simon watched in silence. Not horror now—fascination. His eyes tracked every line, every verse, every moment when Apirael's hand hesitated before finding the next precisely wrong word, the exact metaphor that would make reality shift slightly, accommodate, manifest.
When Apirael finished, he felt the familiar lightness. The pressure released. The blood-ink circulating normally again. His body remembering how to animate without being forced.
But also: absence. Loss. Something taken as payment.
His sense of direction in the moral sense. Not north and south—he'd lost that days ago. But the internal compass that distinguished between should and shouldn't, between permissible and forbidden, between action and consequence. It had been growing unreliable anyway, had been spinning wildly since Mr. Hollow, but now it was simply... gone.
He could still choose. Could still decide. But the weight that should accompany choice—the feeling that some things were heavier than others, more significant, more serious—had evaporated. Everything felt equally possible now. Equally valid. Equally available.
It was, he recognized, freedom. The terrible kind.
"That was different," Simon said quietly. "The other poems—even Mr. Hollow—they were about specific people. Specific truths. This was..." He struggled for words. "Broader. Vaguer. More like—"
"Like setting a stage," Apirael finished. "Like writing the world that would make certain stories possible. Like creating the conditions rather than the specific event."
He looked at the pages. At what he'd written. At the portrait of Whitechapel as a landscape of permission, where violence could flourish because visibility was voluntary, because the city had collectively agreed not to see what happened in certain spaces to certain people.
"I didn't write about murders," he said, and his voice held something that might have been confusion or might have been recognition of something he didn't want to admit. "I wrote about the soil that grows them. The environment. The ecosystem."
"And ecosystems," Simon said slowly, "produce what they're designed to produce."
They sat in silence.
Outside, London continued. Inside, something had shifted. Not dramatically—just a small recalibration in the machinery of reality, a slight adjustment in what was possible, what was likely, what the landscape would now permit.
Three days passed.
Apirael wrote constantly now—not from need, but from compulsion that had evolved past biological and become something more fundamental. He wrote about London. Always London. The rookeries of St. Giles where children learned to steal before they learned to speak. The docks where Irish and Jews competed for work that barely sustained life. The markets where meat of questionable origin sold beside vegetables that had been dropped, retrieved, and repriced.
He wrote landscapes. Wrote conditions. Wrote the architecture of desperation.
And Simon brought him papers. Brought him food he didn't eat. Brought him water he rarely drank. Brought him news.
"Mr. Grey," Simon said on the morning of the third day, his voice holding something between awe and fear. "Have you been reading the papers?"
"No." Apirael looked up from his current piece—something about the Thames as a boundary between London's pretensions and London's truths. "Why would I? They print comfortable lies. I write uncomfortable truths. We're in different businesses."
"Mr. Grey—" Simon stopped. Started again. "Apirael. That's what they're calling you now. In the papers. In the coffee houses. In the literary societies. The name you took—someone leaked it. Or invented it. Or—I don't know. But there are poems circulating. Under your name. Poems you actually wrote and poems attributed to you. Broadsides. Pamphlets. Someone's collecting them. Publishing them. You're becoming—"
"Famous?" Apirael's voice was flat.
"Notorious." Simon pulled out a newspaper—The Pall Mall Gazette—and opened it to an inside page. "Look. 'The Poet Apirael: Prophet or Madman?' They've printed one of your pieces. The one about the city being a mouth. They're calling you a genius. They're calling you dangerous. They're saying your work is 'unprecedented in its capacity to disturb.'"
He pulled out another paper—The Times. "'The Death Poet of Whitechapel: New Voice or New Threat?' They think you're from Whitechapel. Think you're writing from inside the poverty. They don't know—" He stopped.
"That I'm writing the poverty itself," Apirael finished. "That I'm not describing conditions—I'm creating them. Making them more concentrated. More true."
Simon nodded slowly. "Is that what you're doing? Creating?"
"I don't know anymore." Apirael looked at his black hands. They'd spread past his elbows now, consuming his forearms, creeping toward his shoulders. "I think I'm just... observing very precisely. And precision, when applied to suffering, makes suffering more itself. More concentrated. More unavoidable."
He picked up another sheet. Pressed his thumb to it. Watched the blood well up.
"What are you writing now?" Simon asked.
"Another landscape piece. About Buck's Row. About the lodging houses there. About what it means to sell your body in four-pence increments just to afford a bed for a few hours. About how—"
He stopped. His new senses—the ones that had replaced smell and taste and touch—pulsed. Reported something. A concentration of violence somewhere in the city. A focus of cruelty that was learning to be precise, to be authored, to be significant.
"What?" Simon leaned forward. "What is it? You look like you've sensed something."
"I have." Apirael's voice had gone distant. "Someone's reading my work. Not metaphorically. Actually reading. Absorbing. Learning from it. Someone in Whitechapel is—" He struggled for words. "Is using my landscapes as instruction. As permission. As proof that their violence can be meaningful if it's precise enough."
Simon's face went pale. "The murders. Mr. Grey, there was another one. Last night. A woman named Mary Ann Nichols. Found in Buck's Row—the exact street you just mentioned. Her throat cut. Her abdomen—" He swallowed. "Mutilated. In ways that looked almost surgical. Almost like someone was making an argument with the cuts."
Apirael felt something cold move through him. Not guilt—he'd traded that away. Not horror—that was gone too. Just recognition.
"He's reading my work," Apirael said quietly. "Whoever he is. He's found my poems—the ones circulating, the broadsides, the pamphlets—and he's interpreting them. He's using my landscapes as maps. My observations about significance and invisibility as instruction. He's—"
"He's inspired by you," Simon finished, and his voice held accusation now, held the weight of someone who'd chosen to witness but hadn't chosen to be complicit. "Your poems about Whitechapel, about hunger for significance, about being invisible unless you become spectacular—he's acting on them. Making them literal. Writing his own version in flesh and blood."
Apirael stared at the paper in his hand. At the verse he'd been about to write about Buck's Row. At the precision he'd been about to apply to the exact location where a woman had just been murdered.
"I didn't write the murders," he said. "I wrote the landscape. The conditions. The—"
"You wrote the permission," Simon interrupted, and now there was fury in his voice, fury he'd been holding back for three days while watching Apirael transform. "You wrote a vision of London where violence was inevitable, where murder was just another form of expression, where the desperate learned to matter through spectacular cruelty. And someone believed you. Someone took your poetry as prophecy. Someone—"
"Someone learned from me," Apirael finished quietly. "Someone saw my precision applied to suffering and thought: That. I can do that. I can make suffering precise too."
He stood. Walked to the window—the broken one, the one his first poem had shattered. Looked out at the clear circle his manifestation had carved from London's fog.
"I've been writing landscapes," he said. "Writing conditions. Writing the soil. But soil grows what you plant in it. And I've been planting—" He stopped. Let the truth surface. "I've been planting the idea that invisibility is unbearable. That spectacle is the only form of mattering. That precision can make anything—even atrocity—into art."
He turned back to Simon. "And someone's been planting. Actually planting. Making my metaphors literal. Taking my observations about knives as tools, about bodies as texts, about violence as authorship, and actualizing them. I wrote the theory. He's writing the practice."
Simon was shaking now. Not with fear—with something more complicated. "You need to stop. You need to stop writing about Whitechapel. Stop giving him more material. Stop—"
"I can't." Apirael's voice was gentle but absolute. "The pressure doesn't care about consequences. The blood-ink doesn't discriminate between safe subjects and dangerous ones. I write what demands to be written. If I try to avoid Whitechapel, the pressure will just build until I write something worse somewhere else."
"Then write something different," Simon pleaded. "Write about beauty. Write about hope. Write about—"
"I don't see those things anymore," Apirael said simply. "My new senses don't register comfort. Don't perceive mercy. They're tuned to truth, and truth in London is suffering, and suffering concentrated becomes violence, and violence authored becomes—"
He gestured at the newspaper in Simon's hand. At the headline about Mary Ann Nichols. At the description of cuts that looked almost like writing.
"—becomes him," Apirael finished. "Becomes someone who learned that murder can be meaning. That flesh can be manuscript. That if you're precise enough with your cruelty, people will remember your name."
"They're calling him Leather Apron," Simon said quietly. "The papers. The police. They don't have a real name yet, so they're using the nickname people in Whitechapel gave him. But you and I—" He met Apirael's gaze. "We know his real name, don't we? We know what to call him."
"What?"
"Your student," Simon said, and the word was an accusation, a verdict, a truth that couldn't be softened. "Your disciple. The person who read your work and decided to actualize it. To make your metaphors literal. To become the darkness you described so precisely that you made it seem inevitable."
Apirael felt something shift in his chest. Not guilt—but responsibility. The recognition that his words had created conditions, and conditions had created actions, and actions had created corpses.
He hadn't written the murders. Hadn't described them. Hadn't wanted them.
But he'd made them possible. Had written a London where such murders felt inevitable. Had described the landscape with such precision that someone had looked at it and thought: Yes. This is where I belong. This is what I should become.
"What do I do?" Apirael asked, and his voice sounded young suddenly, uncertain, more Casimir Grey than Apirael the death poet.
Simon looked at him for a long moment. Then, with the terrible honesty of someone who'd chosen to witness and was committed to seeing it through:
"You keep writing," he said. "Because stopping won't undo what you've done. Won't save the women who are already dead or the ones who will die. But maybe—maybe if you're precise enough, if you capture him as clearly as you captured Lenore and Mr. Hollow—maybe you can manifest him into something that can be caught. Can be stopped. Can be—"
"Can be written into an ending," Apirael finished. "You want me to author his capture the way I authored his existence."
"Yes." Simon's voice was steady. "Use the mechanism against itself. Use your precision to contain what your precision created. Write him so clearly that reality has no choice but to manifest his arrest, his exposure, his—"
"His legend," Apirael said quietly. "Because that's what manifestation does. Doesn't just create events—creates stories. Creates narratives that outlast the participants. I could write his capture, yes. But in doing so, I'd make him permanent. Would turn him from murderer into mythology. Would ensure that his name—whatever name I gave him—would be remembered forever."
He looked at his black hands. At the mechanism that was consuming him. At the power that had turned observation into obligation, precision into prophecy.
"I'd be making him immortal," Apirael said. "Giving him exactly what he wants. What all of us want, all us invisible desperate souls who'd rather be feared than forgotten. I'd be offering him the same bargain I took: trade yourself for significance. Become story. Become legend. Become remembered."
Simon absorbed this. "So what's the alternative? Let him keep killing? Let your landscapes keep giving him permission? Let your poetry keep—"
"Keep inspiring him," Apirael finished. "Yes. That's the alternative. Because the moment I write him specifically, write him personally, I stop being observer and become accomplice. Stop being landscape architect and become"—he struggled—"become author. Of his crimes. Of his legend. Of everything he becomes."
He pressed his thumb to fresh paper. Watched the blood well up.
"But you're right about one thing," he said. "I need to write. The pressure demands it. The mechanism requires it. So I'll write. Not about him. Not about the murders. But about—" He paused. "About the women. The ones he's killing. The ones my landscapes have made vulnerable. I'll write them truly. Will give them presence, significance, reality that outlasts their deaths. Will make sure they're not just victims in his story but people in their own right."
"Will that help?" Simon asked.
"No." Apirael's voice was flat, honest. "But it's the only form of mercy I'm still capable of. The only way to use precision for something other than harm. I can't save them. But I can make sure they're remembered. Can make sure their truths persist even when their flesh doesn't."
He began to write. Not about Mary Ann Nichols the victim. About Mary Ann Nichols the person. About her life before Buck's Row. About the choices that led her there. About the systems that made those choices inevitable. About the city that created women like her and then punished them for existing.
Simon watched him write. Watched the black ink-blood flow. Watched reality shift slightly, accommodate, make space for truth that had been invisible.
And in Whitechapel, in the alleys, in the fog:
Someone else was reading. Learning. Interpreting the landscapes as instructions. Taking Apirael's precision about suffering and making it literal. Taking his observations about knives and bodies and significance and actualizing them.
Not because Apirael had written him to do it.
But because Apirael had written a world where doing it made sense. Where murder could be meaning. Where flesh could be manuscript. Where cruelty, if authored precisely enough, could make you matter.
The death poet had written the conditions.
And the conditions had grown exactly what they were designed to grow:
Another poet.
One who wrote in blood.
One who signed his work with knives.
One who would never be caught, never be identified, never be anything except a name, a mystery, a legend.
One who would outlast them all.
Because legends, once written, never truly died.
They just waited in the pages.
Waiting to be read.
Waiting to inspire.
Waiting to teach the next invisible soul that spectacle was significance, that violence was visibility, that you could matter by being monstrous.
Apirael wrote his mercy into reality.
And miles away, another hand gripped another knife.
And the lesson continued.