Click. Click. Click.
The sound of chalk on slate cut through the empty lecture hall like a metronome for doubt. Adrian crossed the front row and wrote PLATO in clean white strokes. Dust moved in the weak afternoon light. The room smelled like chalk and rain that had already dried on stone.
"Plato said the soul remembers what the body forgets," he said. His voice carried easily in the hollow space. "What does that say about belief?"
Thirty faces stared back. Half-alert. Half gone. One yawn carefully into a sleeve. Another scrolls their phone under the desk, screen glow ghosting against their chin.
A few students raised pens and did not write.
Silence. Then one notebook opened late, apology disguised as paper.
"Anyone," he said.
Someone in the back cleared their throat. Rain slid down the tall windows in slow, crooked lines. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, a thin, tired buzz he pretended not to hear.
He set the chalk down. Pressed one hand to the lectern. The move felt practiced, like a gesture he'd done so many times his body went through it without asking permission from his mind.
"If memory is not proof, what happens to certainty," he said. "What happens to doctrine." He looked up. "Mr. Carrow."
Carrow jerked his head up, caught in the act of not paying attention. "Faith," he blurted.
Adrian rubbed the bridge of his nose, catching the faint smear of chalk there. "It means the mind lies well," he said. "Faith is one of its better lies."
A ripple of uneasy amusement passed through the room, gone in an instant.
The bell rang. Desks scraped. Students flooded out like they'd been freed from obligation instead of taught, the way they always did—relief first, thought later. A girl in a yellow sweater lingered at the end of the row, clutching her notebook like a shield.
"Professor Thorne, will the midterm be more on epistemology or more on…" She faltered. "On, um… religious language?"
"It will be on whether you read," he said, voice low but not unkind. "Start with the syllabus."
"Yes, sir."
She left fast, boots squeaking once on the polished floor.
He stayed alone a moment longer. The word PLATO sat on the board like a tomb label. He erased it in three even swipes. Chalk dust hung where the letters had been, a ghost that didn't know it was gone.
Another hour of certainty sold to people who did not want cost.
His goal today had been simple. Keep the room awake long enough to make them doubt what they think they know. That was always the goal. Some days it felt like trying to light fires in wet paper.
The hallway outside tasted like old coffee and wet coats. Fluorescents flickered intermittently, one tube buzzing with a frustrated stutter. Faculty office doors opened, closed, opened again as the building cycled through its own routines.
"Thorne."
Morales leaned out of the shared lounge. Philosophy of Mind. Soft jaw. Tired eyes. Tie undone like it had lost an argument earlier in the day.
"You still antagonizing God?" Morales asked.
"Only His PR team," Adrian said.
Morales held out a paper cup that steamed vaguely. "Drink. Donor dinner next week. Shake hands. Smile. Tell them the department matters."
"Faith, capital market edition." Adrian took the cup, smelled it, and decided he valued his organs. He set it on a filing cabinet instead.
Morales grinned. "Poker Friday. We need a skeptic at the table."
"I'm a skeptic of joy."
"You're a joyless skeptic," Morales corrected. "Different thing. Think about it."
The door swung shut behind him.
Adrian moved down the corridor past the glass case of alumni photos. Stiff men in stiff suits. Confident mouths. Gold plaques etched with names and years that blurred together. He saw his own reflection layered over theirs and felt a brief shift in his stomach, like he was standing behind someone else's face, trying it on.
The university keeps the story moving. You fill in your lines and you age in place. No miracles required.
Outside, the sky was already bruising toward evening. He pulled his coat tighter against a wind that smelled like rain and exhaust and the faint, metallic tang of the city breathing.
He went home.
The townhouse door groaned like it had a memory of every time it had been opened too hard. The air inside was warm. Dust. Paper. Animal.
Mina reached him first. Black cat. Tail raised high like punctuation. Faustus trailed behind, slower by principle, long fur gathering dust as he moved. Gray came last, nails clicking on wood before the weight of his head hit Adrian's knee with practiced precision.
"Ladies. Sir." Adrian crouched and let them press against him. Mina brushed his hand with cheap disdain, as if to say you're late. Faustus inspected the grocery bag, found it beneath standard, and flicked his tail in disappointment. Gray leaned in, sighed into his wrist, and stayed there.
"I brought kibble," Adrian told them. "Not revelation."
Mina blinked in judgment. He had always trusted that blink more than any written review.
He stood and walked into the study and flicked on the lamp.
Tzzp.
Yellow light washed over old books and older notes. Shelves lined the wall, full and then overfull. Volumes stacked in vertical piles like small, unstable towers. Margins full of his thin, square handwriting. Arrows. Notes. Cross references. Whole lives reduced to index cards and pressure.
Kant. Spinoza. Nietzsche.
The Torah. The Qur'an. The Bhagavad Gita. A worn Tanakh. RSV. Vulgate. Septuagint, more than one copy, his notes arguing with other people's footnotes in three languages.
Rig Veda. Upanishads. Pali Canon. Myth anthologies with his ink crawling in the borders like an invasive species.
Above the desk, a pinned card. Block letters in his own hand.
WE DON'T HATE MYSTERY.
WE HATE NOT CONTROLLING IT.
The bulb in the lamp hummed faintly, light holding steady, but there was a moment—a tiny, half-second dip—where the brightness faltered and came back, like the room had blinked. He frowned, then filed it away under old wiring and moved on.
He sat. He opened his laptop. His second classroom lit up.
The forum threads were already in motion. He scrolled.
[ u/SolaFide1776 ]
Miracles prove divinity.
[ u/ThorneA ]
Miracles prove that people confuse pattern with meaning. See Hume. Or your grocery list.
Scroll.
[ u/HammerOfGod ]
If morals don't come from God, where do they come from?
[ u/ThorneA ]
From need. From living next to other people without killing them. We built ethics the way we built roofs. To keep the rain off.
Scroll.
[ u/Prophet4U ]
Why are you so afraid of judgment if you're right.
[ u/ThorneA ]
I'm not afraid of judgment. I'm afraid of boredom. Eternal anything sounds like torture.
Scroll.
[ u/ArcLight ]
If we are only matter and math, why do we feel.
He paused there.
[ u/ThorneA ]
Because we're primates that learned to talk about lightning. And then believed the story.
He sat back.
He knew what his replies sounded like. Cold. Sharp. Arrogant. He was not here to comfort strangers. He was here to hold the line. You are not trying to win. You are trying to keep the question honest. Keep the blindfolds off, even when people begged for them back.
He clicked open an old thread from the same handle.
ArcLight.
They had argued for months. Pre-Christian mysticism. Proto-Hebrew fire rituals. Sumerian sign systems. Comparative angelology. The kind of fringe scholarship respectable conferences tried not to make eye contact with. He had blocked and unblocked the man twice. He trusted ArcLight more than he trusted most of his colleagues. At least ArcLight believed in something enough to fight for it.
The worst friendships form around the sharpest disagreements.
He minimized the browser and looked at his hands.
He thought of a different pair. Rough. Older. Folded tight in prayer at the bedside. Machine noise cutting through the quiet. His father had died without visions, without signs, without a voice from above. His mother went slower and angrier, eaten from the inside and still polite by reflex.
Prayer had not saved them. Philosophy had not saved them.
He had learned something in those rooms. Belief is a blanket for pain. Belief is also a blindfold. You do not rip the blanket. You rip the blindfold.
He was still ripping.
Mina jumped on the desk and set one paw on Kierkegaard. She stared up at him like she knew he was lying to himself.
"Traitor," he told her, and scratched behind her ear. She allowed it for service rendered. Payment in grooming. Typical.
The package sat on the corner of the desk. Brown paper. Soft from moisture at the edges. Wax seal split open.
He had been waiting for it.
ArcLight had sent it.
No return address. Just one line in black ink on the wrapping.
To u/ThorneA
Under that, a note.
Do not read the script aloud.
Do not touch the heart.
Do not seek what listens.
You always said you wanted proof.
This is our last debate.
— ArcLight
Adrian huffed out a laugh that sounded more like an exhale that had lost its way.
"Melodramatic bastard," he said under his breath.
He could hear the voice behind the words in his head anyway. That mix of friendly arrogance and fanatic promise. The same tone the guy used when he sent scanned fringe manuscripts at 3 AM with captions like: tell me this doesn't bother you.
Outside, rain started again, ticking against the window in a slow, uneven rhythm.
He opened the package.
Inside lay an amulet.
Bronze circlet, blackened, old. Center crystal, cloudy white with thin gold veins, like milk caught in glass. It did not shine. It absorbed the lamplight and threw it back in a way his brain did not like—angled, delayed, like reflection with a memory.
"You're ugly," he said. "That's promising."
There were markings on the back. Curved symbols punched into the metal. Not Latin. Not Greek. No alphabet he knew on first glance, which got his pulse up in a way caffeine never did.
It wanted to be read.
Something in him—old training, older obsession—sat up straight.
He pulled a pad closer and began to copy the symbols in pencil. Slow. Clean. He started matching shapes by reflex, the way he had always done. Loop to family. Angle to script. Family to place.
Not Linear B.
Not Akkadian syllabary.
Not Old Persian cuneiform.
Not Old Aramaic either. The arcs were wrong.
The lamplight shifted as he worked, brightening when he leaned in, dimming when he pulled back. He told himself it was his imagination. He kept going.
He reached up and grabbed a Coptic index off the shelf. No match. He grabbed Old Church Slavonic, the one with his notes running down the gutters in red ink. No match.
He flipped through Anatolian scripts and thought of relief carvings and temple seals and worn coins.
Maybe early Anatolian. Or some private priest cipher. Could also be nonsense. Could also be a replica some hobbyist aged with vinegar and wishful thinking.
The thought should have made him scoff. Instead, it made something at the base of his skull itch.
He kept working.
Hours slid. The rain outside thickened, turning the window into a blurred gray sheet. The room cooled. The lamplight settled into a steady, yellow pool that felt too bright at the edges of his vision.
Gray, the old dog, sat in the doorway and watched him with one ear raised. Supervisor mode. He made a mental note to pick up more canned food. Cheap brand. Same as always. Some parts of life stayed comforting in their predictability.
He looked back down at the amulet.
The crack in the crystal hadn't been there before.
He frowned.
He lifted it closer to the lamp.
Hairline fracture. Running across the cloudy surface like a vein. Gold in the fissure caught the light. Held it too long.
"Old stone," he muttered. "Not my fault if you start bleeding."
The words hung in the air a fraction longer than they should have, like the room was listening.
He checked his clock. Too late. He could feel the ache behind his eyes, dull and heavy. He ignored it. He leaned in.
The longer he stared at the crystal, the warmer it felt in his hand.
He told himself it was body heat.
He told himself a lot of things.
The hum of the lamp rose a half step, a thin whine he felt in his teeth.
He pushed back from the desk only when his neck started to throb. He stood. Stretched. Vertebrae cracked like old wood.
He had a plan. One more hour. Then shower. Food. Sleep. Class tomorrow.
He was going to get one clear read off the inscription. He was going to pin the origin. He was going to prove it was a fake or prove it was real. He would take either. He only wanted to stop not knowing.
His goal was always the same: get to the truth fast, before the story around it hardens.
"Be what you are," he told the amulet. "Or be nothing."
He set it down.
It rolled. Slid off the notebook. Tilted toward the edge of the desk.
He reached, fumbled, swore.
The amulet hit the hardwood floor.
Clink. Crack.
"Come on," he hissed, crouching fast. He swept a hand under the chair. His finger brushed the crystal. Warm.
He pulled it up and saw a thin red smear across the cracked face.
He stared.
Blood.
He lifted his hand. Tiny cut across the knuckle. Must have happened when he grabbed.
A single drop of his blood had run into the fracture.
The lamplight bent, like the air between him and the bulb had turned to slow water.
The crystal glowed from inside.
A low hum rolled into the room. He felt it in his teeth first. Then in his jaw. Then behind his eyes.
The cats vanished in one move. Mina sprinted under the couch. Faustus shot down the hall. Gray let out a short, warning bark and backed away, tail down.
Adrian froze.
"What are you doing," he said to the empty air, to the amulet, to himself.
The hum dropped pitch. The lamp flickered. The air felt thicker, like pressure before a storm. He took one step back.
The amulet pulsed in his hand.
He moved to set it down on the desk. The edge caught his palm and sliced deeper this time. Two more drops of blood ran into the crack.
The glow jumped.
The air in the room tightened.
It felt like the whole space inhaled and did not let it out.
"Alright," he said. His voice came out thin and false. "Enough. We're done."
He got as far as en.
Light exploded.
No color at first. Then all color at once. Then a kind of white so clean his brain could not process it as white.
Pressure slammed into his chest, then yanked at him from behind, then spun him in place without moving him. Heat rolled through him, then a deep cold that hurt the way grief hurts. His whole body locked.
The room folded in around him, like someone had bent the air between four fingers.
He turned his head by instinct, looking for something solid. His gaze caught the reflection in the glass of the display cabinet.
His body.
Slumped in his chair at the desk. Head at a slack, ugly angle. Mouth open.
Dead drunk posture without the bottle. Dead body posture with it.
"Oh," he said to no one. "Sh*t."
The words sounded like a laugh and like a prayer.
Then he dropped into nothing.
Thud. Scrape. Thud.
——
The mine breathed.
Air slid through the beams. Water tapped into pans on the floor. Lanterns threw small circles of light that died fast against coal walls.
Garth worked a long walk from his cottage. The shaft sat deeper than comfort. Warm in the wrong way. Like the air had weight.
His cart, Number Seven, waited on bent rails. He shoveled to fill it. He counted each load the way other men counted rosary beads.
Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Keep the rhythm or it gets louder.
Break room. Tin mug. Corner chair. Quiet.
The other men filled the space with talk. Cards hit the table in fast beats. Laughter rose and dropped and rose again.
"Heard him muttering again."
"Says things to the wall."
"Lad's not right."
"Or he is, and we aren't."
He kept his eyes down. You learn to go still when the thing inside your head is louder than the room. Words only feed it.
If I talk, they hear. If I do not talk, they only hear half. Half is better.
He went back to the line.
Pick strikes rang out in neat time. Rails groaned. Breath steamed in the dark.
The whispers slid in on the draft, thin and wet.
…gar…th…
…down…down…deeper…
…home is a hole…
"Shut it," he breathed. Dust took the word fast.
A shadow leaned into his lantern light. Eamon Doyle. Wire frame. Fox face. Hands that did not shake even when the ceiling did. Foreman without the title.
"You eat," Eamon asked. He tapped a support beam with two knuckles, listening for a hollow sound. He left a heel of bread on the edge of the cart without looking straight at Garth. Normal. Not charity. Respect.
Garth nodded.
"Good lad."
Eamon hummed a flat little scrap of a tune and walked on.
Garth slipped the bread into his jacket pocket. He shoveled.
Near the end of the quota mark, something caught the lantern wrong. Buried in coal. Not black. Not clean either. Sick light. Old milk in glass.
He went down on one knee and dug with his glove. He pulled free a shard the length of his palm. Jagged on one end, smooth on the other. Faint veins, pale and gold.
It pulsed. Soft. Once.
He stared.
Thrum.
He told himself that was his pulse in his hand.
Footsteps passed behind him. Eamon again. Slower now. Half-looking. Fingers trailed the rim of the cart. Close to the shard. Never touched it.
"Funny what the dark keeps," Eamon said to the open air.
Garth did not answer.
He checked the shadows. Checked the overman at the tally line. Checked the angle of the nearest lantern. Then slipped the shard into his pocket.
Could be nothing. Could be everything. Either way, mine now.
The voices in his head twisted in tone.
…good…
…closer…
…closer home…
He shoved the cart the last length to the mark. The counter chalked his quota without looking up.
The lift dragged them up on a whining rope. The surface air hit like a slap.
Night had swallowed the sky.
Rain fell in tight lines over the cottages at the edge of town. The dirt paths shone like oil. Gaslamps burned weak under the downpour. The air smelled like smoke and wet earth.
Garth walked fast. His coat stuck to his back. His teeth clenched against a shake that was not cold.
"Not tonight," he whispered. He pressed one hand hard against his temple. "Not tonight."
You are late.
He froze.
"Quiet."
You cannot shut us out.
He pressed his palms hard over his ears. "You're not real."
Thunder rolled in the distance. The pain behind his eyes jumped up and locked in with his heartbeat.
"Stop," he said. "Stop talking to me."
Almost home.
He flinched. "No."
The voices multiplied. Some high and thin. Some deep and wet. All close.
listen listen listen
"Shut up," he said, and his voice tore. His walk broke into a run.
The stone path turned to mud. He stumbled, hit one knee, shoved up again. His breath tore out in white bursts. The lights behind him blurred away.
The cottage came into view. One candle still flickered behind warped glass.
"Almost there," he said.
Home.
The word echoed back in his head in a voice that was not his.
He hit the porch and shoved the door open. The hinges groaned. He kicked it shut behind him and leaned against it, chest heaving, water dripping from his jaw.
"You're in," he told himself. "You're home. It's over."
The room felt wrong.
Too quiet. No drip from the roof leak. No rattle from the loose window frame. Even the wind noise had cut out.
Something hummed against his thigh.
He reached into his pocket. He pulled out the shard.
Dull gray. Rough. Cold and then warm in the same second. The surface caught the candlelight and did not reflect it. It swallowed the light and held it inside.
"What are you," he whispered.
The shard pulsed. Once.
His heart answered. Once.
Thump.
He frowned.
Then the shard pulsed again. Brighter.
Pain stabbed deep in his chest, right under the sternum. He almost dropped to his knees. His breath hitched.
"No."
He dropped the shard. It hit the floor by his boot and rolled. Soft glow spread out from it like spilled liquid, running along the wood grain. Tracing a slow pattern across old boards.
He reached for it.
A sharp edge bit into the meat of his palm.
He hissed through his teeth. "Damn it."
Blood hit the crystal.
The light jumped.
White filled the room.
The candle guttered and died.
The air pressed in on him from every side, tight like a wrapped bandage. He could taste metal. His ears rang. The floor under him thrummed like a struck bell.
"Stop," he said, voice raw.
The hum grew lower and heavier. He felt it in his teeth and down his spine. His chest kicked against his ribs, fast and hard. His own heartbeat was no longer in his control. Something else was setting his rhythm.
The light moved over the floor. Thin lines slid into the wood in clean arcs and loops, like something was writing under the house and the boards were paper.
Then the light pulled in on itself and vanished.
One beat.
Silence.
Then a voice.
"Oh… sh*t."
It came from everywhere.
He stared at the empty air above him.
His throat worked. "Who said that."
No answer.
Then the ceiling tore open.
A column of white dropped straight down and swallowed him.
He screamed once.
The light forced its way into his mouth, down his throat, into his lungs. His back arched hard enough to strain the muscles along his spine. His hands clawed at the floorboards and found no grip. The room shook.
"Get out of me… get out… get…"
The words cracked apart.
Something else entered him. Heavy. Slow. Cold. It pressed through his chest like a hand pushing through water. His vision burst white, then black, then white again. Thought split into pieces. He could feel two pulses inside his own ribs, out of sync.
His body tried to thrash. The light held him down.
The shard on the floor split with a hard snap. A blast of force ripped through the room. The windows shattered outward, glass spraying into the rain. Wind slammed in from nowhere and spun dead ash from the hearth.
Then nothing.
Silence dropped into place. Thick. Total.
Silver light crawled under his skin in thin lines, then faded slow.
Garth lay on the floor. Still breathing. Barely.
The shard had gone gray, cold and lifeless. A dead stone. No glow left.
Water from his coat sleeve dripped onto the floorboards. Drip. Drip. Drip.
His mouth opened. His voice came out quiet and rough, like something spoken through sleep.
"…Garth."
The name hung in the air and died.
Outside, the rain eased.
Inside, two lives exhaled in one body.