A grim dawn veiled Castle , its towering spires swallowed by mist that slithered through the courtyards like a living thing. In the eastern wing, Margarett Londy Yapharec knelt on the cold stone floor of her chambers, her fingers tangled in hair the color of tarnished silver. The memories of last night clung to her like grave soil—the crunch of shovel biting earth, the splintering wood of coffin lids, the terrible things she'd whispered to the corpses as they sat up in their tombs.
"Why?" she whispered to the empty room, though she knew the answer. It had begun with Lord Valtiere's sneering comment at her engagement banquet—"The Yapharec heir? More like a ghost of one." It had festered through every veiled insult about her "delicate disposition." And last night, it had erupted in the churchyard, with her hands buried wrist-deep in consecrated soil.
A knock at the door. Margarett didn't answer, but it opened anyway.
Hukmi Lamreta stood framed in the doorway, her lean silhouette backlit by torchlight. The castle's chief archivist wore her usual attire—a high-collared black coat buttoned to the throat, ink-stained fingers peeking from fingerless gloves. Her cropped hair, dark as raven feathers, made the pallor of her sharp-featured face all the more striking.
"You missed morning devotions," Hukmi said. Her voice was calm, but Margarett saw the way her nostrils flared at the scent of grave dirt still clinging to the room.
Margarett turned her face away. "I'm unwell."
Hukmi stepped inside and shut the door with deliberate softness. "The groundskeeper found three disturbed graves. The Valtiere mausoleum door hangs broken on its hinges." She paused. "And Cook says you stole a butcher's knife after midnight."
The silence stretched. Somewhere in the castle depths, a pipe groaned.
"Show me your hands, Margarett."
When Margarett didn't move, Hukmi crossed the room in three strides and seized her wrists. The sleeves of Margarett's nightdress fell back, revealing crescent-shaped wounds where her own nails had bitten into flesh. Beneath that—fainter, but unmistakable to anyone who knew death—the grayish tinge of corpse-handling.
Hukmi's grip tightened. "What did you take from them?"
Margarett wrenched free. "Nothing you'd understand."
For a heartbeat, anger flashed in Hukmi's dark eyes. Then it was gone, replaced by something colder. "Get dressed. We're going to the city.
The carriage ride passed in silence. Margarett stared out at the skeletal trees lining the road to the capital, while Hukmi occupied herself with annotating some arcane text. Only when the city's towering gates came into view did Hukmi speak.
"You'll say nothing of last night to anyone," she said, not looking up from her papers. "The librarians at the Great Library are tolerant of many things, but grave-robbing isn't among them."
Margarett's laugh was bitter. "And what are we doing at a library? Researching proper burial etiquette?"
Hukmi finally met her gaze. "We're going," she said slowly, "because whatever madness has taken root in you requires more than a priest's chastisement or a physician's tonics. It requires understanding."
The Great Library rose before them like a cathedral to forgotten gods. Its obsidian doors bore carvings of things that might have been angels or demons—the distinction blurred at the edges. Inside, the air smelled of dust and something older, something that curled in the back of Margarett's throat like smoke.
Hukmi led them past shelves stacked with books bound in strange leathers, down staircases that seemed to descend far deeper than the building's foundations should allow. At last they came to a door marked only with a silver seven-pointed star.
The room beyond was small and circular, its walls lined with books that seemed to pulse in the flickering candlelight. At its center stood a reading desk, upon which rested a single volume bound in what looked like human skin.
"This," Hukmi said, "is Reymont's Compendium of Flesh. You will read page forty-two. Then you will tell me if your little graveyard adventure still feels like justice."
Margarett's fingers trembled as she opened the book. The page showed an anatomical drawing of a hand—but wrong, all wrong. The bones were too long, the joints too numerous, the nails tapered to razor points. As she stared, the ink seemed to shift, rearranging itself into new, more terrible configurations.
Her vision swam. The candle flames elongated into skeletal fingers. The walls breathed.
Hukmi's hand clamped down on her shoulder. "This is what the Yapharec bloodline was meant to contain. This is what you play with when you dabble in forces you don't understand."
Margarett wrenched away. "You think I wanted this? Any of this?"
"No," Hukmi said softly. "But it wants you."
Outside, thunder rumbled. The book's pages fluttered as if in a breeze, though the air was still. When Margarett looked down, the illustration had changed again—now it was unmistakably her own hand depicted on the page, the same scar across the knuckle from when she'd fallen as a child.
Hukmi closed the book with a snap. "The dead will keep their secrets, Margarett. The question is—will you keep yours?"
They returned to Castle Yapharec as the first true storm of winter began to rage. Margarett stood at her chamber window, watching lightning fork across the sky like cracks in the world's foundation.
Hukmi entered without knocking, carrying two glasses and a bottle of something dark as blood. "Drink," she said, pouring. "It will help with the dreams."
Margarett took the glass but didn't drink. "Why show me that book?"
"Because you needed to see." Hukmi swallowed her own drink in one motion. "Your family's curse isn't weakness, Margarett. It's hunger. The same hunger that made you open those graves last night."
A log shifted in the fireplace, sending up a shower of sparks. Margarett studied the liquid in her glass—how it caught the light, how it looked almost alive. "And if I don't want it?"
"Then you'll spend your life as you are now," Hukmi said simply. "Half-starved and ashamed, jumping at your own shadow."
The wind howled through the castle's eaves. Somewhere in the distance, a shutter banged like a coffin lid slamming shut.
Hukmi set down her glass. "There is another way."
Margarett knew she should refuse. Knew it the way she'd known not to go to the graveyard last night. The way she'd known not to whisper those words to the corpses.
She drank.
"Tell me."
Hukmi smiled then, and for the first time, Margarett saw the sharpness of her teeth. "We begin at midnight. Bring the knife you stole from Cook."
As Hukmi turned to leave, Margarett caught her wrist. "Why help me?"
The archivist's pulse jumped under Margarett's fingers. "Because someone once showed me the same mercy." She paused. "And because the world has enough frightened girls. What it needs are women who aren't afraid of the dark."
The door clicked shut. Outside, the storm redoubled its fury. Margarett lifted her glass to the window, watching lightning fracture through the wine like veins in a corpse's eye.
Somewhere in the castle, a clock began to chime.
Midnight was coming.