04 Jun A Language for Ending Things

Part I

Dr. Simon Keats had never found much use for superstition. His life had been composed, for the most part, of well-shelved books, lecture halls, and the clinking rhythm of train travel between university towns. A man of quiet pattern and gentle retreat, he had long since resigned himself to the idea that his legacy, if any, would be found not in children or love or some passionate eruption of purpose, but in footnotes and modestly cited essays on the lesser-known works of John Clare and Leigh Hunt. It surprised no one, least of all himself, when his wife left.

Her absence did not devastate him so much as it drained the world of its remaining warmth. London became too large. The fog too thick. The halls of King’s College, where he had lectured for the better part of a decade, seemed increasingly like a cathedral for the forgotten. His colleagues were cordial but distant. His students, clever but hollow-eyed, mistook despair for irony. The world, it seemed, had slipped quietly past him without asking if he’d like to come along.

It was in this state of unmoored stillness that the letter arrived. Not by email or courier, but by post—pressed between two dull water bills and a flier for discounted cremation services. The envelope was thick, creamy with age, and sealed with a faint, waxy sigil that had crumbled slightly during transit. There was no return address, only a small emblem stamped in faded ink: an intricate tree with seven branches, each ending in a different eye.

The letter inside was brief and typed on old linen stock. The English was precise, but bore subtle hints of translation—strange word order, capitalizations that felt ecclesiastical.

To: Dr. Simon James Keats, PhD
Department of English Literature
King’s College London

You are cordially invited to serve as Visiting Lecturer of English Language and Literature for the upcoming Winter Term at the Universitet af Nattens Gren. We offer full lodging, a monthly stipend of 8,000 GBP, and uninterrupted research privileges within our historic archives. No interview is required.

Your arrival is anticipated on the 5th of January. Travel arrangements have been made.

We await your acceptance with great interest.

—Office of the Dean
Universitet af Nattens Gren
Himmerland, Denmark

Simon read it twice. The first time with a raised brow, the second with a frown of disbelief. There had been no prior correspondence, no request for curriculum vitae or publication history. No mention of whom he’d be replacing, nor of what exactly would be expected of him.

He set the letter aside. Made tea. Stared out the kitchen window at the lightless January morning pressing against the glass. Then he returned to the letter and read it again.

The salary was absurd. The name of the university—University of the Night Branch—sounded theatrical, even vaguely ominous, though he recalled reading once that Himmerland had long been home to folkloric oddities and medieval ruins. He wondered briefly if it was some kind of prank—perhaps orchestrated by Martin in Medieval Studies, who had a fondness for Scandinavian weirdness and terrible jokes. But the envelope was too serious. Too earnest. And deep down, Simon knew no one cared enough to bother.

That night, he wrote his resignation from King’s. A leave of absence, he called it. Citing personal reasons and creative fatigue. He booked a one-way flight to Denmark. The next day, he boxed his remaining books, locked his flat, and left London without saying goodbye to anyone.

* * * * * *

Copenhagen greeted him with wet snow and a sun that hovered uselessly behind a ceiling of slate-colored clouds. He spent the night in a hotel near the station and caught a northbound train the next morning. The farther he traveled, the more the world seemed to recede into shades of gray and white. Trees stood like monuments. Villages flickered past with ancient thatched roofs and shuttered windows, some of them dusted with frost that refused to melt.

He reached the town of Viborg by noon, where he was instructed—by a second, equally terse letter—to wait by the harbor terminal for the university’s ferry. There was no signage, no visible activity, and no dock attendant. Just a battered bench, a crooked postbox, and an unmanned ferryboat moored to the ice-glazed pilings, its name—Ravnsøen II—barely legible through the accumulation of salt and rust.

The captain, or perhaps simply the ferryman, emerged from below deck without introduction. He was a square-shouldered man in a navy coat with no insignia, his face leathery with age and unreadable in expression. He spoke no English, nor Danish, nor anything at all. He merely gestured for Simon to board, then piloted the vessel across the fjord without a word.

The crossing took just under an hour. The fjord was silent but for the low groan of ice shifting beneath the hull, and the wind that hissed occasionally through the bare skeletal trees clinging to the cliffs on either side. Once, Simon thought he saw movement on the water—a series of ripples that pulsed without origin and vanished before reaching the boat—but when he looked more closely, there was only ice and reflection.

On the far shore, a narrow dirt road wound its way through dense forest. A dark car waited at the ferry landing, its headlights off. It was an old university vehicle, marked only by a dull, circular badge that bore the same sigil as the letter: a seven-branched tree, each limb ending in an eye.

The driver, like the ferryman, said nothing. He was an older man, thin and pale, dressed in a gray coat buttoned to the throat. His eyes were glassy and impersonal, as though they looked out from somewhere else entirely. He opened the back door for Simon and then climbed into the front seat without speaking.

They drove for nearly forty minutes through a forest that seemed entirely untouched by civilization. The trees grew too close to the road, their trunks twisted in strange, almost postural curves. Moss grew on both sides of the bark. There were no birds, no traffic, no evidence that this route was used by anyone else. The light dimmed as the road descended into a valley, and Simon felt, for the first time in years, that he had crossed into a place that did not want him.

The university appeared suddenly, framed by trees, its buildings rising out of the mist like something grown rather than built. The architecture was an unsettling blend of Danish medieval and Gothic ecclesiastical, with steep roofs, arched windows, and blackened stone facades that reflected nothing. Some towers leaned slightly, as though listening. The main hall loomed in the center, its entrance marked by two statues: one of a veiled woman with a finger to her lips, the other of a man with his face erased.

Dean Vinter met him at the foot of the steps. He was tall and immaculately dressed, with silver-threaded hair and a handshake that lingered half a second too long. His English was perfect, though his intonation carried an odd, almost theatrical cadence. His smile did not reach his eyes.

“Dr. Keats,” he said, as though confirming something already known. “Welcome to Nattens Gren. We are most pleased you’ve accepted.”

Simon returned the greeting with awkward politeness. “Thank you. It’s—rather more secluded than I expected.”

“Seclusion is one of our great virtues here,” Vinter replied. “Silence makes for honest scholarship.”

As they entered the main building, Simon noticed that the stone beneath his feet bore carvings—not Latin, not runic, but a looping script that shifted subtly as he walked, always at the edge of comprehension. He blinked and looked away.

“You’ll find your quarters in the guest wing,” Vinter said. “Meals are communal, though few of us indulge. Your lectures begin Monday. Until then, you are free to acclimate. And to read, should you feel inclined. Our archives are extensive.”

He paused, then added with a smile too wide for the moment: “The students are eager to learn.”

Simon was shown to a long, high-ceilinged room with dark wooden furniture and a view that overlooked the edge of the forest. His luggage had already been brought up. The sheets were neatly folded. A fire crackled faintly in the hearth. There were no electrical sockets visible. The bookshelves were full, but the titles were unmarked.

He unpacked, ate a modest meal in the dining hall alone, and retired early. Outside, the woods whispered in the wind. He tried to read but could not focus. A low hum pervaded the walls—not mechanical, but organic, like the distant thrum of buried insects or breath through hollow bone.

Sometime after midnight, he woke to the sound of whispering. Not language. Not wind. Something slower. Sliding between walls that should not have carried sound. When he looked to the window, there were shapes moving at the edge of the trees—tall, indistinct figures that seemed to fade when directly observed.

Simon did not sleep again that night.

Part II

The classroom was colder than Simon had anticipated. The stone walls, soot-dark and lined with damp, rose high into a vaulted ceiling crossed by timber beams that looked centuries old. No windows broke the monotony of the walls. Instead, a single wrought-iron chandelier hung from the center, its flickering bulbs giving off a yellow light that struggled to reach the corners. There were no modern fixtures—no smartboards, no projector, not even an electrical outlet within view. A blackboard stood behind him, though the chalk supplied was brittle and smelled faintly of something that wasn’t quite chalk.

There were five students present when he arrived. All were seated, all motionless, and all watching him as if they had been waiting not just for him, but for the precise moment he would enter. Their clothing was varied—some wore sweaters and scarves typical of northern European winters, others dressed with anachronistic formality, like actors in a poorly researched period drama. None of them spoke.

Simon cleared his throat and set his leather satchel on the oak lectern.

“Good morning,” he said. “My name is Dr. Simon Keats. I’ll be instructing you in English language and literature this term.”

No response. Just the five of them, watching. Their expressions were neutral, their postures upright and unblinking. A vague nausea swelled in Simon’s chest, but he forced himself to continue.

“I’d like to begin with a discussion on poetic structure. Specifically, the English sonnet. Its rhythm, meter, and internal logic are what grant it power—not unlike the structure of formal logic or classical rhetoric.”

As he spoke, he moved to the board and wrote out a sample line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. His handwriting felt unsteady on the slick surface, the chalk scraping in a way that made the back of his teeth ache.

When he turned around, one of the students had stood. A girl—tall, too thin, with black hair drawn tight against her scalp—spoke in flawless Queen’s English.

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” she said. “Thou art more lovely and more temperate.”

Simon paused. “Yes. Precisely. Though it would be ideal to—”

“You dreamt that line three nights ago,” she added. “Only in your dream, it wasn’t directed at Juliet. It was for Natalie.”

He felt his grip on the chalk tighten. “Excuse me?”

The girl tilted her head. “You said her name aloud. In your sleep. The third night in this place.”

Before he could respond, another student—a young man with a furrowed brow and a scarf wrapped three times around his neck—raised a hand. Without waiting to be called upon, he said, “The sonnet relies upon containment. Fourteen lines. No more. No less. The magic is in the fixed perimeter.”

Simon blinked. “Magic?”

“The incantatory power of language increases when it is bound by form,” the boy continued, his voice toneless but assured. “Even in your Shakespeare, you see the attempt. Spoken rhythm becomes function.”

Simon let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, then nodded. “Let’s return to the subject at hand. Perhaps we’ll discuss Petrarch’s variations next session.”

The rest of the lesson passed without incident, if it could be called that. The students answered questions with uncanny precision, but often in ways that hinted at knowledge they shouldn’t possess. One student—Alma, if he remembered the roll correctly—submitted a written exercise in mirror script, which he only noticed when he turned the paper sideways in confusion. Another, Rune, refused to write at all and instead watched Simon’s hand as he spoke, blinking only once the entire session.

By the time he dismissed them, Simon felt as though he had been dissected, not instructing. The students left without speaking. No sound of shoes echoed on the flagstones as they exited, one by one, into the gloom of the corridor beyond.

* * * * * *

The university’s library was not so much a room as it was a buried cathedral. Reached by a stairwell beneath the main building, it opened into a vast underground space that smelled of leather, cedar resin, and something faintly alkaline. Arched shelves stretched into shadow, their ends lost behind hanging velvet curtains that absorbed light rather than reflecting it.

Simon moved through the stacks in silence. The books were ancient—bound in vellum, calfskin, and other materials less identifiable. Many had no titles on their spines. Some bore characters he recognized as Old Norse, others as Latin. One had a cover that shifted slightly when touched, as though something just beneath the surface resented the contact.

He found a heavy volume labeled simply Historien af Universitetet. Inside, the text was bilingual—Danish and a stilted English translation set in parallel columns. The founding charter of Universitet af Nattens Gren was dated 1679. The institution had been a theological seminary, then a linguistic research center. But in 1812, the book claimed, a fire consumed the entire original campus, destroying the records and killing nearly everyone inside.

Simon frowned. The architecture of the current buildings bore no signs of modern reconstruction. In fact, most appeared far older than the nineteenth century. He checked the date of publication: 1961. No mention of when or how the school had been rebuilt.

He returned to the circulation desk to inquire further, but the space was empty. No librarian, no attendant. Just a large bell resting atop a marble counter. He reached out to ring it.

“Looking for something specific?”

The voice came from behind him, though he had not heard anyone approach.

He turned. A woman stood there—tall, pale, and thin-lipped, dressed in black. Her nametag, if it was one, had been scratched smooth. She did not blink. Her eyes were the color of wet ash.

“I was hoping for information on the university’s reconstruction,” Simon said. “Post-1812.”

“There was no reconstruction,” she replied.

“But the book—”

She turned without further explanation and disappeared behind one of the velvet curtains. He stepped after her, but the aisle was empty. The curtain fell silently back into place, erasing the moment.

* * * * * *

That night, after returning to his room and failing to sleep for what felt like hours, Simon stood at his window and looked out over the fjord. The water, barely visible beyond the tree line, glinted with something unnatural—points of shifting light that moved in synchronized spirals. They weren’t boats. The pattern was too precise, the motion too slow and deliberate.

He leaned closer. The lights seemed to form an arc. Then another. Then three vertical lines.

Not random, he realized.

They were writing something.

He blinked and it was gone. The water returned to its dull, black sheen. No light. No movement. Only the wind against the glass and the faint, intermittent pressure he had begun to feel behind his eyes—like a thought he was not allowed to have.

He stepped back from the window and did not return to it that night.

Part III

Simon had returned to the library not out of duty, but because he found it harder and harder to remain above ground. The upper floors of the university carried with them a brittle tension, a kind of psychic pressure that gathered most intensely in corridors that bent in unnatural ways or staircases that climbed two floors but descended three. The underground levels, for all their strangeness, at least gave the impression of stillness. The air down there smelled of cedarwood and drying ink, and the vault-like silence felt clean in comparison to the subtle hum and whisper of the upper halls.

He was midway through the second folio of the Historien af Universitetet—this one printed a century earlier and far more lavishly illustrated—when he first encountered her.

She moved like a shadow displaced by light, emerging between two massive shelf-columns so quietly he didn’t notice her until she stood beside him. She was slender and dressed in ash-colored garments that looked almost monastic, though not quite archaic. Her skin was pale and unblemished, her features delicate in a way that suggested sculpture rather than inheritance, and her eyes were a kind of green that did not quite reflect the light but absorbed it, gently, as if refracting it inward.

“You’ve chosen an inconvenient puzzle,” she said, her voice lilting with a Danish cadence that bent English into a music of its own. “That text is known to rewrite itself when too many questions are asked.”

Simon blinked. “I’m sorry—do you work here?”

She smiled, not in offense, but with something that felt almost pitying. “I do. My name is Eva Søborg. I maintain the university archives.”

“I didn’t think faculty had access to those.”

“They don’t,” she said. “Not generally.”

She gestured for him to follow her, then turned and moved between the stacks without waiting for consent. Simon, startled but intrigued, rose and followed.

They passed through a back corner of the main floor, where the shelves grew taller and the air colder. There was no rope or barrier—only a single, black iron door that groaned faintly on its hinges when Eva pushed it open. Beyond was a descending stairwell, lit not by bulbs, but by strange orb-shaped lamps set into the walls. Their glow was soft but did not flicker, and it cast no shadows.

“This wing predates the library,” Eva said. “It was once a root cellar, then a reliquary. The archives absorbed it when the ground above was deemed unstable.”

She led him into a chamber with no symmetry. The room had eight walls, but no uniform geometry, and every shelf was curved. At the center sat a circular table, upon which several tomes were already spread open. The scent here was older than dust—more like fermented leather or the inside of a dead beehive.

Simon lowered himself into the nearest chair.

“These are the restricted volumes?” he asked.

Eva nodded. “These are the ones we do not index. The ones whose names should not be read aloud.”

He glanced at the nearest open book, but no title adorned its spine or inner leaf. The pages were filled with calligraphic writing that seemed almost too organic in shape, as though they had been penned not by hand, but by something that moved like one.

“You’ve been researching the foundation, I assume?” she asked.

“Yes. The 1812 fire. There’s no mention of reconstruction, and yet clearly—”

“This building was not reconstructed,” Eva interrupted. “It was reinhabited.”

Simon looked up sharply. “I don’t follow.”

“The records are sparse because they were not meant to survive. What stood before the fire was only a shell—a façade built to hold something that already occupied the land. The university was built atop older foundations. Deeper ones.”

“How much older?”

Eva tilted her head slightly. “Before Denmark. Before any map that survived the Ice.”

Simon stared at her. “You mean pre-Christian?”

“I mean pre-language.”

She reached into one of the drawers and produced a bundle of old, weathered parchment bound in twine. She unwrapped it and slid one toward him. The map depicted the valley as it currently stood, but instead of labeled roads or settlements, it was marked with symbols: concentric spirals, jagged hourglass shapes, and lines of what looked like overlapping alphabets—Latin, Cyrillic, and something older.

“This is one of our oldest surviving surveyor records,” Eva said. “We believe it to be copied from something far older. The ink has no known base. The pigment is derived from crushed beetles that have no surviving species.”

Simon touched the edge of the map, expecting it to crumble. Instead, it vibrated faintly under his fingertips.

“What is this place?” he asked.

Eva took a moment before answering.

“It is a school,” she said finally. “But not in the way you understand. It prepares things. Minds. Voices. Shapes.”

“For what?”

She looked away. “That depends who’s asking.”

* * * * * *

Simon returned two days later, compelled not by academic interest but by a growing sense that if he did not understand the rules of this place soon, he would forget why he came altogether.

Eva was already there when he arrived, waiting at the same eight-walled table. She had laid out a different collection this time—journals, letters, brittle sepia photographs whose subjects were either blurred by movement or by time itself. One of them showed a group of faculty members gathered in front of the university’s main entrance. The photograph was dated 1902, but one of the figures stood taller than the rest, dressed in a black coat and formal gloves.

Simon leaned closer. “That’s Dean Vinter.”

Eva nodded slowly. “He was listed then as Head of Linguistic Theory. He became Dean later.”

“That’s not possible,” Simon said. “He’d be well over—”

Eva said nothing.

He lifted a journal next, the leather cover soft from use. Inside, the handwriting belonged to one Professor Wilhelm Erstad, whose entries began normally enough—lecture summaries, student behavior reports, occasional musings on the intersection of phonetics and mysticism. But by the final pages, the entries had grown erratic, peppered with sketches of the same branching symbol Simon had seen on the letterhead and the car: the tree with seven eyes.

January 13th, 1903 — The lights returned to the fjord last night. More organized this time. Alma watched them without blinking for over two hours. I think she sees through them.

January 18th — Vinter spoke to me without speaking. I heard my name in my own handwriting. I can’t account for how it happened. The ink was not mine. The voice was not mine.

February 2nd — There are no mirrors in the library. That was not always true.

Simon closed the journal and looked up. “How long has he been here?”

Eva looked tired suddenly, though her face betrayed no fatigue.

“Longer than I have memory,” she said.

He waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. Instead, she reached into her sleeve and produced a black envelope sealed with a smear of wax.

“I want you to take this,” she said.

Simon accepted it, feeling its weight. There was no marking. No name. The wax was warm to the touch.

“Don’t open it yet,” Eva continued. “You’ll know when it’s time.”

He frowned. “How?”

She met his gaze evenly.

“When you hear your name spoken,” she said, “but there is no one in the room with you.”

* * * * * *

That night, back in his quarters, Simon placed the envelope inside the drawer beside his bed and tried to read until sleep came. The light above the fireplace sputtered once, then returned to normal. Outside, the wind had died, and the forest beyond the university stood in brittle silence.

Somewhere past midnight, a voice spoke in the dark.

“Simon.”

It was not loud. It was not cruel. But it was close—closer than his own breath—and it did not belong to anyone he had ever met.

He turned on the lamp, but the room was empty.

The envelope waited in the drawer, exactly where he had left it.

Part IV

It began with a mistake—a small one, so small it might have gone unnoticed if Simon hadn’t already grown suspicious of the very walls around him. He was reviewing an essay written by the student called Nihal, a piece supposedly analyzing the rhetorical symmetry in Milton’s Areopagitica. At first glance, the writing was impeccable: structured, elegant, even insightful. But when he reread the second paragraph, he realized a word had changed.

He was certain the phrase had originally read, “…the liberty of unlicensed printing is the sinew of reason.” But on second reading, the word reason had become return. It was not a typographical error. The ink was identical, the page unstained, the line unbroken. The word had simply shifted its identity when he wasn’t looking.

Simon set the paper aside. His pulse quickened, in the deep, slow churn of intellectual unease, as he became increasingly aware that a formerly foundational assumption had now become unreliable. He pulled other essays from the pile. Rune’s piece on Shakespeare’s historical tragedies contained footnotes citing works Simon had never heard of: The Tragedie of Elfrida and King Orme of the Vale, neither of which existed in any published corpus he knew.

Alma had submitted her assignment as a scroll, the page folded into itself and sealed with thread. When he opened it, the ink was pale and oily, and the letters were not letters at all. At first, they resembled stylized runes, but upon closer examination, they bled into each other, forming a single sprawling line that seemed to shimmer in his peripheral vision.

When he turned his head, the shimmer stopped.

That afternoon, during class, Simon asked Nihal to read aloud a section of her own writing. She stood with eerie grace, held the paper before her like a sacred object, and began to speak.

The words were English, but structured with a rhythm that felt like an incantation. As she progressed, the lights above flickered once. Then again. Then failed entirely. The room fell into darkness. Simon felt the shift physically, as though a membrane had torn somewhere behind the eyes.

He opened his mouth to speak, but found himself incapable of forming words.

When she stopped reading, the lights returned. One bulb exploded in a burst of acrid smoke. The others held, humming faintly, as if recovering from strain.

The students remained silent.

Simon ended the class early.

* * * * * *

Back in his quarters, Simon tried to convince himself that the day’s events had some logical explanation. Faulty wiring. Mental exhaustion. A misremembered phrase. He poured himself a glass of water and stood at the window, though the forest beyond was dark, and the fjord below reflected nothing.

On his writing desk lay a letter.

It had not been there that morning.

He approached with caution, even though he already recognized the handwriting.

The envelope was addressed to him in a looping script he had not seen in nearly a year. Natalie’s script. The loops of the lowercase L, the way she crossed her T’s with a diagonal flourish—these were things etched into muscle memory by decades of proximity.

The postmark was dated the previous week.

Inside was a single page, unsigned but unmistakably hers. The letter was written in the present tense, and its tone was apologetic. She wrote that she regretted how she had left things, that she had read his most recent article and found it “mournful in a way that made her want to come home.” She asked if he might call her.

Simon sat heavily in the chair and stared at the page until the words blurred.

Natalie was dead.

She had died three months ago, struck by a lorry while crossing an intersection near Brixton. The call had come in the middle of the night. He had flown home for the funeral, delivered a eulogy, and buried her ashes in a plot she had once described as “pleasantly forgettable.” There had been no ambiguity.

He touched the page. It was warm.

* * * * * *

Eva met him in the archive later that evening, though he hadn’t called for her. She seemed to know he would come.

He held the letter out to her without speaking.

She examined it, nodded once, and returned it without comment.

“This place isn’t stable,” she said. “Not in the way you’re used to. It’s built atop a fault line, not of stone or soil, but of language itself.”

Simon stared at her. “You’re telling me the letter is real?”

“I’m telling you that the act of writing is real. The event it recalls, the emotions it conveys—those are the shadows. At Nattens Gren, those shadows sometimes move backward. Sometimes they reach out.”

“She’s dead, Eva.”

“And yet her words found you. That’s what matters here.”

He leaned forward, voice hardening. “Why am I here? Why me?”

Eva did not flinch.

“Because you can be made to understand. You’re a bridge—fragile, yes, but porous. You’ve already begun to doubt the solidity of meaning. That’s the first qualification.”

“For what?”

She hesitated.

“To become a conduit.”

He stepped back from her. “You told me you were an archivist.”

“I am.”

“But you’re also a prisoner.”

She looked down.

“I tried to leave once. Fifteen years ago. I made it as far as the fjord. There was a man waiting on the other shore. He called my name, but his voice couldn’t reach me. I could see the words leave his lips, but they twisted in the air. When I tried to respond, my mouth wouldn’t shape the right sounds.”

She touched her throat as if remembering the failure.

“I no longer match the world’s syntax.”

* * * * * *

The next morning, Simon packed a small bag and left his quarters before dawn. The path to the ferry was well-marked, or at least had been when he first arrived. Now, it led him into woods that shifted subtly with each passing minute. What should have been a right fork curved left. What had been flat terrain sloped upward until he found himself climbing, though he had no memory of elevation on the way in.

The forest thickened. The trees were too close together, their roots knotted above the surface like veins. There were no birds. No animal tracks. Just the sound of his own boots disturbing the brittle frost.

After what felt like hours, he emerged at what he believed should be the clearing beside the fjord. But the road was gone. There was no sign of the dock, the ferry, or even the faint trail that had once led to them. In their place stood a ring of trees, each equidistant, their branches unnaturally bare.

Simon turned in a slow circle.

Behind him, something whispered.

It was his voice. Or something using his voice.

It was reciting lines from his lecture on Milton—out of order, backward, as if unlearning what had been spoken.

Simon did not move.

The voice paused, then spoke his name. Not shouted. Not beckoned.

Simply stated.

And then, silence.

Part V

The announcement came not through memo or letter, but through the mouth of Dean Vinter himself, who appeared outside Simon’s quarters just past dusk. He knocked once, waited precisely the length of a breath, and entered without waiting to be invited.

“The hour has come,” Vinter said, folding his gloved hands behind his back. “The Convergence will take place this evening. Attendance is not optional.”

Simon, who had been seated beside the hearth with the black envelope unopened on the table beside him, stood instinctively. “What is the Convergence?”

Vinter’s smile was pleasant, though it held nothing of warmth. “A culmination. A recitation. A return.”

“Return of what?”

“You will see.”

He turned and departed with the same unhurried confidence that had always made Simon feel like a child shadowing an adult conversation he did not fully understand.

* * * * * *

The air outside had grown sharp, with a cold that moved through fabric and flesh as though searching for something deeper. The halls of the university were empty, but torches had been placed in wrought-iron sconces along the walls, casting wavering light against the stone.

A student—Nihal—stood near the entry to the western wing, waiting. She gestured silently for Simon to follow, her movements as fluid and unsettling as ever. Her feet made no sound on the floor.

She led him through parts of the university he had never seen. Passageways that twisted in on themselves, doorways that appeared where only blank stone had stood the day before. They descended past the archives, past the cellar where he had first spoken with Eva, and deeper still. The torchlight never flickered, even when the staircases curved at impossible angles.

The chamber, when they arrived, was immense.

It had not been hewn from stone, but appeared grown—its walls curved and ribbed like the inside of a cathedral built from bone. Massive columns supported a ceiling lost in darkness, and the floor was marked with concentric rings of runes that pulsed faintly, not with light, but with intention.

At the center stood a stone dais. Upon it, Dean Vinter waited.

The students were already present. They stood in formation, arranged by unseen design, each holding a sheet of parchment inscribed with glyphs that twisted when viewed directly. Their eyes glowed faintly, though not with reflected light—something beneath the surface shimmered, a depth that should not have belonged in any living gaze.

Simon took his place at the periphery, and at last, the faculty arrived.

They came not through doors, but through the walls themselves—sliding from alcoves or descending from the dark ceiling like figures suspended in water. Their robes were black and embroidered with symbols that moved across the fabric like a slow infestation. Their faces were covered, or else blank. One wore a mask shaped like an inverted jaw. Another had no head at all, yet the folds of its hood undulated as though something unseen was whispering inside.

They circled the dais in unison, taking positions behind the students.

Dean Vinter raised his hands.

“Our students,” he began, “have learned the language. Not the first tongue. Not the root tongue. But the one that was forgotten on purpose. The one that unseams. The one that remembers us.”

He turned, and though he did not point to Simon, his gaze fixed there.

“You were brought here to listen. That is your only function now. You will bear witness to the restoration.”

Then, the students began to speak.

The chant did not rise so much as form, emerging from the center of the circle and spiraling outward. The language had no fixed cadence—each word seemed to echo in multiple tenses at once, as if describing something happening now, long ago, and not yet. It moved like a tide, washing over the chamber and filling the space between walls.

English bled into Old Norse, which bled into sounds Simon had no framework for—sharp, wet syllables that rasped the inside of the ear even as they passed through it. The runes beneath their feet began to pulse in synchrony. The floor shifted underfoot, becoming soft for an instant, then liquid, then solid again.

Above them, the ceiling cracked open—not with violence, but with purpose. Through it, the night sky appeared. Not the one Simon remembered. The stars were different. Fewer. Brighter. Arranged in unfamiliar constellations.

Dean Vinter raised both arms.

And then the fjord answered.

* * * * * *

Outside the chamber, the water churned without wind. A vast arch of silver light formed just beneath the surface, mirrored in perfect clarity but extending farther down than physics allowed. The trees bowed toward it. The air stilled.

Something moved on the other side.

It was not a shape, not yet. More a presence—the suggestion of scale and intent. Something waiting. Something long invited. The surface of the water rippled outward, forming symbols that echoed those on the students’ pages, then faded.

Simon turned to run.

A hand caught his wrist.

Eva.

She had appeared beside him, dressed in the same ash-gray robes, her eyes frantic.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “You were only meant to instruct. Not to see. Come now. There’s still a path—there might still be a path.”

She pulled him toward a shadowed alcove. For a moment, he followed.

Then the chanting changed.

It inverted—folded inward and collapsed, forming a silence that was not absence but compression. The pressure of language without sound. Eva cried out, clutched her throat, and stumbled.

“No—no, don’t look at them—Simon, don’t look at—”

She unraveled.

Not exploded. Not shredded. Unmade.

Her body dissolved along threads that had not previously existed, splitting not along muscle or skin but concept. Her edges pulled away from each other like stitched seams coming undone. One moment she stood beside him, and the next she was a suggestion of shape, a scattering of possibilities.

And then, nothing.

Simon reached toward the place where she had been.

A hand—gloved, cold, and certain—rested on his shoulder.

Dean Vinter leaned close.

“She lasted longer than most.”

Simon did not speak. He could not.

The arch beneath the fjord glowed now with steady brilliance. From within it, a single shape emerged. Not a body. Not even a shadow. Just an eye.

The eye looked at him.

And Simon understood, without needing words, that it had always known him. That it had waited, not for the ritual, not for the students, not for Vinter—but for him.

He had been the invitation.

Part VI

Simon did not remember the transition from the fjord back to the university’s upper floors. One moment, the eye had filled the sky, vast and depthless, gazing through him like a window left ajar. The next, he was stumbling through the corridor outside his quarters, the door to the bell tower swinging shut behind him.

There were no footsteps. No murmuring students. No flickering torches. The halls echoed with a silence so absolute that it no longer registered as absence but as something filled, weighted, and patient. Paintings that once hung crooked had vanished. Doorways were narrower. Some passages had grown too tall. Others had vanished entirely, sealed with fresh plaster that showed no sign of having ever been otherwise.

He walked with no plan. Only the memory of movement guided him—past the guest wing, down the eastern hall, into the long-locked administration corridor where the doors bore no names and the windows refused to show the world beyond. At the end of this passage stood a brass-handled door marked Rektor Emeritus, covered in dust and untouched since his arrival.

Except it was no longer locked.

He entered.

The office had not aged. The room was warm, the air stale but free of mold. The furniture—mahogany, antique, disturbingly ornate—gleamed faintly in the dim glow of a green-shaded desk lamp. The walls were lined with narrow shelves, every one filled with slim volumes and folders bound in twine. A record player sat in the corner, silent and needleless. Behind the desk stood a cracked mirror, reflecting only the light and not the man who had entered.

Simon crossed to the desk and opened the drawer.

Inside lay a leather-bound journal, its cover scored with a single vertical line.

The handwriting was familiar—not from memory, but from resonance. The same syntax, the same lilt of phrasing that had echoed in the glyphs his students recited. But this journal was different. Less exalted. Less reverent.

April 19 — I have failed. They will not unmake what has been set in motion. But I have learned their flaw: they believe only in language as construction. They do not understand that rhythm can also undo.

The inversion is the key. Reversed cadence. Broken meter. Subverted breath.

Shakespeare hid it well. In The Tempest. Listen not for the meaning. Listen for the break.

Those who speak creation must fear the one who speaks its counter.

Simon read the passage twice, then turned the page. There, written by hand and circled in ink, was a passage from the play—not in the original, but distorted. The iambic pentameter had been reversed: stress before unstress, breath held before exhaled, meaning unraveling itself with every word spoken backward. It was poetry composed for unmaking.

He read it silently once. Then again. He committed it to memory, each syllable grafting itself not to understanding, but to something deeper.

Outside, the sky split open.

* * * * * *

From the tower window, he saw the door beneath the fjord open fully. The light no longer shimmered—it radiated with purpose, casting a pale sun across the valley. Shapes moved beneath it, impossibly tall and without form. Their arrival was not loud, but it was undeniable.

He turned and climbed.

The bell tower spiraled upward without end. The steps grew steeper, the stones more uneven. Wind shrieked through broken panes, though the sky remained still. He climbed until the air grew thinner and the architecture lost its right angles. At the top, beneath the dormant bell, stood a small platform of warped wood.

He stood at its center and began to speak.

The words came from the journal. Their rhythm was jagged, unnatural. They bent his tongue and dried his mouth. The consonants struck the air like stones, and the vowels refused to round properly, forcing him to gulp between lines. But as he spoke them—clearly, loudly, with deliberate cadence—the sky changed.

The light faltered. The arch over the fjord wavered.

A low vibration passed through the university, shaking loose dust from walls that had never cracked. The ground did not quake, but recoiled. Somewhere below, the chanting of the students ceased. Simon heard their voices draw inward, syllables swallowed as if by a vacuum. One of the columns outside the tower window crumbled—not from force, but from forgetting how to hold its shape.

He continued.

The words ran out.

The world convulsed.

And then—

Everything folded inward.

* * * * * *

He awoke in a hospital bed.

The light was warm. Natural. A window to his left opened onto a street lined with trees. The smell of antiseptic and coffee reached him faintly. His body ached, though not with injury, more like the soreness left after a prolonged fever.

A nurse entered. She was middle-aged, gentle-eyed, and spoke English with a Danish accent.

“You’re awake,” she said. “That’s good. They found you wandering outside Aalborg. You’ve been here for three days.”

Simon tried to speak but found his throat dry.

“You were repeating something,” she said. “A mixture of Latin and… well, we weren’t sure. Some of it was Old English. Possibly a dialect. But it’s stopped now.”

She poured him a cup of water and handed him a slim paperback from her cart.

“We thought you might like this. Said it was left for you by a friend. No name. Just asked us to make sure you had it when you woke.”

Simon looked at the cover.

The Tempest by William Shakespeare.

He opened it.

The pages were ordinary—until he reached the midpoint.

There, without context, a passage had been underlined in red. On the opposite page, written in his own handwriting, was a line he had never composed.

What is spoken to open must be spoken again, broken, to close.

The page turned itself.

And somewhere, beneath the words, something listened.