Louisville, KY

Journal Entry – September 18, 1871

The evening draped Louisville in a hush of gray and violet, the kind of light that makes every alley seem like a waiting throat. Lanterns quivered in the mist, their glow barely holding back the dark. I walked without aim until a carving above a narrow bookshop door snared me mid-step—a pattern of curling sigils—deliberate, ritual marks—etched into the stone. I had not seen them since childhood.

Memory uncoiled like smoke. Years ago, crossing from Germany with Ma, we passed through France and lingered near the catacombs. I remember the echo of bones beneath the streets, the damp air that tasted of secrets and death. Ma had pressed a finger to her lips and dragged me through a bookshop door marked with those very same symbols. She said nothing of what she hid beneath Paris, but I knew the silence was heavy with things that belonged to the dead.

Tonight, those symbols burned again above a Louisville door. I entered. A withered crone looked up from behind the counter, her eyes clouded yet unblinking. She greeted me in a tongue so old the syllables shivered through my bones. The words came back like a forgotten lullaby; I shaped a reply, my accent rough. She smiled—a slow, knowing curve—and gently corrected me. From the shelf she drew a black-bound volume, its leather cracked like ancient skin. “For practice,” she whispered. Inside lay the very words of spellcraft, each one a key to what the catacombs have never given back.

I left with the book wrapped in black cloth, its weight unnatural in my hands. Ma was already asleep when I returned. But the ink from its pages had stained my palm, seeping into the creases of my skin, burning, sinking deeper—into bone, into breath. No matter how I scrubbed, the mark held fast. It wasn’t just ink. It was permission.

And something beneath the bedboards whispered a name I haven’t heard since Paris.

With Ma fast asleep, I returned to the black-bound book—the one the old woman handed me in Louisville without a word. I had only meant to glance at its pages again before bed. But when I opened the cover, something fluttered loose from between the leaves.

A slip of thick, unmarked parchment. On one side, a hand-drawn map. On the other, a time and a date:

October 3rd. Midnight.

No names. No directions. Only a compass rose inked in a style I have not seen since the catacombs—and a phrase scrawled beneath it in the same crooked hand:

“We are waiting.”