The silence that followed the severing of the psychic link with Doctor Thorne's clinic was more deafening than any scream.
Catherine sat in the darkness of her library for a long moment, the doctor's challenge still echoing in her mind. An exchange between adepts.
That phrase had changed everything. Until now, she had been moving through a world of the profane, men whose desires and fears were simple, predictable levers.
Valerius, Mathieu, Corbin… they were pawns on her chessboard, unaware of the rules of the true game.
But Thorne? Thorne knew the rules. He had not only proven it by identifying the nature of Mathieu's curse, but he had also just invited himself to Catherine's poker table.
He didn't want her money, not just that.
He wanted her knowledge.
He had recognized her as a player from another Pathway, and he wanted to see her cards. This situation was both an extreme danger and an unparalleled opportunity.
A danger, because Thorne was a free agent, amoral, who could sell her out to the highest bidder. An opportunity, because he was the first person she had met who possessed a formal knowledge of this occult world. He was a potential source.
Her first decision was to leave Mathieu where he was. Bringing him back to the manor was impossible. Leaving him to fend for himself was a death sentence.
Thorne's clinic, however dangerous, was for now the only possible sanctuary for him.
The doctor, in his avarice, had a financial interest in keeping his patient alive, pending the more substantial payment he coveted.
Mathieu had unknowingly become the hostage that guaranteed his own doctor's future cooperation. It was a precarious situation, but it was the only one she had.
This confrontation with Thorne's knowledge had highlighted her greatest weakness.
Not her past, not her loneliness, but her ignorance. She was a force of nature who did not understand the physics of her own power.
She could no longer afford to navigate by instinct while her enemies and her new potential "partners" were reading from manuals she didn't even know existed.
Her gaze swept over the library shelves.
This room, which she had first seen as a fortress, then a headquarters, was now becoming what it should have been all along: a source of knowledge. Valerius was a collector, not a scholar.
He wouldn't have read most of these books. But a man of his paranoia, aware that strange things existed, would certainly have acquired rare and forbidden texts, if only to understand potential threats.
She began the most important search of her life.
For hours, she pulled tomes from their shelves, dust flying in choking clouds in the candlelight.
She went through treatises on law, city histories, collections of poetry… nothing. She was on the verge of despair when her hand fell on a smaller volume, bound in untitled black leather, wedged between a history of taxation and a treatise on siege tactics.
She opened it. The pages were of a fine parchment, covered in a tight, nervous script. It was not a printed book.
It was a journal. The journal of a certain Lord Alistair Finch, a noble who had served as an occult advisor to Valerius's father decades ago, before falling into disgrace, likely by descending into madness.
Catherine began to read, and the world opened up to her.
For the first time, she saw the words she had only known by instinct.
The journal spoke of the Forbidden Echo, describing it not as a voice, but as a fundamental dissonance in the fabric of the real, a passive corruption that begets reality itself.
It spoke of the Pathways, the twenty-two scars or symptoms of this corruption, each one a unique path of power.
It spoke of the Sequences, the ten stations of the fall into power or madness.
Catherine drank in the words, her mind assembling the pieces of the puzzle.
Pathway.
Sequence.
Echo.
These concepts gave a structure, a grammar, to the language she had been speaking intuitively since her awakening.
She understood her own progression, from the passive Seer to the active Player.
She read descriptions of other Pathways, recognizing in the accounts of "domination through will" the signature of the aura of Milo, The Rook's man.
She devoured the journal, turning the pages with a voracious hunger.
She was fascinated, terrified, and exhilarated. Lord Finch was clearly a scholar, but also a terrified man, aware that every scrap of knowledge brought him closer to insanity.
Then, she reached a section near the end of the journal. The writing there was more erratic, almost frantic. Lord Finch was describing an encounter that had profoundly disturbed him.
An encounter with an adept of a Pathway he had never seen before, a Pathway he called a "blasphemy against identity itself."
He named it the Usurper's Pathway .
"…its presence is a void that draws in the light," Finch had written. "It has no 'self' of its own, only a perfect and perverse reflection of those around it. It reads thoughts not by probing, but by becoming such a perfect mirror that the soul of the interlocutor projects itself upon it without realizing. I tried to grasp its nature, but I saw only my own fear and doubts amplified. It is a terrifying power, based on absolute usurpation."
Catherine felt a shiver run down her spine. It was a philosophy close to her own, but more passive, more insidious.
She turned the page. Finch's handwriting was nearly illegible, the letters distorted by the shaking of his hand.
"The adept… a creature of androgynous beauty and a nonchalance that masks an ancient intelligence. But the most horrifying thing… I saw its face change. Not an illusion, but a true fluctuation of its being. One moment, it wore the face of a man. The next, a woman's. It was like watching a reflection in water that could not decide. It smiled at me, and that smile was the emptiest thing I have ever seen. It said it had borne many names. But it admitted that its first, the one it had chosen to begin its long march, was Eve."
Eve!!!
The name hung in the silence of the library.
Catherine did not know it. It meant nothing to her.
But as she read it, she felt a dissonance, a cold echo in the depths of her own power, like the distant sound of a glass bell cracking in the darkness.
It was a musical note that did not belong in the rest of the universe. A note that, she felt with an instinctual certainty, heralded a threat of an entirely different order.