Karen's office at the university was a larger, more cluttered version of her apartment. Books climbed the walls from floor to ceiling, not in chaotic piles, but in disciplined, alphabetized stacks. They were her garrison. Here, she was not just Dr. Alwright; she was a sentinel, standing guard over the collected wisdom of the ages. Her desk was an antique oak behemoth, its surface scarred with the honorable wounds of time, yet its current state was immaculate. A single manuscript lay open, its pages filled with her sharp, decisive handwriting.
The manuscript was for her upcoming book, an academic treatise on the role of emotional contagion in the fall of the Guidobaldi dynasty in 15th-century Urbino. It was a story of breathtaking passion and equally breathtaking stupidity. A duke, a brilliant strategist and patron of the arts, had fallen obsessively in love with the wife of a rival, a woman known for her volatile temperament. Their affair had unraveled alliances, triggered a war, and ultimately led to the ruin of a city-state that had been a beacon of Renaissance culture.
To Karen, it was the perfect case study. Her thesis was simple: passion is a fever of the mind, a temporary madness that makes intelligent people act against their own interests. It was not a grand, romantic force, but a biological imperative that history proved, time and again, to be the enemy of reason and order. Her celibacy, therefore, was not a condition to be pitied. It was a philosophy. It was a deliberate, intellectual choice born not of fear, but of wisdom.
She had arrived at this conclusion early in her life. While her peers were navigating the clumsy, painful rites of teenage romance, Karen was in the library, losing herself in the tragedies of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Guinevere. She saw the patterns they could not. These legendary women were not figures of romance; they were epicenters of destruction. Their desires had toppled walls, sunk fleets, and shattered fellowships. They were cautionary tales writ large.
Her colleagues found her discipline admirable, if a little eccentric. "Karen lives for her work," they would say, a phrase meant as a compliment but which always carried a faint undertow of sympathy. They could not comprehend that she felt no sense of lack. She had mastery. She had quiet. She had a life free from the emotional shrapnel that littered the lives of everyone she knew. She had chosen a life of the mind over the messy, unpredictable, and frankly unhygienic world of physical entanglement.
A knock at her door pulled her from her thoughts. It was Thomas, a junior professor from the classics department, a kind man with a perpetually worried expression and a wedding ring that seemed too tight for his finger.
"Karen, got a moment?" he asked, hovering in the doorway. "Just wanted to pick your brain about the Guidobaldi court. My students are fascinated by the duke's letters to his mistress. They see it as one of the great romances."
Karen offered him a thin smile and gestured to the chair opposite her desk. "They would," she said. "We've trained them to. We feed them poetry and call it truth. What they see as romance, Thomas, was a geopolitical disaster. The 'connection' they admire was, in fact, a form of collective insanity. The duke's letters weren't love; they were symptoms of an obsession that cost thousands of people their lives and their culture."
Thomas shifted uncomfortably. "Right. Of course. But the language… the raw emotion. You have to admit, there's a power to it."
"Oh, the power is undeniable," Karen conceded, leaning forward. Her eyes, usually calm and analytical, held a flicker of intensity. "So is the power of a flood or a wildfire. It's primal, chaotic, and indiscriminate. It creates spectacular ruins. My work is not to admire the beauty of the fire, but to understand the mechanics of the combustion. And to know, with absolute certainty, that the safest place to be is as far from the flames as possible."
She said it with such conviction that Thomas could only nod, suddenly feeling foolish for his talk of romance. He thanked her for her time and retreated, leaving Karen alone once more with her books and her certainty.
She turned back to the manuscript, to the translated words of the duke himself. "To be without you is to be a body without a soul, a sky without a sun. I would burn my city to the ground for a single night in the fortress of your arms."
Karen dipped her pen in ink and made a cool, precise notation in the margin: "Note the classic rhetorical conflation of desire with existential necessity. The subject equates his obsession with life itself, a dangerous delusion that elevates a personal compulsion to the level of a heroic imperative."
She was brilliant. She was insightful. She was in complete control. And as she wrote, she was blissfully unaware that her analysis of the duke's fortress was a perfect, unwitting description of her own. She had built it stone by stone to keep the fire out, never once considering what it might be keeping in.