The vellum was cold. Colder than it should have been, even in the climate-controlled archives of the university. Dr. Aris Thorne felt the chill seep into his fingertips as he gently turned the page. The manuscript, his latest and most perplexing acquisition, lay open on the oak table, its Latin script a testament to a long-dead hand. It was the personal chronicle of a 12th-century scribe named Elias, a man whose life, until a month ago, had been utterly unknown to history. Now, his life was threatening to consume Aris’s own.
It had all started so innocently. A hushed call from a contact at a London auction house, a tip about an uncatalogued lot from a private estate in rural France. “It seems to be a monastic journal of some sort,” the voice on the phone had said, dismissively. “Probably just a record of prayers and harvests.” But Aris, whose specialty was early medieval texts, had felt a familiar, inexplicable pull. He’d won the manuscript with an aggressive bid that had raised eyebrows, and when it arrived, he knew his instinct had been right. This was no mere ledger of accounts. It was a soul laid bare on parchment.
The scribe, Elias, wrote with a desperate, poetic urgency. He detailed his life within the walls of the Abbey of Saint-Jude-des-Ombres—Saint Jude of the Shadows. He wrote of the political machinations of his abbot, the whispers of heresy that slithered through the cloister, and his work in the scriptorium, copying texts both sacred and profane. But woven between these historical details was something else, something deeply personal and dangerous. He wrote of a woman, Isabeau, a local nobleman’s daughter who would come to the abbey to study illumination. He wrote of her eyes, the color of a summer storm, and a love that was a blasphemy in the eyes of God and man.
This was the narrative that had sunk its hooks into Aris. Yet, it was the darker undercurrents that kept him awake at night. Elias spoke of a secret—a relic hidden within the abbey walls, an object of immense power that his abbot sought for a shadowy cabal known as the Fratres Aeterna, the Eternal Brotherhood.
It had begun with the headaches. A dull, persistent throb behind his eyes whenever he studied the manuscript for too long. Then came the dreams. Not the usual fleeting-anxiety dreams of a tenured academic, but vivid, immersive nightmares of stone corridors, the smell of incense and damp earth, and the chilling clang of a distant bell. He’d wake up with his heart hammering against his ribs, the ghost of a rough-spun cassock on his skin. He’d see flashes of a man’s face—a man with piercing blue eyes and a cruel twist to his lips, a fellow monk named Lucian who Elias described as his closest friend, yet also his bitterest rival.
Tonight, as he worked late, the silence of the archives pressing in on him, a single line of text seemed to leap off the page, the ink a shade darker than the rest. “Et in somnis, video faciem proditoris mei. Is vultu amici mei loquitur.” And in my dreams, I see the face of my betrayer. He speaks with the face of my friend. A shiver traced its way down Aris’s spine. The library, usually his sanctuary, felt vast and menacing. The rows of silent, sleeping books seemed like rows of tombstones. He looked up, his gaze drawn to the darkened windows that reflected the lonely pool of light from his desk lamp.
For a fleeting, heart-stopping moment, his own reflection wasn’t there. In its place was the gaunt, bearded face of a stranger, his eyes wide with a terror that was a thousand years old. Aris blinked, a strangled gasp catching in his throat, and the apparition was gone, leaving only his own startled face staring back, pale and slick with a sudden sweat. He slammed the manuscript shut. The sound echoed like a gunshot in the profound silence.
He pushed his chair back, the legs screeching against the polished floor. He needed air. He needed to disconnect from the oppressive weight of the past. He packed his briefcase, his hands trembling slightly, and locked the precious manuscript in the secure reading room vault. As he walked through the deserted library, his footsteps seemed to echo with a second, fainter set of footfalls—the soft shuffle of sandaled feet on stone. He shook his head, attributing it to exhaustion. It had to be exhaustion.
The cool night air did little to calm his racing pulse. As he walked across the manicured university green, the Gothic spires of the main hall silhouetted against a bruised purple sky, he couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. He glanced over his shoulder. Nothing but empty pathways and the whispering leaves of ancient oak trees.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, making him jump. It was a text from Julian Croft, the charismatic head of the Anthropology department. ‘Still burning the midnight oil, old friend? We need to discuss the fundraising for the new wing. Mr. Sterling is getting antsy. How about a drink tomorrow?’
Aris typed a quick reply, his thumb hovering over the screen. Julian had been his staunchest supporter at the university, his closest confidant. A man with piercing blue eyes and an easy, disarming smile. The thought came unbidden, a venomous whisper in his mind. He speaks with the face of my friend.
Aris stumbled, catching himself on a park bench. He squeezed his eyes shut, the face from the window—the face of Elias—superimposed over his vision. He knew, with a certainty that defied all logic and reason, that he was not merely reading a dead man’s diary. He was remembering it. And the betrayal that had cost a 12th-century scribe his life was a story that was not yet finished.
