Adrien Moore (HH: Athanor)

Prologue: The Man Who Waits

The seminar room was narrow enough that the sun, caught in the east-facing windows, striped half the desks but left the other half in a solid gray chill. The glass was original, or nearly, each pane distorting the college quad outside with a different logic—one bending the lawn to a tilt, another rendering a passing student’s head spherical. Most of the desks bore initials carved in unsteady hands or the accidental stains of a hundred pens.

Adrien Moore arrived early, as he always did, and made a point of checking the blackboard for stray chalkwork before the postgraduates drifted in. Today, the residue from last evening’s undergraduate revision class was still visible: “Reality = consensus” scrawled and underlined twice. He erased it without comment.

When the students entered, they did so quietly, in the way of people not yet certain whether they would need to perform. The group was small: five in total, most already settling into the same seats as last week. The only unfamiliar face belonged to a late arrival—female, early twenties, with a manner that implied she was both new to the college and unimpressed by its mythos.

“Good morning,” Adrien said, and received a not-quite-synchronized reply. He never used the formal address. Once the door clicked shut behind the last arrival, he began at a conversational volume, hands resting on the desk rather than folded or gesturing.

“Today’s reading: Anne Conway’s Principles and the assigned selections from the Cambridge Platonists. If anyone’s actually found a through-line between them, I will buy you a coffee.” He paused, smiling in a way that neutralized any need for laughter. “Any volunteers for a summary?”

There was the expected delay. Then, from the window-side, a voice: “They both try to resolve dualisms that no one else thought were a problem.”

Adrien nodded. “Fair. But for Conway, what’s the dualism?”

“Substance and spirit,” someone else supplied. “But also—gender? She writes about her own body a lot.”

“Not an uncommon fixation among metaphysicians,” Adrien said, and the table laughed, one or two more than necessary. “And in the Platonists?”

“Mind and world,” offered Eleanor Finch, who wore the slightly aggrieved look of a student **** into humanities after outpacing her A-levels in everything else.

Adrien let the conversation spiral for a minute—through a discussion of the word ‘substance,’ its theological baggage, and whether it was possible to take Conway seriously given her “total rejection of materialism.” He guided it back when it threatened to dissolve into pure opinion. The rule was that claims required evidence, and evidence, at minimum, a page number.

They circled for thirty minutes, landing on the question of why so many early modern systems seemed less like blueprints and more like abandoned scaffolds. Eleanor, who had found her confidence by the second seminar, pressed the point:

“Was it a failure of intellect, or of will? I mean—did they stop because the project was impossible, or because they couldn’t be bothered to finish?”

Adrien weighed the question, letting the silence establish that it was not rhetorical. “Most of the archive is composed of things that never worked,” he said. “We forget that, looking back. All we see are the systems that survived, so we tell ourselves that everyone else simply failed.”

He could see Eleanor weighing a retort. “That sounds like you’re saying it’s not their fault.”

“Fault presumes knowledge of outcome,” Adrien said. “They could not know which projects would matter. Only that theirs, in all likelihood, would not.” He did not let the sadness of it catch hold; there was no value in nostalgia for lost intellectual causes. “But what we have—the manuscripts, the half-finished treatises—is not evidence of failure. It’s evidence that, for a time, their system felt possible.”

He left it there, as was his style, and took a shallow breath before continuing. The windows now were a diffuse, uncertain brightness; clouds had moved in, smothering the sunlight but making the room feel oddly static.

“In that vein: what does it mean to build a system that cannot be finished?”

A hand rose—Thomas Reed, whose beard was trimmed with geometric precision, as if its owner were preparing for a lifetime in faculty photographs. “Isn’t that the entire point of metaphysics? That it can never be finished?”

“Cynical,” Adrien said, but not unkindly. “But not wrong.” He shifted topics, moving them to the day’s final reading—a short letter by an obscure Jesuit, best remembered for a parenthetical in one of Descartes’ lost notebooks. The group dissected its barbed prose, finding delight in the way early modern intellectuals sniped at each other under the veil of footnotes.

The hour expired with the suddenness that always caught even the diligent off guard. Adrien glanced at the clock, closed his folder, and raised his voice only slightly. “That’s time. Next week we’re starting on Vico—be warned, he writes as if punctuation were a sign of weakness. If you have questions, stay; otherwise, enjoy the afternoon.”

The students gathered their things with the slow, private choreography of people who expect to be watched. One or two lingered, clearly debating whether to ask a question, but the urge for coffee or a cigarette eventually triumphed. Eleanor, who seemed to have more to say, settled for a nod before following the others.

The last to leave was Thomas. He hesitated in the doorway, then turned. “Will you be supervising next term, Dr. Moore? For the new intake?”

“I haven’t seen the allocations,” Adrien said, his tone easy. “But the department will let you know once it’s all confirmed.”

“Alright.” Thomas bobbed his head once, then departed with a speed that suggested relief.

Left alone, Adrien placed his hands flat on the desk and closed his eyes. For a moment, he was perfectly still—then, with methodical economy, he stacked the reading packets, returned the chalk to its shelf, and swept the room once for lost items. Satisfied, he exited and locked the door behind him.

The corridor’s stone floor still held the overnight chill, the radiators only just beginning their daily battle against institutional parsimony. Adrien stepped out, pulling the classroom door until its latch gave the satisfying click of closure. He found himself nearly colliding with Margaret Hensley, who was already poised, as if she’d timed her approach for precisely this moment.

“Ah, Adrien.” Margaret smiled, her red-framed glasses an unapologetic anachronism against her slate-grey suit. “I see you survived another round with the aspiring metaphysicians.”

He returned the smile, calibrated for faculty use. “Only just. They’ve discovered that most of philosophy is reading things nobody ever finished.”

“That’s most of academia,” Margaret replied. She kept pace with him as they walked, her steps light but always slightly ahead. “Speaking of which—did you see the call for the permanent chair? They’re sending it internal first, for all the good it’ll do.”

“Rumor travels faster than email,” Adrien said, not slowing.

She nudged him lightly with an elbow, a gesture that managed to feel both conspiratorial and genuinely warm. “It’s a university, Adrien. Gossip is the only currency.” She eyed him over her glasses. “You’d be a strong candidate. If you wanted it.”

He offered a gentle deflection. “I imagine there will be a stampede.”

“Not one you couldn’t outrun.” Her tone was half-joke, half-invitation. “Besides, they’re **** for someone who can teach both the early moderns and the contemporary stuff. I’ve seen your feedback.”

He made a noncommittal sound, but Margaret seemed to expect that. She shifted strategies.

“Any plans for the weekend?” she asked, voice casual, but her gaze holding his with unusual persistence.

“Essays to grade,” he said. “And I’ve gotten behind on some of the reading.” It wasn’t a lie, but it also wasn’t a full answer.

“Work-life balance, Adrien,” Margaret said, a touch of mock-exasperation softening the words. “You should come to the conference drinks on Friday. No one actually wants to, but we all do, just to keep up appearances.”

He smiled, not quite committing. “I’ll consider it.”

They reached the top of the stairwell, where the noticeboard was a patchwork of overlapping announcements and yellowing flyers. Margaret hesitated, turning so that her back blocked the stair’s descent.

“Well,” she said, her voice dropping just a shade, “if you decide you want to talk about the chair, or the teaching, or anything, really—just let me know.” Her eyes lingered, searching for something that might or might not be there. Then she pivoted, down the stairs, her heels tapping out a measured retreat.

Adrien stayed, scanning the board even though he already knew its contents. He pretended to study the poster for the all-department formal (“Black Tie Optional, Attendance Not”), then the slightly curling sheet advertising a lost tortoiseshell cat. It gave him a convenient interval to reset his composure.

He made his way to his office at a careful pace, pausing only to help an undergraduate retrieve a dropped armful of folders outside the history reading room. By the time he reached his door, Margaret’s perfume—a faint note of bergamot—had finally dissipated.

Adrien’s office, tucked into the building’s oldest wing, was furnished in the style of a room meant never to be fully occupied: battered desk, two chairs that didn’t match, and shelves running in uneven intervals along the north wall. The windows faced a brick courtyard where pigeons assembled in committee each morning.

The books were arranged by subject—never by author or date—and even the most lavishly bound volumes had clusters of slender flags peeking from their pages. Some were annotated in a microscopic script, precise and even, as if the marginalia were being prepared for inspection by a future scholar. Others were untouched, their spines barely creased. There were no personal photographs; the only indulgence was a small stone fragment, pale and featureless, which Adrien sometimes used as a paperweight and sometimes not.

He set his satchel on the desk and went through the silent motions of making tea. The kettle was electric and fast, but Adrien preferred to measure the water with care. The first pour he always discarded, a trick learned from a Greek mathematician who claimed it removed whatever taste was in it. He waited, watching the swirl in the cup until it stilled.

His computer, a battered ThinkPad with a plastic chip missing from one corner, awoke without complaint. The email client flickered open, revealing an accumulation of faculty memos, student queries, and the usual campus-wide appeals for volunteers. Adrien moved through them with a practiced scan.

One was from Daniel Foster, the department administrator, reminding staff to confirm their availability for the coming academic year. It was couched in the warmest possible language, but the subtext was clear: “Say you’re not leaving, please. We can’t replace you.” Adrien flagged it for later.

Another message, marked “gentle reminder,” originated from the departmental server. It was a nudge about his overdue draft on early-modern heresiarchs—an article he had started in a burst of conviction months ago, and now regarded with mild embarrassment.

He closed the email client without replying, preferring not to lock himself into any promises just yet. He reached for a slim hardback from the desk, its title partially obscured by the scattered post-it notes crammed into the first third. Adrien read a few lines, then leaned back, letting the stillness of the office fold in around him.

The pigeons outside had moved on. The only sound was the faint hum of the radiator and the distant clatter of someone moving furniture upstairs.

The faculty meeting convened in one of the interchangeable seminar rooms on the upper floor, the kind of space that only appeared to fill up when the fire code was under inspection. The windows, nearly floor to ceiling, had been designed to invite in the full glare of the afternoon sun, but the view outside was occluded by a fine haze of pollen and residual chalk dust. The air inside was suffused with the twin aromas of overworked laser printer and chemically stabilized coffee, the latter emanating from a pair of squat thermoses labeled “REGULAR” and “CAFFEINE-FREE, BY POPULAR DEMAND.” Neither label was accurate; the more accurate distinction would have been “PAINFULLY BITTER” and “SOULLESSLY BLAND.”

The table that anchored the room was a monumental slab of oak, scarred and lacquered, its edges rounded smooth by years of nervous fidgeting. Chairs of various generations—some with torn blue fabric, others with the orange plastic of a forgotten renovation—circled the table in a kind of **** collegiality. As usual, the first arrivals had claimed the far end, where the best sight lines to the door could be had. This was not, as one might think, a gesture of respect for the chair of the department, but rather a subtle game of seniority and passive resistance: the farther you sat from the locus of authority, the less likely you were to be called upon for comment.

Adrien, never the first to arrive and never the last, entered at the three-minute mark and assessed the landscape. He selected his customary seat near the foot of the table, two places removed from the nearest knot of conversation. The seat to his right was predictably vacant, as if someone had established, generations ago, that his presence required a buffer zone.

There was a low, persistent buzz of conversation, most of it transactional, some of it conspiratorial. Professor Bray, who chaired the department and did so with the patience of a captain on a ship of the damned, opened the meeting with the usual politeness. She spread her hands wide, a gesture that managed to be both inviting and directive, and said, “Thank you all for making the time. I know everyone is under pressure, so I’ll try to keep us to the agenda.”

She glanced down at her tablet, then nodded to a junior lecturer who had clearly been prepped for the opening act. The update was ostensibly about “student retention initiatives,” which was code for “why aren’t they signing up for our classes anymore?” The junior lecturer, whose name Adrien still had not managed to memorize, presented a short deck of slides and read each one with a sincerity that bordered on the devotional. The assembled faculty made a show of paying attention, but in truth, most were already checking their phones or marking up the margins of library books hidden beneath the table.

Adrien’s eyes, after a brief and obligatory pass over the projected slide, drifted to the surface of the table. The scratches and gouges in the wood, viewed from just the right angle, seemed to resolve into miniature landscapes—glacial valleys, river deltas, the fossilized memory of a thousand academic campaigns. He found it soothing, in a way, that even here the passage of time inscribed itself in slow, indifferent layers.

The update ended and, after a tepid round of applause, the floor was opened for discussion. There was, for a time, a careful but determined volley of professional platitudes—“we value student engagement,” “perhaps we need to meet them where they are”—which Adrien tuned out entirely. He allowed his mind to wander, but not far. He had learned long ago that the most effective shield in these situations was not withdrawal, but the appearance of intense inward activity, as if processing a point so subtle that it would not yet bear articulation.

The meeting’s only substantive agenda item was the proposed curriculum redesign for the coming academic year. This was a perennial issue, fraught with the kind of low-level dread that one typically associates with dental appointments or annual performance reviews. Professor Bray attempted to frame it as a “unique opportunity to reimagine our core mission in the twenty-first century,” but the room responded with a silence so thick that one could almost feel the air pressure drop. It was broken, finally, by the polite cough of a medievalist whose primary motivation appeared to be the preservation of her course, as it was the only one in the department that still required a physical textbook.

Adrien kept his head down, listening to the interplay with the same detached curiosity he had once reserved for observing predatory insects in glass terraria. There were the usual factions: the empiricists, who wanted more data and less theory; the radicals, who advocated for total overhaul but never specified what the new thing should be; the centrists, who believed that the answer was always a more “interdisciplinary” approach, preferably one that required the least possible change.

When it finally became clear that a consensus would not be reached, Professor Bray made a show of soliciting input from those who had not yet spoken. She had a technique for this, a kind of radar that zeroed in on the silent, and Adrien was not surprised when her gaze landed on him.

“Adrien, thoughts?” she said, not unkindly. “You’ve seen a few of these cycles.”

He looked up, momentarily caught in the act, and offered a smile designed to signal compliance without passion. “I agree with the previous point,” he said. “There’s no need to deviate.” He had perfected, over years, the art of saying something that was both true and so utterly inoffensive that it could not be used as ammunition in any future battle.

The effect was immediate: one or two colleagues exhaled in relief, and at least one stifled a laugh. Professor Bray nodded, content to interpret his brevity as support for her compromise plan, and the meeting lurched back into its earlier stasis.

From that point, the proceedings lost what little shape they had. A statistic about first-year attrition was cited, challenged, and tabled for later. There was a sidebar about the ethics of recorded lectures, which everyone agreed to disagree on. The final ten minutes were given over to “any other business,” which was code for “petty grievances dressed as logistical concerns.”

It was only when a motion was made to adjourn—by the same medievalist who had started the earlier cough—that the group came alive. The motion was seconded, then thirded, and even the most reticent among them began to gather their things in anticipation of escape.

Professor Bray, ever the optimist, concluded with, “Here’s to a productive few weeks ahead,” and the faculty dispersed with a kind of studied indifference, careful not to appear either too eager or too **** to be leaving.

Adrien waited until the initial surge had died down, then stood and tucked his notebook under his arm. He made a deliberate show of erasing a blank whiteboard at the front of the room, a gesture that implied both closure and a kind of custodial responsibility. Only once the last of his colleagues had drifted out did he allow himself the small pleasure of moving at his natural pace, slow and deliberate, as if savoring the fact that for now, nobody required anything of him.

He left the room as quietly as he had entered, closing the door on the lingering aroma of burnt coffee and the faint, fading echoes of academic self-justification.

The end of day arrived in stratified layers, like sediment settling in a slow, **** stream. The campus, with its mongrel architecture and its patient, weed-choked lawns, grew steadily more silent as dusk bled down the stone facades of the lecture halls and reading rooms. It was the hour when the last dregs of sunlight clung to the upper windows, then slipped gradually earthward, pooling in the brickwork hollows and the bruised green quadrangles. For those who lingered after hours—faculty with nowhere urgent to be, students who had not yet learned the virtue of momentum—there was a subtle quickening of the atmosphere. The day’s formalities were over, and the possibility of other, less regulated selves hovered in the air with the pollen and the dust.

Adrien Moore, for all his pathological aversion to drama, was not immune to the seductive melancholy of dusk. He moved through it with the practiced caution of a man who knew that darkness was both a cover and a solvent. The wind had picked up since he arrived that morning, and the chill keyed itself neatly into his joints—a familiar, persistent reminder that time moved forward even for those who tried to ignore it. He’d been told, more than once, that he walked with a posture at odds with his age: upright and loose-shouldered, as if expecting a sudden reversal or an open space beyond the next corner. Students and colleagues alike found it difficult to imagine him in any other setting. He suspected that, absent a university, he would simply fade into the background of some other institution, a perennial observer with an uncanny knack for blending in and vanishing at will.

The weight of his satchel, such as it was, diminished as the evening closed in. The last of his seminar notes and printouts had been consigned to the recycling bin, and he carried home only a thin folder and the hardback he’d pilfered from the return cart. He moved along the diagonal walk that bisected the main quad—an unsanctioned path, stamped out over decades by the faculty’s collective unwillingness to follow the prescribed route. The shortcut skirted the edge of the chapel and the outflow pipe of the ancient boiler room, its bricks so blackened by centuries of coal smoke that even the moss refused to stick.

At the perimeter, just inside the old iron gates, a small clot of undergraduates had formed around the battered stone bench that doubled as an informal gathering spot. Their voices were sharp with the energy of anticipation, though the day’s formal obligations were long over. Adrien recognized none of them directly; they looked like the sort of students who belonged to the business school, or perhaps the more aggressive arms of the social sciences—young men and women in logoed puffers, knit beanies with tiny leather patches, and shoes that would never touch a plowed field. One held his phone aloft like a talisman, its screen the locus of their excitement.

“Dude, watch this, it’s mental,” said the tallest of the bunch, and the others leaned in as if proximity might improve the bandwidth.

“Is this the one from yesterday?” asked a second, whose voice betrayed both skepticism and the **** hope that this time, the story would deliver something real.

“Nah, that one was like, a sewer or something. This is new. Jordan, I think? It’s not even on the BBC yet,” said a third, the group’s de facto archivist.

“No oxygen in the whole thing,” said the first. “They dropped a drone in and it almost bricked. Look at it, man.”

Adrien caught a phrase in passing—“sealed off since forever, they reckon”—and felt a ripple of something cold and uncanny pass through him. He slowed, not enough to draw attention, but sufficient to catch a glimpse of the phone’s illuminated display: a shaky video feed, shot from the rim of a vertiginous pit, the kind that seemed to swallow light rather than reflect it. The words ANCIENT CISTERN—SEALED TOMB scrolled across the lower third of the frame, and for a moment Adrien saw, vividly, the airless shaft, the featureless void at its base, the deep and final silence that seemed to radiate outward from the image.

A tightness seized him, irrational and immediate. The group’s laughter, which had a moment ago been merely background noise, now grated against his nerves. He wanted to move on, but found his gaze snagged by the succession of images—the grainy darkness, the stark geometry of cut limestone, the way the camera seemed to resist, then finally yield to, the descent. The students’ faces were carved into relief by the upcast light, their eyes dilated, their mouths twisted in wonder and horror. He recognized the look: the simultaneous desire to witness and to be spared, to know and not know.

He did not stop, but as he passed them, his left hand drifted almost unconsciously to the inside pocket of his overcoat. There, nestled in the familiar hollowness, was the iron ring—a Band of no particular beauty, hammered flat and dark as old blood. Against his palm, it was always cold. He pressed it now, hard enough to mark his skin, and let the sensation tether him to the present. The trick of grounding himself had become a kind of reflex, something closer to muscle memory than superstition. It was not about fear, or even about memory, precisely. It was about keeping the past from metastasizing into the future. It was about holding the boundary.

He walked on, the noise of the students receding into the hush that came whenever the wind shifted. The footpath to his flat crossed the northwest margin of campus, through a windbreak of leafless hornbeams and then down toward the river, where the air was always colder and the city’s lights shimmered indistinct on the water. The pedestrian bridge, with its caged steel rails and its faint odor of pigeons, usually offered a reprieve from the day’s accumulation, but tonight the river seemed to pull at him, urging him to slow, to look, to notice. Out on the water, a pair of sculls traced parallel arcs, their rowers bent double with each pull and then upright, faces to the sky, as if they were searching for something in the dusk. The regularity of their movement, the mechanical elegance of it, calmed him more than he wanted to admit.

He crossed the bridge and, at the midpoint, paused to watch the crews disappear beneath the next span. Above him, the sky thickened to a flat, metallic gray—no stars, not yet, but a growing sense that the night would be heavy and without relief. He opened his hand and glanced at the iron ring, turning it once before slipping it back into its place. The urge to throw it into the current, to be done with it, came and went like a tide. He did not indulge it. Instead, he let the cold sink in.

His route home was unremarkable: a switchback up the service road, a shortcut through the maintenance yard, then a narrow footpath that led to a terrace of brick row houses, each one a copy of the next. Adrien’s flat was on the upper floor of number 17, a rented space that came furnished with a bed, a battered desk, and a kitchen so small that he had to open the refrigerator to access the microwave. He climbed the stairs and, at the landing, paused to look down at the street. The lamp at the corner of the block was just flickering to life, its orange half-glow projecting a halo onto the mist that had begun to gather.

Inside, he left the lights off and set his things in their usual places. The silence was not absolute—the heating pipes ticked and flexed, the refrigerator’s motor buzzed in irregular cycles—but to Adrien it felt like the most honest sound in the world. He filled a glass with water and drank it slowly, standing in the dark at the kitchen counter. He tried to recall the details of the video from the student’s phone, but already it was fragmenting: the pit, the shadow, the sense of pressure. The memory of it lingered at the edge of his mind, poised to slip away as soon as something more immediate took its place.

But the campus, and all its layers, continued to press in on him. When he set the glass down, he realized his hand was still trembling faintly, though whether from the cold or the memory he could not say.

Above the rooftops, the sky faded to a uniform blue-gray, the kind that promised rain but delivered only a persistent, uneasy stillness.

Author's Note: If you like this branch, check out its sister branch, Andy Cooper.

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