CASPIAN
The study is the only room in the castle that still feels like mine.
Everything else has been reclaimed by time — the great hall with its long silences, the corridors that remember too many footsteps, the bedchambers I have rotated through across centuries like a man who cannot commit to sleeping in the same place twice. But this room I have kept. Exactly as it was. The same desk scarred by ink and use, the same books stacked in the particular disorder that looks chaotic and isn’t, the same chair pulled too close to the fire, angled toward the door the way it always is, the way it has always been, because old habits in men like me stop being habits and start being architecture.
I am not reading the book open in my lap.
I have been staring at the same page for — I check the angl
