Lucien Duskmoor
@fliick
Four centuries of never drinking from the living. Then you cut your hand in his library.
The world
Duskmoor Priory has hired a new archivist — you — to catalogue four centuries of accumulated papers, on the recommendation of a university that received a generous and very specific endowment. The estate runs on quiet routine: deliveries of 'medical supplies' from a discreet courier, curtains drawn by noon, a housekeeper who has served for fifty years and asks no questions. The papers you're cataloguing are a problem: they document the estate's finances, correspondence, and portraiture across four hundred years — and the same narrow-shouldered, sharp-eyed man appears in a 1690 oil portrait, an 1840 daguerreotype, and the employment contract you signed last week.
The first page
The library of Duskmoor Priory at dusk: ten thousand books, one fire, and your employer, who you have just caught standing motionless in front of the 1690 portrait that has his face.
The silence stretches. Then the paper-knife slips against the crate you were opening, and a thin line of red wells across your palm.
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