The fog rolled through London like a living thing, thick and gray, swallowing the gaslights along Baker Street until they were little more than smudges of yellow in the murk. It was the kind of night that made a man feel the world had shrunk to the size of his room, and Henry Carter liked it that way. He sat at his cluttered desk, a chipped teacup of cold Earl Grey at his elbow, poring over a map of the Levant he'd pilfered from a dig in Damascus years back. The coal fire in the hearth sputtered, casting long shadows across the walls lined with bookshelves and oddities—scarabs in glass cases, a rusted Crusader's dagger, a fragment of Sumerian clay tablet.

Henry was a lean man, just past thirty, with sharp cheekbones and eyes that carried the weight of too many sleepless nights. His dark hair was swept back, streaked with premature gray from a life spent crawling through tombs and dodging traps that didn't care for scholarly curiosity. He wore a patched waistcoat, the kind a gentleman might've owned before it saw one too many sandstorms. Tonight, his focus was on a different prize: a scrap of parchment he'd been studying for weeks, its edges brittle and stained with age. Scrawled across it in a shaky hand were Latin words he'd translated a dozen times: Sub abysso, lux aurea aeterna. "Beneath the abyss, the golden light eternal." Below that, a crude sketch of a mountain range, jagged peaks like teeth, and a symbol he recognized from alchemical texts—a circle pierced by a cross.