That was your word, not mine. I keep it because it helps you put this in a nice, safe box.

Once a year, they sent someone down into the stone and iron to confirm I am still what I say I am. Still quiet. Still safe to catalogue and hide away on a ledger.

As if any of those things were ever true.

I have learned their patterns. I knew the weight of the steps that approached me. The confident ones. The ones made by a man who had eaten far too much La Porchetta. And the ones that paused at the threshold, hoping they wouldn't have to go inside.

Brother Matteo Tenucci had been here fourteen times.

He believed that mattered.

Matteo knew my dimensions without measuring. He was, after all, an expert codicologist. He knew the smell of the vault better than the prayers carved into the walls. Prayers in languages his Order had forgotten how to speak.

He thought the vault was built to hold me.

It was originally designed as a bridge. A fact long lost to all but me.

Matteo was haunted by his quirks. Each time he entered the vault he did the same two circles around the interior of the room. His wide hands smoothed the wrinkles in the front of his habit in the same three swipes. And he tapped his pen four times before he ever wrote a comforting word in his precious black ledger.

No anomalous changes observed. Binding was stable. No measurable emanations. The words were like warmed wine and honey, soothing him.

In return, he kept this prestigious job. The money and the uninterrupted bliss of a deep sleep.

Despite his good fortune, he found me insulting. The binding was too perfect. The vellum too uniform, something machine-made. No wear at the corners where centuries of handling should have left their mark. To Matteo's trained eye, I looked like something made to look old rather than something that was old. The Mona Lisa shown to the masses at the Louvre, not the real masterpiece hidden below the Vatican.

He preferred objects that ached. Objects that twisted and begged to be noticed.

He had handled knives that remembered bloodlines. Scrolls that knew the end of days. Coins that made your fingers itch through the archival gloves. He called those things honest.

I waited.

I was always good at the waiting game.

If I were dangerous once, he told himself, I was something powerless now. Declawed. Neutered.

Matteo opened the case. The seal exhaled stagnant air into a sterile vault.

The first page was blank.

It always is.

He cataloged this. Wrote it down in his little black ledger.

"This is it?" he said to the recorders. To the carvings in the wall. "This is what everyone is still afraid of?"

His voice was smaller than he expected. He blamed the acoustics.

He turned the page. Still blank, except for faded patterns that could have been words centuries ago.

He thought of the wasted resources. His wasted time. The blood spilled elsewhere while attention was paid to myths and folklore. The Highgate incident. The Idol in Madrid, linked to an outbreak of hysterical madness. And here he was, babysitting an empty book because hundreds of years ago, a Knight wrote Perīculōsus on my case, and no one has questioned it since.

"Impostor," he mouthed softly.

I've been called worse.

The lights flickered.

He closed me.

For a moment, he was certain. His skepticism was deserved, his contempt earned.

Matteo Tenucci. I made note of his name.

Not in ink. Not on any page he could have seen.

But I made note.

The vault around Matteo, what's his name, was not built all at once.

The Church loves the fairy tale about the French inventor and philosopher Blaise Pascal and his divine vision for the vault.

They are less fond of the story of the master mason who had been so in awe of his own sacred ratios and divine geometry that he could not understand the pull of gravity. I remember the wet crunch of his last moments.

They didn't learn. They dug deeper.