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.

Three priests and a knight died because none of them could seem to remember the order of words. Their minds played tricks on them, dropping vowels and starting in the middle. Oh, they kept trying, while cloth and metal melted into their flesh.

Even now, if you press your ear to the pristine pozzolanic cement of the north wall, you're actually leaning against the jagged, calcified remains of a nun's mistake. She thought her bastard's blood would seal me in. The stone didn't seal. It warped, twisting into shapes that still sound like a human throat tearing itself apart.

So many more died proving what would not hold.

The Poor Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, or Templar Knights as they would be known, learned from each failure, albeit slowly. Thicker walls. Deeper holes. Sanctified glass. Symbols carved into stone, meanings the Knights no longer remember. The hands that carved them lost to inquisitions, plague, and treachery.

Every generation added another layer. New wards over old fading ones, like paint over decay. New seals affixed to the threshold. Mistakes forgotten with intention. Acknowledgement would mean weakness.

The vault showed echoes of itself, as chalk dust rubbed away but never quite erased. I could feel the older rooms beneath. The wailing of the dead might be what set Matteo's thick arm hair on end.

I remembered all of this, even if the Templar Knights chose not to.

The accidents continued. It's been fourteen years since the last.

Matteo's predecessor, Brother Luca, grew troubled by what his ears told him. What was whispered into them. He stabbed both ear canals with his pen, rupturing the thin membrane of his eardrums, causing internal bleeding inside his skull.

Brother Luca survived. Retired. Changed.

One of the lucky ones, they said.

This incident was cataloged elsewhere, along with the others. An intentional bureaucratic distance. A system designed to prevent pattern recognition.

With no pattern, fewer questions were asked.

They said the vault held me.

They never admitted what else it held.

Careers were built on this shared ignorance. Promotions granted for the ability to see something clear as midday sun and write "no anomalies detected." The system rewarded the blind followers.

The Order of the Templar Knights believed they were the authors of their hidden story.

They were not.

Each time they rebuilt this place, they acted out the same puppet show, their strings tangled and bloody.

For centuries, I've watched them believe, again and again.

This time would be different.

It never is.