Page 47 of Ashen Souls

“Come in,” his voice called.

I pushed the door open.

The office was smaller than I had imagined, but it didn’t feel cramped. If anything, it felt deeply lived-in. Books occupied nearly every surface. They were packed tightly into wooden shelves, stacked in precarious towers on the desk, and even gathered in small piles on the floor beside his chair. Papers lay spread across the desk in a kind of studied disarray that suggested he knew where every single page was.

The air smelled faintly of old paper, cedar, and black coffee.

Hale looked up from the papers in front of him.

“Ms. Hart,” he said.

The directness of it made me suddenly aware of how tightly I was gripping my notebook.

“What can I help you with?”

I stepped further into the room and forced my fingers to relax around the cover.

“I wanted to ask about the essay prompt.”

He leaned back in his chair, studying me with a thoughtful calm that made the small office feel smaller.

“Have you chosen a myth yet?”

“Selene and Endymion.”

For a moment, he said nothing. His eyes didn't just hold mine; they seemed to be mapping the strain in my jaw, tracing the line of my high collar as if he could see the bruised record of Daeren's touch through the wool.

“Interesting.”

I readjusted my footing, unsure if that was a mark of academic approval or polite skepticism.

“Most students choose that myth because it’s comfortable,” he continued. “Moon goddess, sleeping shepherd, tragic devotion. It makes for a very pretty story.” His eyes flicked briefly to the notebook I was still clutching like a weapon before returning to my face. “Why did you choose it?”

The question caught me off guard. I looked down at the worn leather of my notebook, then back at him.

“I suppose,” I said slowly, “because to me, it doesn’t feel entirely romantic.”

That seemed to sharpen his interest. He leaned forward. “How so?”

“Because he never wakes up. Everyone calls it love, but the shepherd never actually gets to choose anything. He’s just a beautiful object kept in a cage of dreams.”

Hale let the pause hang until the only sound left in the room was the wind rattling the windowpane. He tilted his head a fraction of an inch, his scrutiny narrowing with the patience of a man who recognized a wound when he saw one.

“That,” he murmured, “is exactly the kind of question that makes a myth worth studying. You’re looking for the cost of the visitation, not just the poetry of it.”

He gestured toward the velvet-backed chair across from his desk.

“Sit, Ms. Hart. I think this might be a very interesting conversation.”

I lowered myself into the chair, setting my notebook on my lap. The dialogue flowed into the mechanics of the myth, moving between fragmented translations and the friction of how certain passages should be read. The stories themselves seemed to push back against our analysis. Every version warped the meaning, as if the text were intentionally hiding something beneath the surface.

Hale’s voice had lost its classroom projection, dropping into a frequency that felt less like speech and more like a physical resonance in the room. He didn’t rush. He allowed the silence to stretch between his sentences, treating the gaps as calculated punctuation, as though the things he wasn’t saying were just as important as the Greek nuances he was explaining.

At one point, he rose from his chair, crossing the room toward a shelf directly behind me.

“You might find this version useful.” He reached above my shoulder for a leather-bound volume.

I pushed myself up from the chair to give him space and immediately regretted it. The movement was small, almost careless, but the moment I twisted the wrong way, a sharp line of pain sliced through my ribs.