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oddities, with the girl appearing at every turn.
    Will continued to leaf through the book and finally found the page that had first surprised him earlier that evening. It was all at once strange and terrifying and full of promise, a promise that this prison, its walls made of time itself, had all been for some purpose.
    Was it possible he had a destiny to fulfill? For all these centuries he had considered himself cursed, a victim, and the fantasies he had entertained on and off had been of vengeance, not of fulfillment. Even now, it was the thought of a confrontation with the creature that stirred him most, but he couldn’t help being drawn to the siren call of destiny, to the suggestion that his existence had meant something.
    And it could not be simply the ramblings of a madman or a student of the history books because none of Will’s ancestors, nor any of the usurpers of his brother’s line, had ever borne his name, and so he alone knew that his name and that title had belonged together for more than seven hundred years. Nevertheless, the inscription in Jex’s book was clear:
    William, Earl of Mercia, will rise again.

5
    One of the many mysteries that have plagued me through the years of my sickness is the question that surrounds the circumstances of my burial. By the time I first emerged from my slumber, my father and brother were already dead, the latter having lived a long and fruitful life, so there was no one from whom I might have discovered the details.
    They buried me beneath the city walls, I know that much to be true. For many years I slept as my wooden casket slowly rotted and crumbled around me. It’s hard for me to describe the terror I felt upon waking because I knew only one thing and knew it instantly, that I was in the grave.
    I had no idea of the time that had elapsed, nor of the powers I had developed. All I knew in that moment was that I had been buried alive, and the fear and panic of that realization was like nothing I’d known before or since. My body threw itself into a terrible spasm, kicking and tearing at the crumbling walls of my coffin, so desperate was I to be free.
    The first to give and break apart was on the right side, and as the soil spilled in, my violence became even more frantic. My fingernails had grown long and broke now as I scrabbled at the earth that entombed me. The hollow left by my coffin had not completely collapsed, so I was fighting through a shifting and unstable tunnel of dirt, but still I screamed and clawed like an animal in a trap. I screamed so loud, I wonder if a passerby in the world above might have heard me and feared for his life, thinking some monster or demon was about to spring forth from the earth.
    At last, my hand clawed at the soil and touched stone, the foundations of the city walls, and the feel of them brought a calm over me, so powerful that I at once came back to myself. Here were the solid stones of my beloved city, and with them as a guide, I knew I could dig my way free.
    I can’t explain what I did next. All I can suggest is that my instinct was already reversed, that in my bones I already knew that I had more to fear from the day than from the night, from the living than from the dead.
    I dug along the face of the stones, but instead of climbing upwards, I burrowed deeper until, under the wall’s very foundation, the earth gave way beneath me and I fell into a small rocky chamber.
    After the shock and alarm of finding myself buried, after the physical exertion of digging my way free, imagine the renewed surprise of discovering these chambers ready furnished, containing chests laden with garments and objects of use.
    At first, I thought I’d stumbled into someone else’s subterranean lair, and only little by little did I realize that these chambers had been prepared for me. That’s the puzzle of it all—someone had known that I would be buried in that place; someone had spent considerable time and