Chapter 5
The Hermetic Order
I learn about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where Crowley once belonged, and sense its ancient roots reaching back to Leveau's time.
The air in the back room of the bookshop was thick with the scent of old paper and dust, but beneath that lay something else—something like dried herbs and candle wax, faint but unmistakable. Mr. Thorne had led me through a narrow corridor lined with shelves that bowed under the weight of leather-bound volumes, their spines cracked and faded. He unlocked a heavy oak door with a key that looked older than the city itself, and we stepped into a space that felt more like a sanctuary than a storage room.
He motioned for me to sit in one of two worn velvet chairs facing a low table. A single lamp cast a golden pool of light across the surface, illuminating a stack of papers tied with black ribbon. I sat, my hands resting on my knees, trying to steady the flutter in my chest. The shop had been quiet all evening, save for the creak of floorboards and the distant hum of a ceiling fan, but now the silence felt deliberate, expectant.
Mr. Thorne lowered himself into the opposite chair, his movements slow and deliberate, as if each gesture carried weight. He was a tall man, gaunt, with silver hair that fell across a high forehead. His eyes, pale gray, held a clarity that seemed to see past the surface of things. I had met him only once before, the night I stumbled into his shop after wandering the French Quarter in a daze, chasing a name that had appeared in a dream: Leveau. He had given me a book then, a slim volume bound in red cloth, its pages filled with handwritten notes I could barely decipher. Now, weeks later, I had returned, and he seemed to have been waiting.
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