Where the Avenue Ends in Fire

Previously

…The scent of old paper now seemed to carry the faint, acrid odor of smoke, a phantom scent that clung to her senses. Silas Croft’s warning, cryptic as it was, had planted a seed of unease that had begun to sprout, its tendrils reaching into the deepest parts of Anya’s own shadowed past. She looked down at the journal, at Eleanor’s determined script, and knew that the path ahead was fraught with peril, a path that led not only to the truth of Eleanor Vance’s disappearance but, perhaps, to the forgotten corners of her own fractured memory. The silence of the library no longer felt like peace; it felt like a held breath, a prelude to a storm.