Antoine Lavigne had laughed at those warnings when he was young. He laughed louder when age gave him equations, sigils, and forbidden books with pages thin as peeled skin. To him, fear was ignorance waiting to be named. But on the night the lamps burned blue and the roses outside flowered black beneath a moonless sky, Antoine learned that some names answer back. No thunder announced it. No window shattered. Instead, every clock in Côte d’Azur stopped at once, and a silence descended so complete that the house seemed to close its mouth around him.