Read the Colophon on Inkitt for free.
There is a particular kind of silence that only exists in a book room at night.
Not a normal room with books in it. A real book room. The kind with old paper, leather, dust, foxing, dead insects in the window tracks, and shelves that seem perfectly innocent until you are alone with them after dark. My book barn smells like pine, vanilla, mildew, cardboard, and the slow surrender of paper and leather to time. And I love that smell.
One night I was out there picking books for orders, doing the ordinary work of an antiquarian bookseller, when I had one of those thoughts that can only arrive in the dark.
What if something was trapped in one of the books?
Not a ghost. Not a cursed object in the movie-prop sense. Something older and stranger. A dimensional shadow. A conscious darkness. A thing folded into the words the way a pressed flower is folded into a page, except the flower remembers being alive and is furious about it.
That was the first seed of The Colophon.
The second seed was worse, because it was real.
I have, in my possession, a book I still have not opened.
It is stitched shut. Not tied. Not politely fastened. Stitched. Someone took thread and sealed the thing closed with the sort of determination that suggests they did not want anyone looking inside. It is also hollowed out, and from what I can see, which is already more than I want to see, it appears to contain some kind of spellwork. Voodoo, hoodoo, folk magic, curse packet, ritual object, I do not know. I am not claiming expertise. I am saying that every instinct I possess as a dealer of old and strange things says: burn it.
That book gives me the creeps.
I have handled Santeria grimoires, sermons, moldering family Bibles, Victorian mourning books, hand written journals, medical texts with illustrations that should have been illegal, and the sort of occult-adjacent volumes that make sensible people ask why anyone kept them in the house. Most of them are just books. Strange books, beautiful books, disturbing books, but books.
This one feels like a door with bad manners.
So no, I have not opened it. I may never open it. I am not the girl in the horror movie who hears scratching from the basement and goes down in a nightgown holding one candle. I am the woman who bricks up the basement and sells the house. Cause fuck messing with demons!
Maybe.
Probably.
The third inspiration was Tales Of The Genii, Sir Charles Morell’s gorgeously illustrated 1873 edition, which I currently have for sale and will probably pull because, frankly, I may want to keep it. This is the disease of the antiquarian bookseller. We list things with the solemn intention of selling them, then spend too much time with them and begin making excuses.
It is research, we say.
It belongs in the archive, we say.
We lie.
But Tales Of The Genii has that lush, Orientalist, nineteenth-century fascination with jinn, enchantment, courts, sorcery, impossible bargains, and perilous desire. It is not the same book as The Colophon, but it lives in the same haunted wing of the imagination. A place where language is not decorative. It is a mechanism. A spell. A contract.
That became the central obsession of The Colophon: what if a manuscript was not merely a record of a binding, but the binding itself?
What if translation was not passive?
What if reading the book meant entering the contract?
What if the thing trapped inside did not want to be freed at any cost, because the price would be you?
The fourth inspiration was my RPG with my coauthor, which featured a very sexy and dangerous shadowjack. Anyone who writes with another person knows this strange alchemy. You make a character in play. You think he is just there to cause trouble. Then he starts developing gravity. He starts bending the room around himself. You realize, too late, that some part of your brain has been filing him away under future damage.
Khalash owes something to that darkness. Not directly. Not literally. But the mood of it stayed with me. The beautiful thing in the shadows. The dangerous thing that is not safe, but is not simple either. The monster who is not redeemed by love because it is untamable.
And then there is the biographical part.
Nasreen Khalil is not me exactly, but let’s not insult anyone’s intelligence.
She is an antiquarian book dealer. I am an antiquarian book dealer. She knows what old books smell like. So do I. She understands that manuscripts are physical things before they are intellectual things: leather, thread, glue, ink, rot, pressure, weather, hands. She knows that books have bodies.
And yes, I trained with a Wing Chun sifu for several years, so that part did not come from nowhere either.
Nasreen is younger, better with languages, and fictional, which gives her certain advantages. But if we are being honest, I am probably more likely to punch someone in a hallway.
The book barn is mine. The strange stitched book I will not open is mine.
The Colophon began as one of those secret projects writers do not talk about. I had around 50,000 words of it sitting there, languishing, accusing me, occasionally clearing its throat from the hard drive. I would open it, read a few pages, remember that I loved it, remember that finishing books requires work instead of vibes, and close it again.
Then 2025 happened.
It was one of the worst years of my life. My father died. He was my hero, and he was the person who gave me my love of books, reading, impossible things, magic, duendes, mythology, and the sense that the world is stranger than it looks if you know how to pay attention.
Losing him changed everything.
It made life feel very short, because it is very short. It made unfinished things feel less like harmless clutter and more like a warning. I had stories I still wanted to tell. Books I had started and abandoned. Doors I had left half-open because there would always be time later.
There is not always time later.
I spent 2025 putting pieces back together.
Then 2026 arrived, the Fire Horse year, and something in me turned hard and bright. I did not want another year of almost. Almost finished. Almost brave enough. Almost ready.
There are years for surviving and years for moving. Fire Horse felt like motion. Heat. Nerve. Unfinished business kicking the stall door.
So I went back to The Colophon and finished the damn thing.
The full manuscript is now roughly 75,000 words. The novel is written. I am editing it now, which means I am in that glamorous stage where one day I believe every sentence is etched in stone and the next day I suspect it was written by drunken raccoons.
What’s up with the title? What the hell is a Colophon?
Facts checked: a colophon is traditionally a closing note at the end of a manuscript or book, often recording the scribe/printer, date, place, or circumstances of production. In manuscript studies, colophons are valuable because they preserve traces of the people and conditions behind the text. The word comes through Latin from Greek kolophōn, meaning “summit” or “finishing touch.” (Encyclopedia.com)
The title is a little bit of book-nerd bait.
A colophon is the note you sometimes find at the end of an old manuscript before copyright pages were a thing. It can tell you who copied it, who printed it, where it was made, when it was finished, who paid for it, who owned it, or what condition the poor scribe was in by the time he reached the final page.
Sometimes they are dry. Sometimes they are weirdly personal. A scribe might complain about his hand hurting, ask God to bless the reader, name the patron, record the weather, or quietly insert himself into history after hundreds of pages of copying someone else’s words.
I love colophons because they remind you that books do not fall from heaven. Someone made them. Someone touched the page. Someone sharpened the pen, mixed the ink, ruled the lines, stitched the gatherings, corrected the errors, cursed the work, finished the thing, and left one last little human fingerprint at the end.
So the title matters.
It is part of the trap.
What’s the book about? Here goes…
Nasreen Khalil is an antiquarian book dealer in Lower Manhattan who reads Ottoman Turkish, trains Wing Chun after dark, and can date a manuscript by the smell of its binding.
At an estate auction she finds a fifteenth-century Ottoman text no one else looked at twice. A philosophical debate between a scholar and an entity called Khalash. Seven nights. Seven arguments. The structure of a contract.
Because it is one.
The manuscript is a living binding. The thing inside has been conscious for four hundred years, waiting for a reader who could understand what the words were for.
Khalash is shadow given form. Devastatingly beautiful. Not quite human. The binding’s terms are exact: each clause unlocked through intimacy, because the scholar who wrote it believed desire was the only honest language between humans and jinn.
As Nasreen translates deeper, the text begins erasing her. She is losing English. Gaining Ottoman Turkish. Preferring sleep to waking because in her dreams the thing in the manuscript can touch her. Her family thinks she is losing her mind. She is falling in love with something that would rather stay imprisoned forever than watch her disappear into its pages.
Their love becomes a war over who gets to be the sacrifice.
The Colophon is a gothic dark romance about books, desire, language, imprisonment, sacrifice, and the very bad idea of opening things meant to stay closed.
The novel contains explicit sexual content, themes of confinement and consent, references to past domestic violence, supernatural horror, and enough Arabic linguistic analysis to send you down a three-hour etymology rabbit hole. Proceed accordingly.
I am posting it on Inkitt for free while I edit because I want readers in the room while the book is still alive enough to change. If something lands, tell me. If something does not, tell me that too. If a line pulls you out, if a chapter drags, if Nasreen makes you want to throw your phone, I want to know.
This is the stage where feedback matters.
The door is unlocked.
Mind the shadows.
— Narcisse
