EPISODE 5: THE SIGIL ## CHAPTER 1: THE GEOMETRY OF DECLINE It began with the angles. Nadia noticed on morning twenty-three. She was descending the east staircase—the narrow servant's passage that Catherine Ashworth had built in 1731—when her body registered something wrong before her mind could name it. A step that had always been eight inches deep was now seven. Or nine. She couldn't tell, and that was the problem: the stair's dimensions were uncertain, occupying a smeared range of possibility rather than a single fixed value. She measured. The step was eight inches. It had always been eight inches. But her proprioceptive memory insisted otherwise, and when she ascended the same staircase twenty minutes later, the wrongness returned—a barely perceptible shift in spatial relationships that her rational mind dismissed and her body refused to ignore. By noon, the wrongness had spread. The kitchen doorway, which she'd walked through a hundred times without incident, required her to duck. She measured it: six feet, eight inches, same as the architectural survey. But the space felt compressed, as if the frame were exerting a subtle downward pressure. She stood in the doorway and watched the measurement remain stable, and she ducked anyway when she passed through, because her newly rewired perception told her that the number on the tape was the...