The Blackwood estate had always been a place of shadows, but by the autumn of 1843, the shadows had grown teeth.

Arthur Blackwood stood at the window of his chamber and watched the rain lash against the glass. He was fifteen years old, but his reflection in the window showed a man of fifty—hollow cheeks, gray-streaked hair, eyes that had seen too much. He pressed his palm against the cold glass and felt the familiar warning thrum in his skull. Tomorrow, the north barn would collapse. He had known it since dawn.

He had always known things.

It started when he was three years old. He had pointed at the sky and said, "The apple will fall." His mother, Lady Blackwood, had laughed. Then the apple had fallen. By six, he could predict the weather. By nine, he could tell which horse would win at the races. By twelve, the villagers of Yorkshire began to whisper. The boy was blessed. Or cursed.

He did not know which he preferred.

"Arthur." The door opened. Old Toby, the family's ancient hunting dog, shuffled in and collapsed at his feet with a sigh. The dog was the only living thing that had stayed with Arthur since birth. The servants had long stopped visiting his chambers—there was something unsettling about the way Arthur looked at them, as if he could see through their skin to the bones beneath.

"Tomorrow," Arthur said softly, "I must go to the north barn before sunrise."

Toby lifted his head and thumped his tail once. He understood, somehow, that his master carried burdens no fifteen-year-old should carry.

Arthur sat at his desk and opened the ledger. Blackwood estate: debt, £47,000. Annual income: £1,200. The numbers had been sinking for three generations, and now they were sinking faster than anyone could swim. Arthur had calculated the trajectory. In six months, the estate would be seized. In nine months, the north barn would collapse. In twelve months—

He closed the ledger. He had learned long ago that knowing the future did not mean he could change it. Every time he had tried, the universe had twisted his efforts into something worse.

He remembered the fire of 1840. He had seen it coming three days before—a vision of flames consuming the west wing. He had warned his father. George Blackwood had ordered the servants to double the watch. The fire had started anyway, in the east wing, and killed two servants. Arthur had not warned them about the east wing because he had not seen it. How could he have known?

He could have known. He always knew. But knowing was not the same as understanding, and understanding was not the same as being able to act. The visions came in fragments—shadows, sounds, smells—and by the time he pieced them together, it was often too late.

Or too early.

The worst incident had been last spring. He had seen a horse throwing a rider at the racecourse. He had shouted a warning. The rider had dismounted early, avoiding the fall. But the horse, confused by the sudden change, had bolted into the crowd. Three people were injured. Arthur had stood in the stands, frozen, as the screams rose around him. He had tried to prevent one tragedy and caused another.

Since then, he had stopped trying.

"Arthur." His aunt Margaret stood in the doorway, a candle in her hand. She was a severe woman, fifty-two, with eyes like flint and a spine like iron. She had managed the estate since Arthur's father retreated into drink. "You should rest. The doctor said—"

"The doctor said I am wasting away," Arthur interrupted. "He is not wrong."

Margaret stepped into the room and set the candle on the desk. The flame illuminated the dark circles under Arthur's eyes, the thinness of his hands. "You are fifteen years old."

"I feel fifty."

She reached out and touched his cheek. Her hand was warm. "There is a doctor in London who specializes in— in conditions like yours. Dr. Harrington. He has written papers on neural—"

"I am not going to London."

"Arthur—"

"If I go to London, I will see things. Things that have not happened yet. Things that will destroy me." He looked at his hands. "I am already destroyed, Aunt Margaret. I just have not fallen down yet."

She left without another word. Arthur blew out the candle and sat in darkness. Toby whined softly.

He closed his eyes and let the visions come.

He saw the north barn collapsing at dawn, straw and timber scattering like bones. He saw the rain washing blood into the mud—not human blood, the blood of a calf trapped beneath the beams. He saw himself standing in the wreckage, his hands bleeding, his chest heaving. He saw the look on the farmhand's face—not gratitude, but something worse. Fear.

The boy who predicted the future was feared more than the boy who caused it.

Arthur opened his eyes. The room was dark. The rain had stopped. Dawn was approaching.

He rose, pulled on his coat, and walked downstairs. Toby followed.

The north barn collapsed at six in the morning, just as Arthur had known it would. He had arrived an hour earlier, dragging the farmhand Thomas from his cot and forcing him to help move the cattle out. They worked in silence through the cold, Arthur's hands bleeding as he hauled beams and untied ropes. Thomas thought him mad. Arthur did not blame him.

At six o'clock, the great oak beam in the center of the barn gave way. The roof collapsed with a sound like thunder. Straw and timber rained down. The calf Arthur had freed from its stall lowed in confusion and trotted away into the mist.

Thomas fell to his knees in the mud. "How did you know? How did you know?"

Arthur did not answer. He was looking at his hands. They were shaking. Not from cold—from the familiar draining sensation, the feeling of something vital being siphoned from his body with each act of foresight. He felt older. He always felt older after a vision.

He walked back to the house in silence. Thomas followed at a distance, casting fearful glances at the boy who walked like a man twice his age.

In his chamber, Arthur sat at his desk and opened a fresh page of his journal. He wrote:

October 14, 1843. The north barn collapsed at six. No human casualties. One calf injured. I predicted it three days prior. Cost to my health: moderate. I am thirty-two years old today, though I was born in 1828. The discrepancy grows wider each year.

He closed the journal. He had been keeping it for ten years, recording every prediction, every consequence, every year of life burned away by the fire in his brain. The journal was a record of a slow suicide conducted in broad daylight.

There was a knock at the door. His aunt Margaret entered, carrying a tray with tea and bread. "You have not eaten."

"I am not hungry."

"Eat." She set the tray down and sat beside him. "Arthur, I have something to show you."

She opened a locked cabinet and withdrew a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. Inside was a thick manuscript, handwritten in a cramped, precise script. "This belonged to my father—your great-uncle Edmund. He was a physician. He wrote this about your condition."

Arthur took the manuscript with trembling hands. The title page read: On the Nature of Foresight and Its Toll on the Human Frame, by Edmund Blackwood, 1789.

He read by candlelight while Toby slept at his feet. His great-uncle had documented the same phenomenon in three previous generations of Blackwoods. Each afflicted individual had lived a shorter life than their peers. Each had died between the ages of thirty and forty. Each had experienced a progressive wasting of the body and mind.

The final entry read: "The faculty of foresight is not a gift from God. It is a burning of the brain's own fuel, and the fuel is finite. When it is spent, the vessel is empty."

Arthur closed the manuscript. He was thirty-two. He had perhaps eight years left. Eight years of seeing everything and changing nothing.

He walked to the window. The rain had returned, steady and cold. He pressed his palm against the glass and felt the familiar thrum in his skull. Tomorrow, something else would happen. He would know it before it came. And each time he knew, he would burn a little more.

He was the last Blackwood. The crown was hollow, and he was its empty king.

Toby rose and came to stand beside him, resting his heavy head against Arthur's leg. The dog did not understand the future. He only understood the present, and in the present, Arthur was still his master, still his friend, still worth loving.

Arthur looked down at the dog and smiled—a thin, broken smile. "You are the only one who stays, Toby. The only one."

Outside, the wind howled through the trees of the Blackwood estate, and the rain fell on a house that was slowly dying, inhabited by a boy who was slowly dying, who knew exactly when it would all end but could not stop it.

This was not a curse. This was not a blessing. This was simply the truth: to see everything, to feel everything, to carry everything—and to be unable to put it down.

The crown was hollow. The king was hollow. And the hollow man walked through the hollow house, knowing every shadow, every creak, every whisper of the wind, because knowing was all he had ever had.