*(Folded away)*

The first time Ava called him The Black Knight, she hadn’t met him yet.

Not really.

There was no train platform.

No steady gaze.

No moment of recognition waiting beneath city lights.

Just a girl sitting awake too late at night, writing about a feeling she didn’t yet understand.

Years before the taxonomy.

Before the debriefs.

Before Sienna started categorising emotionally questionable behaviour like a research discipline.

Back then, Ava only knew that something about modern romance felt incomplete.

Too loud.

Too uncertain.

Too temporary.

So she wrote toward something else instead.

Something steadier.

Softer.

Intentional.

Something that felt less like performance and more like presence.

Folded inside an old notebook, between coffee stains and forgotten receipts, Sienna would later find the page.

And on it, in Ava’s handwriting:

Come to me Black Knight
With magic mysteries
My soul's delight.
Touching me gently
Soaring my heart in flight.

Whispering softly
Under moonlight.
Swaying like lace
I feel so light.

Immersed in ecstasy
Romance of the night.
Old world charm
My knight so bright.

Come to me…
Come to me
Tonight.

Sienna read the final line twice before looking up.

“You wrote this before all of them?”

Ava, already regretting every life decision that led to this moment, pulled her sleeve over her face.

“Yes.”

“And you called him the Black Knight even then?”

Ava gave a small nod.

The café hummed softly around them.

Rain pressed against the windows.

Coffee cooled untouched between them.

Sienna leaned back slowly.

“That is either deeply romantic,” she said, “or the earliest documented stage of your mythology.”

Ava laughed despite herself.

But Sienna was still staring at the page.

Thoughtful now.

Because suddenly the taxonomy made more sense.

The Magnetic Drifters.

The Wildfires.

The Ghosts.

The Almosts.

None of them were the beginning.

They were just the patterns Ava learned to recognise while searching for the feeling she had written about years earlier.

Not perfection.

Not fantasy.

Just someone whose presence felt clear instead of confusing.

Someone steady enough that nothing needed translating.

And somewhere between coffee cups, late-night conversations, and a decade of emotional field research…

The Black Knight stopped being a poem.

And slowly became a realisation.

• Realisation
  → The moment it clicked
• Recognition
  → There you are
• Under Observation
  → Research continues
• Found Him
  → Black Knight
• The Moment Before One
  → When you recognise it

→ continue…

👉 Read Signature Series → Come to Me, Black Knight 🌙

🖤 Some patterns are easier to see when you watch them unfold.