THE CURSE OF LUST
It was Ashford who shifted the terrain.
"History," he said thoughtfully, fingers resting on the edge of a folio, "is rarely content with facts alone. Particularly in periods like these. Wars breed stories. Legends. Fear fills the gaps where certainty fails."
I kept my expression neutral. "Legends are convenient. They give shape to what people cannot explain."
His gaze sharpened. "Or what they don't wish to understand."
A pause. The kind that stretches, listening.
"Take seventeenth-century Scotland," he continued. "Battlefields haunted long after the blood dried. Accounts of creatures roaming the hills. Vampiric revenants. Wolves walking upright. Scholars dismiss them as superstition, but the