Port Laveau drew barely a breath yesterday — seventeen souls accounted for across the parish, violence near absent, the streets wearing their stillness like a funeral veil. Seventeen is not peace. Seventeen is everyone already knowing to stay indoors.

Sources near the Blackwater docks report that Rook's waterborne associates moved three vessels before dawn following what one longshoreman called 'an interruption that won't happen twice.' The Serpent's Den closed without notice by midmorning — locals whispered of candles burning behind shuttered windows and a smell like river mud and something older. Baptême's name crossed no official lips, yet fresh symbols, crude and deliberate, were found scraped into the pilings below the Starlust Motel's rear dock. The Tenebrae's own markings, spotted twice this week near the Hidden Relic Antique Shop, have since been painted over. Quietly. Thoroughly.

The Ledger reminds its readers that curiosity along the Blackwater after dark carries costs the Laveau Clinic cannot always remedy. Some doors, once opened, do not close from the inside.