3. Korrath #3
“I know you enjoy it.” The grimoire’s pages flutter with amusement. “I know you hate yourself for enjoying it. And I know that you’ll never stop, because stopping would mean facing what you’ve become.”
The words land like blows. True. Every one of them true.
Thyra steps between us—bloodied and unbowed, positioning herself between me and the book. “Enough.”
“Protecting him, keeper?” The grimoire’s voice carries surprise. Or appetite. “How… unexpected.”
“I’m protecting you.” She faces the grimoire squarely, blood still dripping from her palm. “He’s here to burn you. Provoking him isn’t going to help.”
“Nothing is going to help.” The pages turn again, revealing a final message in that blood-red script:
BURN ME, SPELL-BURNER. BURN ME, AND LEARN WHAT I’VE BEEN KEEPING CAGED. THE AUTHOR IS WAKING. AND HE’S SO VERY RAVENOUS.
The Author.
The name echoes in the sudden silence. Around us, the other texts have gone still—not dormant, but listening. Waiting. Even the air seems to hold its breath.
“What does that mean?” I keep my brand raised, heat radiating from the metal. “Who is the Author?”
Thyra doesn’t answer. She is staring at the grimoire, her face pale, her hands trembling. The blood from her palm has stopped falling—the wound must have closed. But she doesn’t move to feed the book again.
“Thyra.”
Her name on my tongue feels strange. Intimate. I shouldn’t have known her name. Shouldn’t care about the fear I see creeping into her expression.
She’s a keeper. Probably tainted. Definitely dangerous.
But I say her name again anyway.
“Thyra. Who is the Author?”
She turns to face me. The careful calm has cracked. Underneath it, I see a look I recognize—a person standing at the edge of an abyss.
“The sorcerer who created the grimoire.” Her voice is barely a whisper. “He didn’t die when he bound himself to the pages. He’s been in there for three hundred years. Sleeping. Waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
The grimoire answers before she can.
“For a worthy audience.” The voice carries through the Restricted Stacks, resonating off black stone walls and bone-inlaid shelves. “For a visitor worth waking for. For one who burns as beautifully as you do, Korrath Blackbrand.”
The pages turn one final time. And what appears chills me to the bone.
Not names. Not sins.
A face.
Rendered in ink that writhes and moves, a portrait that shouldn’t have been possible on flat parchment. A tall figure in scholar’s robes that crawl with living text. Eyes that glow with script scrolling behind the pupils. A smile that promises knowledge and madness and fates far worse than death.
THE AUTHOR WAKES.
The words burn themselves into the page beneath the portrait.
AND HE’S BEEN WAITING FOR BOTH OF YOU.
The grimoire slams shut.
The sound echoes through the Restricted Stacks—not just the thud of pages closing, but a resonance that travels through my chest, my bones, my execution brand that has suddenly gone cold in my hand.
Silence.
Then Thyra moves. She grabs my arm—both hands this time, fingers digging into muscle—and pulls me toward the door.
“We need to leave. Now.”
“I’m not leaving until—“
“He’s awake.” Her voice shakes. “Three hundred years of sleeping, and you woke him up. Whatever you were sent here to do, it just got a thousand times harder.”
I look back at the grimoire. The book sits on its lectern, chains still vibrating, cover gleaming wetly in the pale light. It looks dormant. Contained. Harmless.
But I’ve burned enough dangerous things to know what dormant really means.
Waiting. Watching. Planning.
“Three days.” I don’t know why I say it. Don’t know why I’m offering time instead of fire. “I’ll give you three days to find a way to sever the binding without releasing what’s inside.”
Thyra’s grip on my arm tightens. “And if I can’t?”
“Then I burn you both.” I hold her gaze—dark, guarded, hiding depths I can’t read. “That’s not a threat. That’s a promise.”
She holds my stare for a long moment. Then she nods once, sharply.
“Three days.”
We leave the Restricted Stacks side by side. The grimoire watches us go—I feel its attention following us through the sealed door, up the spiraling stairs, into the manor above.
The Author is waking.
The words echo in my skull as I step out into the dead gardens, into the twisted trees and bone-white flowers and the oppressive sky of the Veillands bearing down from above.
And he’s been waiting for both of you.
My squad is where I’d left them, weapons ready, eyes fixed on the manor. Bren starts forward when he sees me emerge. “Commander—“
“We wait.” The words taste like ash in my mouth. “Three days.”
“Three days? The orders said—“
“I know what the orders said.” I turn back toward the manor. Toward the Archive beneath. Toward the keeper with guarded eyes and blood-stained hands who is already walking back into the darkness.
“The situation has changed.”
Behind me, the iron gates swing closed on their own. The ward-sigils flare bright enough to cast shadows, then fade.
And somewhere far below, in the Restricted Stacks where craving books wait in chains, I swear I hear the grimoire laugh.