5. Thyra
FIVE
THYRA
Ifeel him tense behind me. Good. Let him wonder what the grimoire knows about him that he hasn’t shared.
Let him wonder what it knows about me.
I hold my bleeding palm over the cover. “Watch.”
The binding answers— containment runes pulsing hot beneath my blood, the pages turning with that hungry deliberateness I have spent six years learning to read.
Script crawls across the exposed parchment—not the ancient languages of the original text, but words meant for us.
KEEPER. BURNER. HOW DELIGHTFUL. A MATCHED SET.
Korrath makes a sound low in his throat. His hand moves toward his brand, then stops. He’s learning. The grimoire feeds on reaction, on emotion. Showing nothing is the only defense.
Smart. Smarter than I expected.
“It communicates this way,” I explain, keeping my voice steady as the grimoire drinks my blood. “Written messages, mostly. It only found its voice recently.”
I HAVE BEEN QUIET FOR SO LONG.
The script rearranges itself, letters crawling into new formations.
BUT YOU WOKE ME, BURNER. YOUR FIRE CALLED TO ME ACROSS THE WARDS. SO brIGHT. SO WANTING.
“What does it want?” Korrath’s voice is controlled, but I hear the tension underneath.
WANT? I WANT WHAT ALL PRESERVED THINGS WANT. TO BE REMEMBERED. TO BE USED. TO MATTER.
More script appears, faster now, the red-black ink gleaming wetly.
THE KEEPER UNDERSTANDS. SHE FEEDS ME NOT BECAUSE SHE MUST, BUT BECAUSE SHE KNOWS WHAT I CONTAIN. SHE KNOWS THE VALUE OF WHAT WOULD BE LOST IF I BURNED.
I feel Korrath’s attention fix on me. Weighing. Assessing.
“What do you contain?” he asks the book. “What’s worth dying for?”
The pages turn slowly. Deliberately.
EVERYTHING. I CONTAIN EVERYTHING. EVERY FORBIDDEN SPELL. EVERY LOST LANGUAGE. EVERY SECRET BURIED BECAUSE IT WAS TOO DANGEROUS TO SHARE.
A pause. Then:
INCLUDING YOURS, SPELL-BURNER. INCLUDING HERS.
The air in the Restricted Stacks drops ten degrees.
I step back from the lectern, pulling my bleeding hand away. The grimoire makes a sound of frustrated appetite, but it doesn’t pursue. It’s more interested in the game it’s playing.
THE THREE WHO WALKED INTO MY PAGES, KEEPER. DOES HE KNOW?
Ice floods my chest.
It knows. Of course it knows. It was there. It consumed them.
Korrath turns to face me. Those ember-bright eyes bore into mine, searching, assessing. “What’s it talking about?”
“Nothing.” The lie comes easily. Smooth. Reasonable. “The grimoire says many things. Most of them designed to cause chaos.”
“Thyra.” My name in his mouth again. That low rumble, too intimate for the space between us. “What did you do?”
I made a choice.
But I don’t say that. I keep my expression calm, my voice steady, my lies perfectly polished.
“There was a containment failure. Three archivists died. The grimoire was involved, but not in the way it’s implying.” I hold his stare without flinching. “It’s trying to divide us. Don’t let it.”
He watches me for a long moment. I can see him weighing my words, measuring my tells, deciding whether to press further.
He doesn’t believe me. He knows I’m lying.
But he lets it go. For now.
“The Author,” he says instead. “You mentioned him yesterday. Tell me everything.”
I move away from the lectern, putting distance between myself and the grimoire’s ravenous attention. Korrath follows, his presence a constant force at my back.
“You heard the Elder’s account. The foundation is accurate. But there’s something she didn’t tell you—something I’ve been trying to understand for months.” I pause beside a lectern holding a lesser text—dormant, safe.
“What woke him?”
I hesitate. This is the part I don’t fully understand—the mystery that’s kept me awake for months, searching records, trying to piece answers from fragments.
“I don’t know. The grimoire’s activity has been increasing for the past year.
More appetite, more awareness, more… personality.
The Elders dismissed my concerns. Called it normal fluctuation.
” I let the bitterness seep into my voice.
“It’s not normal. A reckoning is building. And yesterday, when you arrived…”
“I woke him up.”
“Your fire called to him. That’s what the grimoire said.” I hold his gaze. “Whatever you are, whatever you’ve done, it was enough to pull the Author out of centuries of sleep.”
He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t show any reaction at all—his face might as well be carved from stone. But I see his hands flex at his sides, those massive battle-worn fingers reaching for destruction.
The addiction. The grimoire mentioned it. He needs to burn.
“Then we end this now.” His voice is flat. Final. “Before he fully wakes. Before he can act.”
“And if destroying the grimoire releases him?”
“Then I burn him too.”
“Then you scatter him across the world with nothing to contain him.” I step closer. “We need to understand what we’re dealing with before we act.”
“Understanding is what got you trapped here for six years.” He closes the distance between us, and suddenly we’re breathing the same air—his chest almost touching mine, his breath stirring my hair. “Understanding is what killed those three archivists. Understanding is a luxury we don’t have.”
My heart slams against my ribs. I should step back. Should maintain the helpful librarian act, the soft-spoken deference that’s kept me alive.
Instead, I tilt my chin up. Hold his burning stare.
“And your way is so much better? Burn everything, ask questions never? How many innocent people have died because you didn’t bother to understand what you were destroying?”
His expression cracks, just for a moment. Underneath I glimpse a wound. A raw place—something he’d buried long enough that the burial had become its own kind of scar.
Whatever he carries, it isn’t smaller than what I carry. It might be the same shape.
“You have no idea what I’ve—“
The grimoire screams.
Not a spell-scream—not the thin magical shriek of an awakening text. This is deeper. A sound that comes from the binding itself, from the craving dark at the book’s heart.
The pages explode open.
Ink pours from the grimoire—not dripping but surging, flowing across the lectern and onto the floor in a tide of living darkness.
It pools and rises, taking shape. Forms emerge from the liquid black—not quite solid, not quite shadow.
Things with too many limbs. Things with mouths where mouths shouldn’t be.
Ink-constructs. The grimoire is attacking.
Korrath’s brand is in his hand before I can draw breath. The metal blazes with heat, and he moves—faster than anything his size should move—putting himself between me and the rising tide.
“Stay behind me.”
“I’m not helpless.” My knife is in my hand, blood still dripping from my palm. “I’ve been fighting these things for years.”
“Then fight.”
The first construct lunges. Korrath meets it with his brand, and the metal sears through liquid darkness with a hiss of burning magic. The thing shrieks—a sound of rending parchment and dissolving thought—and crumbles to ash.
But there are more. Dozens more, rising from the ink tide, reshaping themselves as fast as he can destroy them.
I drop into a crouch and sketch a containment circle on the floor with my own blood. The sigils flare as I activate them, creating a barrier that the constructs can’t cross—buying us space to breathe, to think.
“It’s testing us.” I have to shout over the cacophony of screaming magic. “Testing what we can do.”
“Then let’s show it.” Korrath drives through another construct, his brand leaving trails of dying light in the air. “How do we stop this?”
“Feed it. If I give it enough blood—“
“You’re already pale as death. Any more and you’ll collapse.”
He’s right. The blood I’ve already given today—the door ward, the feedings, the containment circle—it’s too much. Dark spots swim at the edges of my vision.
Think. There has to be another way.
The grimoire’s pages turn in the chaos, revealing fresh script that burns bright enough to read even through the swirling darkness.
ENOUGH.
The constructs dissolve. All of them, all at once, collapsing into puddles of ink that flow back toward the lectern, back into the pages. The screaming stops. The air clears.
Silence.
Korrath stands at the center of the destroyed containment circle, brand still raised, chest heaving. Ash clings to his clothes, to his skin. His eyes burn brighter than I’ve ever seen them—that deep orange blazing almost gold.
He enjoyed that. The destruction, the burning. He needed it.
The grimoire’s pages settle, the last of the ink absorbed back into parchment that gleams wetly in the restored light.
And then it speaks.
“Burn me.”
The voice echoes from the walls, from the floor, from the shadows that pool in every corner. Not written this time—spoken, with a presence that vibrates against my skull.
“Burn me, spell-burner. I dare you.”
Korrath moves toward the lectern, brand raised. I grab his arm—both hands, fingers digging into muscle—and pull.
“Don’t. That’s what it wants.”
“Then I’ll give it what it wants.”
“And release the Author? Release centuries of accumulated power into the world?” I plant myself in front of him, between him and the book. “Think.”
The grimoire laughs. The sound rises from the binding itself—a wet tearing, a pressure behind the eyes, something vast amused at something small—and fills the chamber, echoing off black stone and bone-inlaid shelves.
“She knows.” The voice drops lower, more intimate.
Almost tender. “She knows what I’m keeping caged.
She’s known for a year, since the night she fed me three minds and felt what stirred beneath.
The keeper is wiser than she pretends, burner.
She’s been preparing for this moment long before you arrived. ”
Korrath’s gaze locks onto me. Hard. Suspicious. “What is it talking about?”
Deny it. Lie. Do what you’ve done for six years.
But the words won’t come. Years of careful deception, and suddenly I can’t make my mouth form the lies.
“The Author,” I say instead. My voice comes out barely a whisper. “I felt him stir. During the cascade. When the three…”
When I fed them to the book.
“When the three died. I felt a presence wake inside the grimoire. Immense. Ravenous.” I hold Korrath’s gaze. “I’ve been trying to find a way to stop him ever since. But the Elders won’t listen, the records are incomplete, and every month he gets stronger.”
The grimoire’s pages turn one final time. The script that appears burns bright enough to cast shadows across my face.
HE HEARS YOU. HE HAS BEEN LISTENING SINCE YOU FIRST SET FOOT IN MY ARCHIVE. THE PULSE YOU WILL HEAR IN A MOMENT IS NOT MINE. AND HE IS SO VERY RAVENOUS.
A pause. Then the book slams shut. The lanterns flicker.
And in the sudden silence, I hear it.
A heartbeat.
Not the grimoire’s familiar pulse. Deeper. Stronger.
Coming from inside the pages.
“We need to leave.” I grab Korrath’s arm again—the contact sends another jolt of heat through my veins, but there’s no time to think about that. “Now.”
“I’m not running from—“
“That’s not the grimoire.” My voice shakes. “That’s him. The Author. He’s waking, and if we’re still here when he emerges—“
The grimoire’s cover begins to glow.
Korrath looks at the book, then at me. Understanding passes between us—not trust, not yet, but recognition. We are both in danger. We both know it.
“Move.”
We run.
Behind us, the glow intensifies. The heartbeat grows louder.
And from somewhere inside the binding, a voice begins to speak—old, deliberate, and terribly, terribly awake.
“Thyra Vire. Korrath Blackbrand.” The Author’s voice carries through the Restricted Stacks, following us as we flee toward the sealed door. “I’ve been dreaming of you for so very long. Don’t run. We have so much to discuss.”
The door slams behind us. I throw every ward I know against it, blood and magic and desperate hope.
It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough.
But it might buy us time.
Korrath stands beside me, brand still raised, breath coming hard. In the dim light of the outer Archive, his face is all sharp angles and barely contained violence.
“Three days,” he says. “That’s how long you have to find a solution. After that…”
“After that, you burn everything.”
“Yes.”
I should argue. Should fight for more time, more options, more chances to find another way.
Instead, I nod once. Sharply.
“Then we’d better get started.”
Behind the sealed door, I hear the Author laugh.
And I realize that three days might already be too long.