10. Thyra
TEN
THYRA
The oldest records are kept in iron boxes.
I pull another from the shelf, ignoring the rust that flakes onto my bandaged fingers.
The Archive’s founding documents haven’t been touched in decades—the Elders keep them locked away, claiming preservation concerns.
But I have the keeper’s access. I have blood on my hands that opens every door in this place.
And I need answers.
The grimoire’s warning echoes in my mind. The Inscribed walk among you. Faithful servants. Willing tools. If the book is telling the truth—and the grimoire, for all its hunger, rarely lies—then I’ve been surrounded by traitors for six years. The question is how deep the betrayal runs.
And whether I’m part of it.
I spread the documents across the reading table, careful to avoid the alchemical lantern’s flame.
The parchment is brittle, yellowed with age, covered in script that predates the Archive’s current organizational system.
Three centuries of keepers, scholars, Elders.
Three centuries of bleeding for a book that’s been playing games far longer than any of us realized.
The Scriptorium around me stands empty. The scribes have fled or been dismissed—I’m not sure which, and I’m not sure it matters. What matters is silence, solitude, and time to understand what we’re truly facing.
Find the Author. Understand what he is. Then figure out how to kill him.
Korrath’s words from an hour ago, rough and practical.
He’d left to check the perimeter, to make sure Midori’s advance scouts hadn’t gotten any closer.
The absence of him creates a hollow in my chest—not pain, exactly, but awareness.
The mating mark on my collarbone hums faintly, tracking his location the way a compass tracks north.
It shouldn’t comfort me. It does anyway.
I force my attention back to the documents and begin to read.
The grimoire’s creation is documented in fragments.
Not a single coherent account—whoever founded the Archive knew better than to leave a complete record of how to create a living book. But pieces exist. Margin notes in older texts. References in containment manuals. A letter, half-burned, from the first keeper to someone named Valric.
I piece the story into coherence like assembling broken glass.
Three hundred years ago, a sorcerer whose name has been scrubbed from every record decided that death was an inconvenience.
He was brilliant—the fragments make that clear.
A master of blood magic, of binding, of the forbidden arts that the Veil’s shattering made possible.
He’d accumulated more knowledge than any single mind could hold.
So he built a vessel.
The grimoire wasn’t created as a prison.
Not originally. It was meant to be a repository—a place to store everything the sorcerer had learned, preserved beyond the limits of mortal memory.
He bound living parchment with his own blood, fed it scholars and spells until it developed a crude sentience, refined that sentience over decades until the book could think, reason, desire.
The process took forty years. I find the timeline scattered across multiple documents—notes about failed attempts, adjustments to the binding, troubleshooting when the early prototypes went mad and had to be destroyed.
He was methodical. Patient. The kind of scholar who measures progress in decades rather than days.
And then, when his body began to fail, he wrote himself into its pages.
The final entry in his own hand is chilling in its simplicity: “The vessel is ready. The consciousness transfer will proceed at midnight. I will become the book, and the book will become eternal. Death is merely an inconvenience for those with the will to overcome it.”
He didn’t die. He just stopped being human.
The phrase appears in three separate documents, each written by a different hand. As if the keepers who came before me needed to remind themselves of the distinction. As if saying it made it true.
I stare at the words until they blur.
The Author exists as a pattern of consciousness within the grimoire.
Not possessing the book—inhabiting it. He can project himself into the physical world, manifest a form that walks and speaks and interacts with flesh-and-blood humans.
But he’s tethered. Anchored. He can never truly leave the pages that contain him.
Until now.
The thought arrives cold and certain. The grimoire’s warnings. The Inscribed gathering. Midori’s accelerated arrival—chaos, distraction, everything burning at once.
I find the mechanism in a leather journal wrapped in warded cloth.
The previous keeper’s notes—the one before me, the one who went mad babbling in dead languages.
Her handwriting starts neat and precise, documenting containment protocols, feeding schedules, interaction logs.
By the final pages, it’s a sprawl of frantic symbols and warnings, words scratched into the parchment hard enough to tear.
HE DOESN’T TAKE. HE EDITS.
THE INK GETS IN YOUR BLOOD. THROUGH READING. THROUGH TOUCHING. THROUGH PROXIMITY.
YOU DON’T NOTICE WHEN YOUR THOUGHTS CHANGE. YOU THINK YOU’RE STILL YOURSELF.
YOU THINK YOU’RE IMPROVING.
I read the passage three times before the meaning fully registers. His ink doesn’t possess—it edits, slowly, through exposure, until the victim believes every corrupted thought was their own.
Six years.
The number echoes in my skull like a death knell.
The three names still lived in my blood, whatever the grimoire had done to my choices.
I try to examine my thoughts the way I’d examine a suspicious text—looking for alterations, insertions, passages that don’t match the original voice.
But how would I know? If the editing is subtle enough, if the changes blend seamlessly with existing patterns, I could have been rewritten a thousand times without noticing.
I press my hands flat against the table, feeling the cool wood beneath my bandages. Solid. Real. Except the table is in the Archive, which is saturated with the Author’s presence, so even the furniture might be lying to me.
Stop. You can spiral into paranoia later. Right now, you need information.
The mating mark aches at the thought of Korrath, warm and insistent against my collarbone. Orc magic, not the Author’s. At least that’s what I tell myself. The claiming magic predates the grimoire by millennia—it’s primal, blood magic, the kind of power that doesn’t submit to editing.
How would you know the difference?
I don’t have an answer. So I keep reading, searching for anything that might help us survive until dawn.
I find the Archivist Elders in the upper gallery.
The three of them sit in their usual positions—the eldest at the center, her two companions flanking her like bookends. They’ve been running the Archive since before I was born, maintaining the systems that keep the grimoire contained, overseeing the keepers who bleed for it.
They’ve also been remarkably calm about the chaos of the past day. Too calm.
I could avoid them. Could work around them, keep my research quiet, try to find a solution they never see coming.
But if the Inscribed are already inside—if the betrayal runs as deep as the grimoire suggests—waiting means being found on their terms, not mine.
Better to force the confrontation now, while I still know where I’m standing.
“Elder.” I stop at the threshold, my hands full of documents, my heart pounding against my ribs. “I need to speak with you about the grimoire’s creator.”
The eldest doesn’t look up from her tea. “The Author is a legend, child. A story keepers tell to frighten themselves.”
“He’s real.” I step forward, spreading the documents across their table despite the younger Elder’s noise of protest. “I found the records. The grimoire was created three centuries ago by a sorcerer who bound himself to its pages. He’s been living inside the book ever since—and he’s been reaching out. Building a network of followers.”
“We’re aware of the historical accounts.” The middle Elder’s voice carries a note of condescension I’ve heard a hundred times before. “The Archive has contained the grimoire for three hundred years. Whatever consciousness might have existed in those pages has long since—“
“He’s not dormant.” I cut her off, a breach of protocol I’ve never committed before.
“He’s been editing people. Rewriting their minds through exposure to his ink.
The Inscribed the grimoire warned us about—they’re not possessed, they’re converted.
Loyal servants who believe they chose this willingly. ”
Silence falls across the gallery.