20. Thyra
TWENTY
THYRA
The scenes keep playing. More villages. More screams. More brands pressed to flesh while Korrath watches with that terrible, peaceful expression.
“He’s trying to show you that you’re a monster.” I step closer, forcing him to look at me instead of the walls. “Trying to make you doubt yourself. Question everything you’ve chosen.”
“I am a monster.”
“Yes.” I don’t soften it. Don’t try to comfort him with lies.
“You are. And you chose me anyway. You saw what I am, and you stayed.” I take his face in my hands, force his gaze to mine.
“The Author wants you to break. He wants you to fall apart so he can pick up the pieces. Don’t give him the satisfaction. ”
His jaw works. The scenes continue playing around us—his sins, catalogued and displayed like trophies.
“Then let’s move. Let him waste his energy on tricks that don’t work.”
We push through the gallery of Korrath’s guilt, past scenes of burning libraries and screaming spells and innocent people dying because the Order decided they were contaminated.
A young woman clutches a spell-scroll to her chest, flames consuming her from the inside out.
A child watches his father dissolve into ash, too young to understand what’s happening.
An old scholar burns while reaching for a text he’d spent his life writing—his life’s work dying with him.
Korrath walks through it all without flinching. His jaw is tight, his eyes fixed forward, but he doesn’t break.
The mating mark burns steady—not his emotions, but his presence. His solidity. His refusal to let the Author see him falter.
The doorway at the far end leads to darkness.
We step through.
And the darkness shows me my own face.
The room is mine.
I know it instantly, viscerally, the way you know your own heartbeat. The Author has reached into my mind and pulled out every shame, every compromise, every terrible choice I’ve made in the name of preservation.
The three scholars stand before me.
Denn. Callia. Voss.
I knew them well—their faces, their rhythms, the small ways they’d made the Archive feel less like a prison. But their deaths weren’t accidents. They didn’t stumble into a hungry book or get caught by an awakening spell.
I fed them to the grimoire.
I knew what I was doing. I had always known.
Three lives, or three thousand.
I chose.
“Thyra.” Denn’s face hovers before me, rendered in living ink. He was kind. Helped me with translations when I first arrived at the Archive. Brought me tea during long nights in the Stacks. His smile was gentle, and he never asked for anything in return. “Thyra, why?”
“You know why.” My voice comes out steady. I’m proud of that. “The grimoire was breaking free. If I hadn’t—“
“You could have found another way.” Callia’s voice now.
She was brilliant—the best archivist of her generation.
Her mind worked in patterns I could barely follow, finding relationships between texts that had been isolated for decades.
She would have done great things if I hadn’t pressed a knife to her throat and opened her veins over the grimoire’s pages. “There had to be another way.”
“No.” I face them—the echoes of people I killed.
“There wasn’t. I ran the calculations a thousand times.
I looked for alternatives. I begged the grimoire for more time.
I tried to find volunteers, tried to use my own blood past the point of consciousness.
” My hands curl into fists. “I made the best choice available. And I’d do it again. ”
“Monster.” Voss’s voice, thick with accusation. He was young—only twenty-three when I chose him. Full of ambition and hope and the certainty that he would change the world. “You’re no better than the spells you keep caged.”
“Maybe not. But I’m still alive. The Archive is still standing.
And the three thousand people who would have died if the grimoire had broken free—they’re still alive too.
Their children are still alive. Their futures still exist.” I step forward, into the ring of accusatory shades.
“I don’t ask for forgiveness. I don’t deserve it.
But I know what I chose, and why, and I refuse to pretend otherwise. ”
The shades waver. They are constructed from my guilt, but guilt requires doubt. And I don’t doubt. Not about this. Not about them.
“Thyra.” Korrath’s hand finds mine. His voice is quiet, careful. “Are you—“
“I’m fine.” I squeeze his fingers once. “The Author’s trying to break me the same way he tried to break you. It’s not working.”
We walk through the shades of the people I’ve killed. They reach for me with ink-dark hands, whisper accusations in ink-dark voices. I ignore them. They’re not real. They’re memories given form, guilt given teeth.
I’ve carried this guilt for years. I’ve already learned how to walk beside it.
The doorway at the far end leads somewhere new—somewhere the Author didn’t expect us to reach. The air grows heavier, charged with awareness. He’s focusing on us now, surprised that we’ve made it this far without breaking.
Good. Let him be surprised.
The passage beyond my memories opens into a corridor of pure script.
Words crawl across every surface—floor, walls, the space where a ceiling should be. They form and reform in patterns I almost recognize, sentences that would make sense if I could just focus long enough to read them.
“Don’t look at the words.” I pull Korrath forward when he starts to slow. “The script is a trap. Read it, and it reads you back.”
“Reads me?”
“Absorbs your knowledge. Your memories. Everything you are.” I’ve seen the records of scholars who tried to study the grimoire’s inner architecture. Most went mad. The rest went missing. “Keep your eyes on me. Don’t look at the walls.”
He obeys without question. His gaze fixes on my face, his feet following my lead. I navigate by instinct and the grimoire’s fragmented guidance—left here, right there, straight ahead when the corridor tries to twist us off course.
The Author’s voice echoes through the script-lined passage.
“You’ve come so far.” He sounds amused. Impressed, maybe, in the way a cat is impressed by a particularly persistent mouse. “Most who enter the Codex break in the first room. The burning villages usually do the trick. But you two… you’re made of harder stuff.”
“Keep moving.” I don’t respond to him. Don’t engage. That’s what he wants—to slow us down, to give his traps time to work.
“The spell-burner, I understand. Twenty years of burning tend to create a certain… callousness. But you, keeper? You’re supposed to be soft. Helpful. Harmless.” His laughter echoes off the writhing walls. “Instead, you’re a murderer who feeds scholars to hungry books. I’m almost proud.”
Don’t respond. Don’t engage. Just keep moving.
“But you’ve forgotten something important.”
The corridor opens ahead of us—I can see the distant glow of the throne room, the pulsing heart of the Author’s domain. We’re close. So close.
“The spell-burner who’s destroying my Archive above?” His voice drops to a whisper that somehow fills every corner of the passage. “She’s not going to stop when the building falls. She’s going to keep burning until there’s nothing left.”
I freeze.
“Including the exit.”
The grimoire’s voice screams in my mind.
THE PHYSICAL FORM—SHE’S BURNING THE PHYSICAL FORM—
An image forces its way into my consciousness—not a memory this time, but the present. The real world. The Restricted Stacks, where the grimoire’s physical body rests on its lectern.
Midori stands over it.
Her pale eyes glow with fanatical fire. Three execution brands hang at her belt, and she’s using all of them—pressing the heated metal to the grimoire’s cover, to its spine, to the edges of pages that curl and blacken under the assault.
The grimoire is burning.
“No.” The word escapes me in a whisper. “No, no, no—“
I can feel it now. The heat spreading through the Codex. The walls around us beginning to sweat, to blister, to char at the edges. The floor beneath my feet softening, destabilizing, threatening to swallow us into liquid ink.
“If the grimoire burns while we’re still inside—“ Korrath’s voice is tight. Controlled. But I can see the realization in his eyes.
“We burn with it.” I finish the thought he won’t voice. “We become ash, absorbed into the book as it dies. And the Author—“
“I escape.” The Author’s voice echoes with triumph. “You didn’t really think I’d let you destroy me, did you? I’ve survived for centuries. When this grimoire burns, I’ll simply find another vessel. Another prison. Another set of fools to torment.”
The walls are definitely burning now. Smoke rises from the parchment-flesh, carrying the stench of cooking meat and crisping paper. The floor groans beneath our feet.
“We need to reach the throne. Now.” I grab Korrath’s arm and run.
But even as we sprint toward the Author’s domain, I can feel the heat building behind us. The grimoire is dying. The Codex is collapsing. And Midori—relentless, fanatical Midori—won’t stop until everything burns.
Including us.
We have minutes. Maybe less. And the Author is still waiting at the center, on his throne of stolen knowledge, watching us race toward a trap that’s been closing around us since the moment we jumped into his pages.
The corridor walls catch fire.
We run faster.