Chapter 18 #4
What woke within Celetian was not only light.
Something else stirred in the depths, a shadow the gods once buried.
And it waits. I stared at the final line, my pulse thrumming.
The ink was smudged, like the writer’s hand had trembled as they wrote it.
Something dark was still there. Something that had never died.
This book confirmed everything; the prophecy Ryan and I had found wasn’t a prophecy at all.
It was a warning. A riddle written to hide the truth.
“When light forgets its name…” The words echoed through my mind as the pieces started to align.
Maybe the light forgetting its name wasn’t about a god at all, it was about the High King.
The man the world saw as a symbol of light.
The one feeding from the mountain’s power while Celetian itself bled in shadow.
If the book was right, if the gods’ seal had been broken once before, then whatever was sleeping inside, that mountain could destroy everything, gods included. It was ominous. Terrifying. But for the first time, things made sense. This wasn’t a coincidence; this wasn’t even a conspiracy anymore.
It was truth.
Celetian Mountain was dying and if it fell, so would we. My pulse pounded in my ears as I slammed the book shut, the sound echoing through the quiet library. I shoved it back into its slot, ready to leave, to breathe, to think but then I felt it.
A pull.
It wrapped around my arm, faint and electric, like invisible threads tugging me forward.
I froze, my breath catching. Then curiosity, instinct, or maybe something else made me follow.
The air grew colder as I moved between the shelves.
The torches dimmed to a weak orange flicker, shadows stretching longer across the stone floor.
A whisper slithered through the silence.
At first, it was only one soft voice, ancient, unintelligible.
Then another joined it. And another. They spoke in a language I didn’t know, yet it was as if they were speaking to me.
The pull grew stronger, guiding me deeper into the library’s forgotten corner.
The light barely reached here, dust thick enough to choke on. And then I saw it.
Tucked into the very back of the library, hidden in a secluded alcove just like the scroll, was a black book.
No title, no markings, only a dark leather-bound cover that seemed to pulse with something…
unnatural. The whispers grew more frantic and louder as I approached it slowly.
The air around it felt colder. Heavy. Wrong.
Was it a good idea to touch the weird, creepy book that radiated a bad vibe and whispered to me?
Definitely not. But rational thinking wasn’t my strong suit.
I pulled it from the shelf and the library vanished. Gone. In its place was chaos.
I stood in the middle of a battlefield. Screams tore through the air as townspeople ran, scattering like ants as an army of shadows advanced on them. The soldiers weren’t human. They were made of darkness shifting forms with glowing red eyes that burned like coals.
My heart stopped. I’d seen eyes like that before.
In the shower. The sky above was blackened with smoke and storm clouds.
Fire devoured the city behind me. Screams. Steel.
Shadows. Darkness was seeming to devour the land, some people were too sick to move, others starving to death in the streets.
This was seeming to show me what I read in that book, the darkness, the famine, the plague.
“What the hell…” I whispered. A sharp jolt ripped through me, yanking me out of the vision. The library flickered back into place around me.
“Yo. Girl, you good?” Luna’s voice pierced the haze. She stood a few feet away; brows furrowed in concern.
My grip tightened on the book. “Uh… yeah. Why?”
“I called your name like three times. You didn’t even blink. Just stood there mumbling.”
I forced a shrug. “Weird. Must’ve zoned out.”
Her gaze dropped to the book in my hands. “What’s that?”
“A book.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, no shit. What kind of book?”
I glanced down at it, still trying to steady my heartbeat. “Not sure. Haven’t read it yet.”
She arched her brow but didn’t push. “Well, I was studying more conjuring maneuvers. You know we get our own spirit animals” She held up her own stack.
“Cool,” I said quickly. “Anyway… I should go. I’ll see you later.”
Without waiting for a reply, I slipped past her and out of the library. I told myself I wanted to include my friends in this investigation. That I could trust them. But whatever this book was… whatever it had just shown me… it felt dangerous. Like something I couldn’t take lightly.
And the more I uncovered, the more I feared what the truth might cost. I wasn’t about to risk Luna.
Or Ryan. Or Alaric. Not until I understood exactly what this thing was.
If that vision was real, then what that book told was the truth and everything we believed, everything we’d been taught was a lie.
Celetian was no longer a good mountain, dark magic was definitely being used, and every single professor here was hiding it.
And I wasn’t sure how much farther down this rabbit hole I was willing to go.
But for now, I would keep this book a secret.