It lay chained to the hearth like a beast that refused to die. The iron bindings trembled when it stirred, the sigils etched into them pulsing in the dark. The leather of its cover—stitched from shadow—beat with a slow, furious rhythm, as though a heart still lived beneath it. Sometimes it screamed—a sound like iron tearing, shadows thrashing against the chain until the metal glowed red. Then silence. Only the rasp of its breathing, if it could be called breathing.
Salvatore had wanted too much. Darkness was never enough for him. He wanted dominion—over time, over death, over every shadow that walked this earth.
The tome was his creation, his masterpiece, bound in his blood and greed. Through it, he sought to command the shadows themselves, to unmake the boundary between the living and the lost.
When his hunger began to devour everything around him, I tried to stop him. But Severen’s curse had already tainted the spell. The binding turned back upon us both.
So, I did the only thing left to me.
I took the tome—the very heart of his power—and turned it against him.
With its words, I built his prison—walls carved with shadowmarks, stone sealed in blood, a chamber that no light or time could breach.
There I cast him—his body, his voice, his endless greed—locked away beneath the weight of his own creation.
The tome remained with me.
Bound in his blood, thrumming with the remnants of his will.
A reminder of what he once was… and what I had done.
It was justice.
Or perhaps it was mercy.
Sometimes, I no longer knew the difference.
Each morning, I took a cup of bitter-root tea and walked to the cliff’s edge. The Sea of Ashur gnawed at the stone, grinding it thinner with every wave. The wind cut through my robes, salt stinging my throat. I watched the tide eat the land and thought of what I’d buried—what still breathed beneath my floor.
I stood there until the cup was empty, until the wind stole my breath, and asked the same question that had haunted me for fifty years.
Why was I still here?
Once, I believed power could answer everything—that I could master the darkness without letting it master me.
That belief carried me through war and curse alike, through nights where the walls of the Dreadhold bled shadow. But Ugarit still died. Its people withered. The city rotted from within, no matter how much of myself I gave to it.
The shadows were my only companions now.
They did not forgive.
They did not forget.
They shifted at the edge of my sight, sliding over my skin like oil, whispering near my ear in voices as thin as reed-flutes.
“Feed us,”they murmured. “We hunger. Break the world open. Let us out.”
Their words burrowed into my skull like worms in grain—relentless, gnawing, alive.
Still, I resisted.
Restraint was all that tethered me to what I once was, the last thread keeping me from becoming him, from becoming Salvatore.
He had surrendered. He had let hatred hollow him until nothing remained but want.
I could not.
Some small ember of mercy still lived within me, though it burned low.
