Her answer was quiet, but it struck like a hammer. “We need you to create a time traveler.”
The king nodded, his jaw set. “Someone who can bend time itself.”
When I spoke again, my voice felt old, brittle, unused. “You ask me for something so powerful; I am not sure it can be done. But…” My eyes drifted to the shadows rippling at the edges of the chamber. “I will ponder it.”
The queen’s composure cracked entirely. “Please, Lazarus. I beg you.”
And with nothing more to say, they both bowed their heads and left, their footsteps dragging down the path like the last beats of a dying heart.
When the silence returned, the tome shuddered once, a tremor that crawled through the floor.
The chains rattled, metal rustling against stone.
The shadows gathered closer to my feet, whispering not of hunger this time—but of possibility.
With a murmur and a twist of my hand, the protective sigils on the hearth broke apart, their glow dying in the dust. The air thickened. The spell unraveled. I drew the Tome of Shadows free from its resting place and set it upon the table.
The leather was warm beneath my palms, slick with age. The scent of iron rose from it like breath.
“How to create a time traveler?” I whispered, the words raw and uncertain.
The book convulsed.
It quaked against the table, rattling the stone beneath it as black smoke bled from its spine. My shadows recoiled, hissing, slithering through the air as if even they feared what would come next.
Then the tome opened on its own—slowly, deliberately—as if it had been waiting all along.
The parchment heaved like lungs. Smoke seeped between the pages, thick and damp, curling through the room until even the flame at the wall bent away in fright. The smell of blood and salt filled my throat.
Then, in jagged strokes like wounds carved into flesh, the words crawled across the pages of the tome, burning themselves into being?—
“We have waited a long time for you to ask this question.”
The sound pressed against my skull, deep and soft, like hands upon my temples. My vision swam.
“It is possible,”the voices whispered.“But one Shadow Lord cannot bear the weight. Time is a wound too vast for a single vessel. It will break you.”
The tome’s pages rippled, and glowing script burned itself into the parchment—each line etched as though carved by invisible knives?—
Only two Shadow Lords may endure.
Two bound not by love, nor blood, but by curse.
Two who were broken in the same pit and rose together.
My throat tightened.
I had known the name that would come next long before I asked. I had known since the queen first spoke of turning back time.
Still, I needed to hear it—to make the horror real.
“Who?” I breathed. “Say it.”
The ink flared. The shadows recoiled as though burned. The answer seared itself across the page in strokes of living flame?—
Salvatore Lorian.
The light seared my eyes before fading to black ash.
