All the Wisdom and Knowledge in the world, collected and curated for over 500 years, ruined because I let my heart rule my head.
Guilt made my stomach turn.
The ritual began with the circle. An intricate weave of runes drawn from the oldest, most volatile forms of magic.
Not just complex, deliberately dangerous.
These sigils were written in the language of the forgotten Gods, the Serathic.
The tongue of the forgotten Gods.
Now extinct, except in fragments.
Known only to the most ancient evil deities and now partly to Maelis and the priest.
The circle had to be ringed with void crystals, dark, jagged things pulled from the chaotic planes. The kind the God of Dreams would keep on hand, likely for manipulating nightmares. In this ritual, they’d be used to twist the natural flow of divine energy, bending it toward Maelis.
Blood would be required, of course. Hers and mine. The connection established through that exchange would let her draw power directly from my essence.
And then came the invocation:The Whisper of Ignorance.A chant designed not to destroy knowledge, but to unravel it, to scatter it like ash and let the remnants sink into her.
That was the theory, anyway.
Whether it would actually work?
No one knew.
It surprised me how readily they believed her.
Trusted her.
Welcomed her into their circle like she belonged.
But perhaps, to them, it made perfect sense.
She was mortal.
And now she had the chance to seize the power of a God.
That kind of ambition was something they understood.
Respect, even.
To them, she was exactly what she appeared to be, a wordsmith hungry for more.
And maybe they were right.
In me, she had seen a weakness, an opening. And she had taken it.
I just wish I hadn’t made it so easy for her.
Never again.
No one would get that close again.
* * *
The setting sun cast a golden glow through the windows.
