Page 12 of Orc’s Grimoire

The laugh continues, building in volume, resonating through the Restricted Stacks until the other texts begin to stir. Chains rattle. Pages flutter. The air grows thick with the smell of old blood.

And then the grimoire speaks.

“Korrath Blackbrand.” The voice is wrong—layered, harmonized, carrying echoes of sounds that didn’t belong to any living throat. “The Order’s favorite weapon. The flame that never stops burning.”

My brand is in my hand before I realize I’ve drawn it. The metal blazes with heat, responding to the living magic in the air. “What are you?”

I glance at Thyra. She hasn’t moved—but her face has changed. This isn’t the careful fear of a keeper managing a dangerous text. It’s the raw shock of someone watching something do something it has never done before. In six years, it never spoke to her.

“I am what your Order fears most.” The pages turn slowly, revealing more script, more names, more sins. “Knowledge that cannot be burned. Truth that refuses to die. Everything you’ve destroyed, I’ve preserved. Every spell you’ve ended, I remember.”

“Then you know what I’m capable of.”

“I know exactly what you’re capable of, spell-burner.” The voice drops lower, more intimate. “I know the relief you feel when magic screams and dies. I know the peace that floods through you when forbidden things burn. I know about the addiction—the need that never quite goes away, no matter how many libraries you reduce to ash.”

My jaw clenches. The brand burns hot enough to leave marks on my palm. “You know nothing.”

“I know you enjoy it.” The grimoire’s pages flutter with amusement. “I know you hate yourself for enjoying it. And I know that you’ll never stop, because stopping would mean facing what you’ve become.”

The words land like blows. True. Every one of them true.

Thyra steps between us—bloodied and unbowed, positioning herself between me and the book. “Enough.”

“Protecting him, keeper?” The grimoire’s voice carries surprise. Or appetite. “How… unexpected.”

“I’m protecting you.” She faces the grimoire squarely, blood still dripping from her palm. “He’s here to burn you. Provoking him isn’t going to help.”

“Nothing is going to help.” The pages turn again, revealing a final message in that blood-red script:

BURN ME, SPELL-BURNER. BURN ME, AND LEARN WHAT I’VE BEEN KEEPING CAGED. THE AUTHOR IS WAKING. AND HE’S SO VERY RAVENOUS.

The Author.

The name echoes in the sudden silence. Around us, the other texts have gone still—not dormant, but listening. Waiting. Even the air seems to hold its breath.

“What does that mean?” I keep my brand raised, heat radiating from the metal. “Who is the Author?”

Thyra doesn’t answer. She is staring at the grimoire, her face pale, her hands trembling. The blood from her palm has stopped falling—the wound must have closed. But she doesn’t move to feed the book again.

“Thyra.”

Her name on my tongue feels strange. Intimate. I shouldn’t have known her name. Shouldn’t care about the fear I see creeping into her expression.

She’s a keeper. Probably tainted. Definitely dangerous.

But I say her name again anyway.

“Thyra. Who is the Author?”

She turns to face me. The careful calm has cracked. Underneath it, I see a look I recognize—a person standing at the edge of an abyss.

“The sorcerer who created the grimoire.” Her voice is barely a whisper. “He didn’t die when he bound himself to the pages. He’s been in there for three hundred years. Sleeping. Waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

The grimoire answers before she can.

“For a worthy audience.” The voice carries through the Restricted Stacks, resonating off black stone walls and bone-inlaid shelves. “For a visitor worth waking for. For one who burns as beautifully as you do, Korrath Blackbrand.”