Page 3 of Orc’s Grimoire

I pull chalk from the pouch at my belt and drop to my knees. The floor here is marked with old containment circles, half-faded and useless. I work fast, sketching new lines over old, adding sigils I’ve modified through years of practice. My hand is steady despite the blood loss. Despite the growing wrongness in my chest.

The Concordance’s screaming intensifies. I feel it pushing at me—not my mind, not directly, but my ears. My equilibrium. The book is trying to make me listen, to force its echoed messages into my skull.

“Shut up.” I finish the circle and slam my bleeding palm against the center.

Blood and magic flare. The containment runes activate, red-gold light racing around the circumference. The Concordance shudders, pages snapping shut, and goes still. Dormant again. The screaming stops.

My palm throbs. I’ve given too much blood tonight—first to the grimoire, now to containment. Dark spots swim at the edges of my vision.

Don’t pass out. Don’t you dare pass out down here.

I force myself upright. Steady my breathing. The dizziness recedes, slowly, reluctantly. I need to get back to the grimoire. Need to make sure it hasn’t⁠—

Laughter.

Not the Concordance. Not any of the lesser texts.

The grimoire.

I find it exactly where I left it—chained to the central lectern, cover gleaming wetly where my blood still pools. But the pages have opened on their own, spread wide to expose parchment that glows faintly in the lantern light.

Words crawl across the surface. Not the ancient script of the original text, but new writing. Fresh. The ink is red-black and gleaming, and it moves, rearranging itself as I watch.

THYRA VIRE.

My full name. The one I’ve never spoken in the Archive. The one I left behind when I came here at twenty-one, desperate and determined and too stupid to know what I was getting into.

How does it know? I’ve been so careful. So precise. I’ve never let anything slip, never given it more than it needed, never⁠—

YOU THINK BLOOD DOESN’T CARRY NAMES? YOU THINK I DON’T TASTE EVERYTHING YOU ARE EVERY TIME YOU FEED ME?

The words rearrange. The grimoire is writing faster now, script appearing and disappearing, thoughts forming and dissolving. I should close it. Should slam the cover shut and walk away. But I can’t move. Can’t look away.

I KNOW YOUR NAME, KEEPER. I KNOW YOUR SECRETS. I KNOW WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO KEEP ME FED.

Ice spreads through my veins. “You don’t know anything.”

More laughter. The sound vibrates through the lectern, through the floor, through my bones. A low, intimate amusement that makes my skin crawl.

DON’T I?

The script rearranges. And this time, what appears stops my heart.

Three names.

ARCHIVIST DENN. SCRIBE CALLIA. RESEARCHER VOSS.

I stop breathing.

TWO

THYRA

One year ago. The containment failure that nearly brought the entire Archive down. Three texts awakened simultaneously, feeding off each other, creating a cascade that threatened to consume every mind in the building. Three thousand people worked in the Archive then. Three thousand minds that would have been devoured.

I remember the sound of the cascade building. The way the air thickened until breathing felt like drowning. The screaming—so much screaming—from texts that should have been dormant for centuries.

The grimoire had offered a solution. Three lives instead of three thousand. Three minds to satisfy its appetite, to break the cascade, to restore the containment.