Page 38 of Orc’s Grimoire

The grimoire’s creation is documented in fragments.

Not a single coherent account—whoever founded the Archive knew better than to leave a complete record of how to create a living book. But pieces exist. Margin notes in older texts. References in containment manuals. A letter, half-burned, from the first keeper to someone named Valric.

I piece the story into coherence like assembling broken glass.

Three hundred years ago, a sorcerer whose name has been scrubbed from every record decided that death was an inconvenience. He was brilliant—the fragments make that clear. A master of blood magic, of binding, of the forbidden arts that the Veil’s shattering made possible. He’d accumulated more knowledge than any single mind could hold.

So he built a vessel.

The grimoire wasn’t created as a prison. Not originally. It was meant to be a repository—a place to store everything the sorcerer had learned, preserved beyond the limits of mortal memory. He bound living parchment with his own blood, fed it scholars and spells until it developed a crude sentience, refined that sentience over decades until the book could think, reason, desire.

The process took forty years. I find the timeline scattered across multiple documents—notes about failed attempts, adjustments to the binding, troubleshooting when the early prototypes went mad and had to be destroyed. He was methodical. Patient. The kind of scholar who measures progress in decades rather than days.

And then, when his body began to fail, he wrote himself into its pages.

The final entry in his own hand is chilling in its simplicity: “The vessel is ready. The consciousness transfer will proceed at midnight. I will become the book, and the book will become eternal. Death is merely an inconvenience for those with the will to overcome it.”

He didn’t die. He just stopped being human.

The phrase appears in three separate documents, each written by a different hand. As if the keepers who came before me needed to remind themselves of the distinction. As if saying it made it true.

I stare at the words until they blur.

The Author exists as a pattern of consciousness within the grimoire. Not possessing the book—inhabiting it. He can project himself into the physical world, manifest a form that walks and speaks and interacts with flesh-and-blood humans. But he’s tethered. Anchored. He can never truly leave the pages that contain him.

Until now.

The thought arrives cold and certain. The grimoire’s warnings. The Inscribed gathering. Midori’s accelerated arrival—chaos, distraction, everything burning at once.

I find the mechanism in a leather journal wrapped in warded cloth.

The previous keeper’s notes—the one before me, the one who went mad babbling in dead languages. Her handwriting starts neat and precise, documenting containment protocols, feeding schedules, interaction logs. By the final pages, it’s a sprawl of frantic symbols and warnings, words scratched into the parchment hard enough to tear.

HE DOESN’T TAKE. HE EDITS.

THE INK GETS IN YOUR BLOOD. THROUGH READING. THROUGH TOUCHING. THROUGH PROXIMITY.

YOU DON’T NOTICE WHEN YOUR THOUGHTS CHANGE. YOU THINK YOU’RE STILL YOURSELF.

YOU THINK YOU’RE IMPROVING.

I read the passage three times before the meaning fully registers. His ink doesn’t possess—it edits, slowly, through exposure, until the victim believes every corrupted thought was their own.

Six years.

The number echoes in my skull like a death knell.

The three names still lived in my blood, whatever the grimoire had done to my choices.

I try to examine my thoughts the way I’d examine a suspicious text—looking for alterations, insertions, passages that don’t match the original voice. But how would I know? If the editing is subtle enough, if the changes blend seamlessly with existing patterns, I could have been rewritten a thousand times without noticing.

I press my hands flat against the table, feeling the cool wood beneath my bandages. Solid. Real. Except the table is in the Archive, which is saturated with the Author’s presence, so even the furniture might be lying to me.

Stop. You can spiral into paranoia later. Right now, you need information.

The mating mark aches at the thought of Korrath, warm and insistent against my collarbone. Orc magic, not the Author’s. At least that’s what I tell myself. The claiming magic predates the grimoire by millennia—it’s primal, blood magic, the kind of power that doesn’t submit to editing.

How would you know the difference?