Page 4 of Orc’s Grimoire

I made the choice.

I didn’t hesitate. Didn’t agonize. Didn’t pray or plead or search for alternatives. I looked at the numbers—three versus three thousand—and I did the math.

YOU TOLD THE ELDERS IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. TOLD THEM THE TEXTS CONSUMED THE THREE BEFORE YOU COULD INTERVENE. TOLD THEM YOU TRIED TO SAVE THEM.

“I did try.” My voice comes out raw. Cracked. “I tried to find another way.”

BUT THERE WASN’T ONE. AND YOU KNEW THAT. YOU KNEW WHAT HAD TO HAPPEN THE MOMENT THE CASCADE BEGAN.

Denn. Callia. Voss. I’d known their names. Worked beside them for years. Watched them walk into the Restricted Stacks, drawn by a compulsion I’d seeded in their minds, and I hadn’t stopped them.

I’d opened the door.

THREE LIVES. THREE THOUSAND SAVED. A REASONABLE CALCULATION, KEEPER. I SHOULD KNOW—YOU USED MY LOGIC TO MAKE IT.

My hands are shaking. I clench them into fists, feel the wound in my palm tear open again. Fresh blood drips onto the floor.

“Why are you telling me this now?”

The grimoire’s pages flutter. A new message forms, larger than the others, script burning bright enough to cast shadows.

BECAUSE SOMEONE IS COMING. SOMEONE WHO BURNS. AND WHEN HE ASKS WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO KEEP ME CONTAINED, I WANT YOU TO REMEMBER—YOU’RE ALREADY DAMNED, THYRA VIRE. ALREADY MINE.

Before I can respond, the grimoire does what it’s never done in all my years as keeper.

It speaks aloud.

Not with words written on the page. With an actual voice—low and resonant and wrong, emerging from somewhere inside the binding, from the space between the pages, from the craving dark at the book’s heart.

In all my time here, I’ve never heard the grimoire speak. Not once. The Elders never mentioned it could. The records from previous keepers never warned of this possibility.

This is new. This is very, very bad.

“Thyra Vire.”

My name in its mouth. My name in its throat. Intimate and invasive, a lover’s whisper and a killer’s warning rolled into one. The sound wraps around me, slithers beneath my skin, settles in the hollow of my ribs.

The alchemical lanterns flicker. The temperature in the Restricted Stacks drops ten degrees in a heartbeat. The other texts—the Concordance, the dozens of lesser grimoires chained to their lecterns—all go utterly silent. Even their breathing stops.

They’re afraid.

They should be.

The grimoire continues, and each name falls from its pages with the deliberate precision of a death sentence being read.

“Archivist Denn.”

I hear him screaming in my memory. The sound of his mind unraveling as the grimoire consumed it.

“Scribe Callia.”

She’d trusted me. Asked if I needed help with the cascade. I’d smiled and told her yes.

“Researcher Voss.”

He’d been young. Twenty-three. He’d had a sister who still asks about him sometimes.

The grimoire’s voice drops lower, almost tender. “They’re still here, you know. Still inside me. Still screaming. Would you like to hear them?”