Page 6 of Orc’s Grimoire

I wrap a strip of cloth around my palm, tight enough to stop the bleeding. My vision still wavers at the edges, but I’ve learned to function through worse. Years of this work teaches you to move through pain, through exhaustion, through the constant press of magic against your mind.

The spell-burner arrives tomorrow.

I should warn the Elders. Should evacuate the staff. Should do anything other than stand here in the dark, bleeding and broken and utterly unsurprised that my sins have finally come home.

But the Elders dismissed my concerns about the grimoire’s increasing activity. Called it normal fluctuation. Told me to do my job and stop worrying. They’re old. Set in their ways. They’ve spent so long containing knowledge that they’ve forgotten it can escape.

They don’t know what I know. Don’t see what I see.

The grimoire isn’t just awakening. It’s been building toward a moment for years. Every feeding, every drop of blood, every mind it’s consumed—all of it leading to a reckoning I can feel approaching but can’t quite see. The creature inside those pages is preparing. Planning. Waiting for the right time to act.

And now a spell-burner is coming to burn it all down.

A destroyer of forbidden knowledge. An executioner who won’t hesitate. Won’t make compromises. Won’t try to preserve what should probably burn.

Part of me wonders if that would be a relief.

I turn away from the central lectern and walk toward the exit. My bare feet leave bloody prints on the stone—a trail of red leading back to the grimoire, marking me as surely as any spell could. Mine. It doesn’t need to brand me. I’ve been branded by my own choices for years.

The walk back through the Restricted Stacks feels longer than the walk in. The books whisper as I pass—not threats this time, but curiosity. They can smell the grimoire’s attention on me. Sense the change in the air.

The keeper has been marked. The keeper has been named. The keeper is walking dead and doesn’t know it yet.

I ignore them. There’s nothing they can tell me that I don’t already know.

Behind me, the grimoire laughs again—soft and dark and knowing. The sound follows me through the Stacks, echoing off black stone walls and bone-inlaid shelves, carrying farther than any sound should carry in this place of swallowed screams.

“Until tomorrow, keeper.”

I don’t look back.

I climb the stairs to the upper Archive. Through the entrance hall with its warning sigils. Past the iron gates that burn those who enter uninvited. Into the iron-wrought manor above, where the Archivist Elders sleep in chambers lined with containment wards that have never quite made them feel safe.

The night is cold. The sky outside the blackened windows shows stars I haven’t looked at in months. The world above the Archive continues on, unaware of what bleeds beneath its feet.

Somewhere out there, a spell-burner is preparing his equipment. Sharpening his blade. Planning the destruction of everything I’ve given my blood to protect.

He’s coming to burn me. To burn the grimoire. To burn years of sacrifice and three lives of murder and everything I’ve told myself was necessary.

I should be afraid.

I’m not.

I’m curious.

What kind of monster does the Order of Ash send to destroy what can’t be killed? What does a weapon look like when it’s been forged to end things that shouldn’t exist?

Tomorrow.

I wash the blood from my hands in a basin of cold water. Watch the water turn pink, then red, then a deep crimson that matches the ink in the grimoire’s pages. Even my blood looks different now. Darker. Wanting.

Maybe the spell-burner will see that. Maybe he’ll recognize what I’ve become. Maybe he’ll burn me before the grimoire does, and that will be the kindest thing anyone’s done for me in years.

Or maybe we’ll destroy each other, and the Archive will finally be free.

I lie down in my narrow bed. Close my eyes. Feel the distant pulse of the grimoire below—that heartbeat I’ve spent years learning, that rhythm I’ve fed with everything I have.

It’s still starving.