Page 68 of Orc’s Grimoire

“Keep moving.” My voice comes out rougher than intended.

“I noticed.” Her fingers tighten on my arm—brief pressure, acknowledgment—before she’s running again.

The doorway grows closer. Beyond it, I can see the glow of luminous script, the pulsing heart of the Author’s domain. The throne room. Where this ends, one way or another.

A wall of ink-wolves materializes between us and the entrance. A dozen of them, maybe more, their liquid bodies flowing and reforming as they circle. Their eyes glow with scripted malevolence.

I don’t slow down.

I hit the first wolf at full speed, blade leading, and feel the construct burst against my weapon like water on stone. The second lunges at my throat; I duck beneath its jaws and bury my blade in its chest. The word at its center—HUNT—shatters under my strike.

Thyra fights beside me. She doesn’t have a blade, but she has her blood magic. Her knife opens a line across her forearm, and the blood that flows out isn’t just blood anymore—it’s power, shaped by years of feeding the grimoire, weaponized by desperation. She flings drops of it at the wolves, and where the blood touches, the ink dissolves.

She learned that from the grimoire. The book that’s dying around us taught her how to kill its own creations.

We tear through the pack in seconds. More nightmares rise from the crumbling walls, but they’re weakening—the fire is consuming the Author’s resources, burning away the magic he needs to create his defenses.

The doorway looms ahead. Ten feet. Five. I can feel the heat intensifying behind us, hear the roar of flames consuming centuries of forbidden knowledge.

We dive through.

The throne room spreads before us, and for a moment—just a moment—I forget to breathe.

The walls are lined with faces.

Not paintings. Not sculptures. Faces pressed into the parchment-flesh itself, frozen in expressions of revised contentment. Their mouths still move, murmuring edited thoughts in voices I can’t quite hear. Their eyes track our entrance with the empty devotion of those who’ve been rewritten to worship their captor.

The floor is paved with pages—thousands of them, millions, each one containing a final scream that echoes soundlessly beneath my boots. I can feel them crying out as I walk across them. Texts that were destroyed over centuries, their deaths preserved here as trophies.

Floating script circles the room in lazy spirals, the Author’s thoughts made visible. I catch fragments as they drift past:

they came to die and the keeper is mine and burn, burn, burn.

His memories, his plans, his malice—all of it on display, glowing with captured light.

And at the center, on a throne of chained grimoires and stolen thoughts, sits the Author.

Each book in that throne was once a person’s life work. I can see the chains that bind them—rune-etched iron, humming with suppressed power. The spells imprisoned in that seat strain against their shackles, desperate to escape, desperate to be free. But the Author holds them all in place with nothing but his will. His stolen, accumulated, terrible will.

He looks… amused.

The same form I’d seen in the gallery—but here, at the center of his own domain, he isn’t projecting. He simply exists. Every line of him radiates the absolute certainty of a god in his throne room.

He doesn’t stand as we enter. Doesn’t move at all. Just watches with the patient amusement of someone who knows he’s already won.

“You made it.” His voice carries harmonics of every mind he’s ever edited—a chorus of the rewritten, speaking in terrible unison. “I’ll admit, I’m impressed. Most intruders collapse in the memory rooms. The guilt usually breaks them long before they reach my door.”

“We’re not most intruders.” I position myself between him and Thyra, blade raised. The mating mark burns against my chest—hot, urgent, demanding that I protect the woman at my back.

“No.” The Author tilts his head, studying us. His gaze lingers on Thyra. “My keeper. My beautiful, bloody keeper. I’ve been feeding from you for six years, did you know that? Every drop you gave the grimoire, I tasted. Every secret you whispered to its pages, I heard. I know you better than you know yourself.”

“You don’t know anything.” Thyra steps forward, beside me, refusing to hide behind my blade. Blood still drips from the cut on her forearm, but she doesn’t seem to notice. “You collect information. You store it. You catalog and index and cross-reference. But knowing isn’t understanding.”

The Author laughs. The sound echoes off the parchment-flesh walls, making the embedded faces twitch in their prisons.

“Such fire. That’s what I’ve loved about you, keeper. That cold calculation wrapped in soft compliance. The mask you wear so well that even you forget it’s a mask.”

“Enough.” I step forward. “We didn’t come here to talk.”