Page 72 of Orc’s Grimoire

“I’m not losing you.” Her voice cracks. Her mask slips, and for a moment I see past the cold calculation, past the careful keeper, to the woman beneath—fierce, terrified, refusing to let go.

This is what she hides. This is what she’s been hiding since the moment we met—the capacity for desperate, irrational attachment. The ability to care about something more than survival calculations. The woman who fed three scholars to a hungry book can’t bear to let one orc die.

I made her care. I broke through her walls without even trying.

The thought should terrify me. Instead, it fills me with something I haven’t felt in twenty years.

Hope.

“You’re not losing me.” I manage a smile, or close enough. “I’m just… going somewhere you’ll have to follow.”

The ink closes over my head.

And I sink into darkness.

TWENTY-TWO

THYRA

The ink closes over his head.

I watch it happen. Watch the darkness swallow him inch by inch—his scarred hands, his massive shoulders, the ember glow of his eyes that refuses to dim even as the abyss pulls him under. His grip on my wrist loosens, slips, falls away.

And then he’s gone.

The surface of the ink-sea smooths over like he was never there. No ripple. No trace. Just darkness, hungry and satisfied, already forgetting the meal it just consumed.

The Author laughs.

“Such a shame.” His voice echoes through the dissolving throne room, harmonic with false sympathy. “He fought so well. Burned so beautifully. I’ll remember him for centuries—the spell-burner who came to destroy me and drowned in my pages instead.”

I stare at the place where Korrath disappeared. The mating mark on my collarbone burns—not with his presence anymore, but with his absence. A phantom heat where fire should be. An ache where certainty lived.

He’s not dead. He can’t be dead. The mark would have… I would have felt…

No.

The thought cuts through panic with surgical precision. No collapse. No grief. Not yet. Later, if I survive this. Later, if there’s anything left of me to mourn.

Right now, there’s only one thing that matters.

The Author is still talking. Still gloating. Still believing he’s won.

He has no idea what he’s done.

Six years.

I’ve fed this grimoire for six years. Blood and sacrifice and careful, calculated control. Measuring every drop, rationing every cut, giving exactly enough to keep the book sated without weakening myself past usefulness.

All those years of being soft. Being careful. Being the quiet, compliant keeper who does what she’s told and never, ever loses control.

Enough.

The Author is still speaking—explaining his plans, savoring his victory, painting the future he’ll build from the ashes of everyone I love. I don’t hear the words. Don’t care about his grand designs or his elaborate schemes.

Korrath told me to find a way to kill the Author. Whatever it takes.

I know exactly what it takes.