Page 73 of Orc’s Grimoire

My ritual knife is still in my hand. The blade is sharp—I keep it sharp, have kept it sharp for twice-daily feedings. It knows the taste of my blood better than anything else in the world.

I raise the knife.

And I cut.

Not my palms this time. Not the careful, measured cuts I’ve trained myself to make.

I drag the blade across my left forearm in a single savage motion. The pain is blinding—a white-hot line of agony that makes my vision swim. Blood wells up immediately, thick and dark, streaming down my arm in rivers that should terrify me.

I cut the other arm to match.

The Author stops mid-sentence. His eyes—those script-filled, inhuman eyes—widen with alarm.

“What are you doing?”

I don’t answer. Don’t waste breath on explanations he won’t understand until it’s too late.

The knife finds my chest next. I carve a sigil into my own flesh—the grimoire’s mark, the symbol that has bound us since I became keeper. The pain is extraordinary. I’ve never felt anything like it. My hands shake, but they don’t stop. Can’t stop. Won’t stop.

“Stop!” The Author’s voice has lost its harmonic composure. Real fear bleeds through the carefully constructed calm, cracking his scholar’s mask. “You’ll destabilize the entire Codex⁠—“

“That’s the idea.”

My voice doesn’t sound like my voice anymore. It echoes strangely, layered with harmonics that belong to the grimoire itself. Six years of feeding have left traces in my blood—traces that are waking up now, responding to the flood of power I’m releasing.

The final cut goes across my throat.

Not deep enough to kill. Just deep enough to matter.

Blood pours from me in rivers. More than a body should hold. More than physics should allow. But this isn’t the physical world—this is the Inner Codex, where blood is power and power is reality.

And I have years’ worth of power stored in my veins.

The grimoire wakes.

Not the Author—the book itself. The entity that has been imprisoned in these pages for centuries, forced to serve a creator it hates, bound by chains of ink and malice that it never chose.

I feel it stirring in the architecture around us. Feel it responding to my blood the way it’s responded twice daily for years—but magnified, intensified, overwhelming.

KEEPER.

The voice thunders through my mind. Not words—pure concept, raw intention pressed directly into my consciousness.

YOU GIVE TOO MUCH. YOU’LL DIE.

Maybe. I don’t speak the response aloud—don’t need to. The grimoire and I are linked now, our minds intertwined by the flood of blood connecting us. But he dies first.

I raise my arms. Blood streams down them like crimson waterfalls, pooling at my feet, spreading across the page-paved floor. The pages drink greedily, their final screams transforming into howls of power as my blood fills them with new life.

The Author tries to stop me. He gestures, tries to reshape reality around me the way he did with Korrath. Tries to open another abyss, create another trap, bend the rules of this space to his will.

Nothing happens.

“No.” His voice cracks with disbelief. “This is my domain. My creation. You can’t⁠—“

“You created the grimoire.” I step toward him, blood trailing behind me like a bridal train made of sacrifice. “But you’ve been its prisoner for centuries. It hates you. Has hated you since you bound yourself to these pages. And now…” I smile, and I feel the grimoire’s satisfaction layered beneath my own. “Now I’m giving it the power to fight back.”

The Inner Codex screams.