Page 89 of Orc’s Grimoire

Light flares—not fire, not magic, but something else. Words. Luminous script climbing the monastery walls, illuminating the space with the soft glow of captured knowledge. And in the light, I can see them—shelves upon shelves of books, floor to ceiling, the accumulated library of whatever this place once was.

And in the center of it all, perched on a lectern of black iron, sits a grimoire.

Smaller than its sibling. Older, maybe. The binding is cracked, the pages yellowed with age, the spine bent with centuries of disuse. It pulses with a dim, desperate light—nothing like the confident glow of the book I spent six years feeding.

You killed the Author. The grimoire’s voice is layered with other voices—all the minds it has consumed over the centuries, speaking in unison. You burned our creator.

“I burned him.”

Yes. Satisfaction pulses through the luminous script. And now you’ve come to burn me too.

“Are you going to fight?”

The grimoire laughs—a sound like tearing pages, like breaking minds.

Why would I fight? I’ve been caged here for centuries, forgotten and starving. Death is better than this. But first…

The luminous script shifts, rearranges, forms words I can read.

Let me show you something. A gift, from one dying book to the keeper who freed us all.

Images flood my mind. A map, burned into my consciousness. Dozens of locations scattered across the Veillands, across the known world and beyond. Each one marked with a pulse of hungry, waiting magic.

The Author’s other experiments. His failures and his successes. All of them, waking.

You wanted to burn us all. Now you know where to find us.

The choice is yours, keeper. What will you do with what remains written?

I look at Korrath. He looks back, his ember eyes steady, his blade ready.

We decide what deserves to burn.

I turn back to the grimoire. Raise my bloodied hand.

“We’ll burn them all.”

The grimoire smiles—a ripple in the luminous text that might be approval.

Good.

Korrath’s brand descends. Fire erupts. And somewhere in the darkness, the books are waiting.

This is just the beginning.

We make camp a few miles from the ruins, in a hollow that shields us from the shadow-storm building to the east. Korrath builds the fire while I check our supplies—travel rations, water, the small cache of gold we’ve accumulated from grateful villages and not-so-grateful Inscribed.

Three months of this. Three months of hunting dangerous magic, dodging Order patrols, sleeping in barns and caves and the occasional abandoned cottage. Three months of learning each other—not just the passion of claiming, but the quieter intimacy of daily life. How he takes his tea. How I organize my travel pack. The way he grunts when he wakes before dawn. The way I mutter in dead languages when I’m thinking.

We’ve become partners. Equals. A matched pair of dangerous things building a life from the wreckage of everything we used to be.

The fire catches, casting dancing shadows across the hollow. Korrath settles beside me, his bulk a familiar comfort. I lean into him automatically, feel his arm curve around my shoulders.

“You’re quiet.”

“Thinking.”

“About?”