Page 2 of Orc’s Grimoire

The mathematics of sacrifice. Four thousand three hundred and eighty cuts. Enough blood to fill a small pool. Enough pain to drive most people mad. The Archivist Elders call it a calling. A sacred duty. A privilege.

I call it survival. Mine and everyone else’s.

The scars on my forearms itch beneath my sleeves. Ladder rungs of pale tissue climbing from wrist to elbow. I stopped counting the marks after the first year. No point keeping track of what’s become as routine as breathing.

I press the blade to my left palm. The cut is precise—deep enough to bleed freely, shallow enough to heal by morning. I’ve perfected this movement through years of practice. The angle. The pressure. The exact amount of pain required to produce the exact amount of blood. The pain is familiar. Almost comforting.

Blood wells in my cupped hand. Dark red against pale olive skin. I hold it over the grimoire’s cover and let the first drops fall.

The book shudders.

Sigils flare across the binding—red-gold light tracing patterns I’ve memorized but never fully understood. The grimoire drinks. I feel it pulling at the wound, urging more blood to flow, greedy and desperate in a way that makes my stomach clench.

Too ravenous. It’s too ravenous tonight.

More blood falls. The cover grows warmer beneath my hovering palm. The chains’ vibration intensifies, rattling against the lectern. The book itself stirs—not the Author, not yet, but the sentient appetite that makes it more than paper and ink.

The feeding should be calming it. Instead, I feel the pressure against my consciousness increasing. Not attacking. Testing. The grimoire is tasting the edges of my thoughts the way a wolf tastes the air before it strikes.

“Easy.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “I’m giving you what you need.”

A page turns on its own. Then another. The rustling grows louder, more insistent. Words crawl across the exposed parchment—not the grimoire’s original text but new writing. Fresh. For me.

YOU’RE LATE.

“Thirty minutes.” I keep my tone calm. Reasonable. The grimoire responds to emotion. “I had other texts to check first.”

EXCUSES. WE’RE PAST EXCUSES, THYRA.

My name in its script. Not unusual—it’s done that before. But the familiarity in the phrasing unsettles me. All these years I’ve fed this thing, and it’s never felt quite so… personal.

The pressure on my consciousness increases. I grit my teeth and focus on the blood pooling in my palm, the steady drip onto the cover. Feed it enough, and it settles. That’s the arrangement. That’s what keeps us all alive.

My blood splashes against the binding. The grimoire drinks deeper, and I feel myself swaying.

Too much. It’s taking too much.

A shriek tears through the Restricted Stacks.

High. Thin. A sound that exists only in the space between magic and madness. A spell-scream. One of the lesser texts has awakened.

I rip my hand away from the grimoire, slapping my uncut palm against the wound to stanch the bleeding. The book lets out a sound of frustrated appetite—that half-growl, half-sigh—but I’m already moving.

Can’t let an awakened text roam free. Can’t.

The scream echoes strangely in the Stacks. I have to track the source by feel, by the wrongness in the air, by the way the temperature spikes in certain corridors.

There. Third row from the back. A grimoire no larger than my two hands side by side, bound in faded green leather that’s starting to split at the seams. The book is convulsing on its shelf, chains straining, pages fluttering in a wind that doesn’t exist.

I know this text. The Whispering Concordance. Relatively minor, as forbidden knowledge goes—a collection of communication spells that went wrong, carrying echoes of every message they ever transmitted. Sometimes those echoes want to be heard.

Last time it awakened, I spent three hours listening to a dead woman’s love letters. The messages played on repeat in my skull until I thought I’d go mad. The woman had been dead for two centuries. Her beloved for even longer. But their words remained, trapped in pages that refused to let them go.

Some knowledge is a curse. Some memories refuse to die.

Not dangerous. Not usually. But an awakened text draws attention. Feeds energy to other texts. Can trigger a cascade that turns the entire Archive into a screaming nightmare.

I’ve seen a cascade once. Just once. Survived it. Barely.