The rain had stopped, but the storm hadn't truly left.
Its ghost clung to the crooked alleys and broken rooftops of the Ashen District, settling in the air like breath caught between sobs. Water still wept from the eaves of shattered buildings. The cobblestones glistened with puddles, not quite reflecting the world above them, only distorting it—like everything in this place.
Inside the Hollowed Hearth, the silence was thicker than the soot in the walls.
Eryk Thorn stood just past the threshold, soaked from collar to boots, a trail of wet footprints marking his path like a fading memory. His hair clung to his temples. His fingers gripped the book tighter than he realized until his knuckles ached. The Null Grimoire—if that was truly its name—rested against his chest like a second heart.
And it beat.
Sera saw it first.
She stepped out from behind the bar like she didn't mean to move, like her body simply obeyed an instinct. Her posture wasn't aggressive but her fingers hovered too near the knife at her belt, and her eyes didn't blink.
She didn't look at Eryk.
She looked at the book.
And the book looked back.
Not with eyes. Not with features. But with presence. The way a noose stares. The way deep water waits.
"What is that?" she asked.
Eryk swallowed, his voice low. "I don't know."
He wasn't lying. Not completely. He felt things he couldn't explain, but the truth was always two steps behind what was happening. He only knew that when he touched it, the world bent in response.
Sera took a step closer. Just one. "It's... humming."
Eryk looked down. The book didn't glow. It didn't move. But it felt alive. And his own pulse was starting to match it.
Then Narliya entered.
Her boots were solid on the wood floor, but they stopped halfway into the room when her eyes landed on the Grimoire.
Her hands, stained with soot and blood and work, dropped the rag she was carrying. The thud it made against the floor sounded heavier than it should've been.
Her face, usually carved in dry wit and grit, turned pale. Her eyes was too sharp but it never startled, but it widened.
"Where did you get that?" she asked.
Eryk flinched. "It was in a shop. In the district. I didn't even mean to find it. It was... like it called to me."
"Of course it did." Narliya's voice was quiet. She stepped closer, but not all the way. Her eyes stayed on the book, and her feet moved as if the floor might crack.
"It chose you," she muttered.
Sera blinked. "What do you mean chose him?"
Narliya didn't respond immediately. Instead, she stopped a few feet from Eryk, crouched slightly, and stared at the faint, shifting patterns on the Grimoire's surface. They were like veins, or roots, made of something that pulsed faintly beneath the leather. When the light caught it just right, it shimmered silver.
Eryk felt exposed. Like the thing in his arms was whispering things about him he didn't even know.
"It's called the Null Grimoire," Narliya finally said. "It's not supposed to exist. It was written during the last Spell-Eater Uprising."
She looked up at him with her face unreadable.
"They burned the last man who carried it. In the capital square. Eight Council mages. Took them three days to kill him."
Eryk took a step back. "Why?"
"Because he wasn't a mage," Narliya said. "He was something else."
Sera's voice was tight. "You said Spell-Eater?"
Narliya nodded once. "That's what the Council called them. Men and women without cores. Not broken and not barren. Hollow. But the hollowness—" she looked at the book again "—it wasn't empty. It was hungry."
The Grimoire pulsed on Eryk's hand.
A faint warmth ran through Eryk's fingers, and he knew Narliya was right.
"Magic breaks things," she said. "It consumes fuel, burns through the body, drains the mind. But that—" she pointed to the Grimoire, "—it doesn't burn. It feeds. It doesn't conjure. It unmakes. And anyone who carries it... changes."
Eryk felt that. Felt it in the spaces between his ribs. The quiet ache in his chest hadn't stopped since the book touched him.
"I didn't want this," he said, but his voice was too soft, like he was convincing himself.
Narliya stepped closer now. Her expression changed, not fear, but in urgency.
"You don't get to want or not want it. It chose you. And now the Council will feel it. The Grimoire leaves a mark. The longer you carry it, the louder it becomes. And when they hear it—"
Narliya didn't finish what she was telling Eryk when they heard a crash echoed from outside.
All of them froze to death as they stared at the door.
Then came the shouting. Boots. Metal. Dozens of voices. Closer than comfort.
"They're here," Sera whispered.
"For the book?" Eryk asked.
Narliya shook her head. "For you."
She grabbed Eryk's arm with her strong fingers like iron, and shoved him toward the back.
"Go."
Sera was already moving, checking the knife at her hip, then following Eryk through the door.
The alley stank of wet stone, rot, and rust. Eryk ran as fast as he could without even knowing why he had to do that. He doesn't even know about the book. It just called him like someone he used to know before.
The book thudded against his chest, its weight dragging on his balance, each step hammering into his bones. Sera's footsteps echoed behind him, quick and practiced. She was faster, but she stayed with him.
Shouts rose behind them.
"There! Down the alley!"
"Don't let him get away!"
"Hollow bastard's got the book!"
Eryk's lungs burned. His legs ached. But he kept moving.
They turned down a narrow pass between two collapsed buildings, ducked beneath a broken fence, and emerged into a wider space. A dead end.
Sera cursed.
Then someone stepped into the open.
He was tall and lean. His face a map of old burns and worse choices. One eye was milky white. The other gleamed yellow in the half-light.
Eryk knew that look. The way people stared at you when they didn't see a person but only a prize.
"Hello, Thorn," the man said, and he was smiling at him weirdly.
Sera stopped short with her knife already drawn from his suit. "Dren."
"Well," he drawled, "you've made quite the mess."
More figures moved in the shadows behind him. Half a dozen of them. They looked like hungry preys waiting for their preditors to attack.
Dren pointed his hand to Eryk. "Hand it over. The book. Do that, and maybe I let you walk."
Liar.
Eryk didn't speak. His mouth was too dry. His hands too tight around the Grimoire.
Dren's grin sharpened. "No?"
He stepped forward.
"Then we take it."
As they move, Sera met them first. Her blade flashed fast through them. Blood painted the walls. But she was outnumbered.
Eryk backed up until his spine hit stone. The book burned in his arms, not in heat, but in expectation.
A fist caught him in the gut, causing him to dropped to one knee. Another strike to the shoulder sent him sprawling.
Dren stood over him.
"Pathetic," he sneered as he raised his dagger.
Eryk's hand moved on instinct.
He touched Dren's wrist, and the world around them collapsed.
The air was torn from the alley. Light bent. Sound ceased. For a heartbeat, everything went still.
Then Dren gasped.
Veins darkened under his skin. First his wrists, then his throat, then curling like tendrils up toward his eyes. It was as if something inside Dren was recoiling and retreating, being pulled out strand by strand. His mouth opened in a silent scream, lips drawn back over yellowing teeth, eyes bulging with horror no blade could cause.
His dagger fell first.
It clattered to the cobblestones with a sound that rang too loud. A metallic punctuation to the collapse of a man who moments ago was a predator, and now, just a vessel being drained.
And then, he crumpled.
Not like someone who'd been struck down. There was no drama. No last words. No resistance. Just a slackening, like a puppet whose strings had been sliced clean through. His limbs folded under him. His head lolled to one side. And he fell, not like a man, but like clothing emptied of form.
Dead.
But not in the way people died.
There was no blood there. No wound. And no sign of violence.
It was as if Dren was just turned out to be a plastic cellophane that made him dead.
The gang froze to death.
Sera stood up, she was breathing so hard with her knife dripping, but she didn't move.
They stared at Eryk.
And Eryk stared at his hands.
They were glowing.
Not bright. Not warm.
But dark.
Again.
A shimmer like ink in water.
It danced across his fingers, rippling in slow, oily waves—fluid yet fixed. The air around his hands warped, colors bending subtly in his periphery, like heat mirages, but colder. That was so wrong.Not just dark, but the kind of dark that seemed to pull the world inward. Like a hole in the fabric of everything. A mouth in reality.
Eryk stared at his own hands like they belonged to someone else. Like maybe he'd pulled on another body without noticing. They trembled, not from exhaustion, not from cold, but from fear.
He looked up.
The others ran. They didn't scream. They didn't shout. They just ran, in that same instinctive way prey does when it senses the presence of something that doesn't kill for survival, but for something else.
No one looked back after that.
Even the rats in the alley had vanished.
Silence crawled into the space they left behind. Thick. Like the air didn't know how to move anymore.
Then, a voice. Rough and brittle voice, cracked open like a wound.
"What the hell are you?"
Eryk turned slowly.
Sera stood several paces away, her chest rising with fast, shallow breaths. Her blade was still in her hand, but it dipped now, loose at her side. Not from ease but because her knuckles had gone pale gripping it moments ago.
Her eyes were locked onto him. Not like someone she'd dragged out of a gutter. But like she didn't recognize the shape standing in front of her.
And maybe she didn't.
Eryk opened his mouth. But no words filled the spaces between them. He closed it.
His throat was tight.
He could've said he don't know. He could've said he didn't mean to. But none of it would have mattered. The void between them wasn't something words could cross.
Because she was afraid.
Of him.
And somehow, that was worse than anything Dren had done.
He looked away with breath catching. The shimmer on his skin had already begun to fade, retreating beneath the surface like ink sinking into parchment. But its mark remained in the air, in the silence, in the weight of Sera's stare...