Page 6
She strode towards the writing desk, its surface a chaos of vellum sheets, glass vials, and leather-bound grimoires. She rummaged through the clutter. Most of the tomes were familiar, volumes she’d thumbed through during her teenage years.
Idonea froze. A book lay near the back, covered in a worn scrap of velvet. She peeled the cloth away to reveal a tome she’d never seen before. Bound in calfskin, the texture was soft yet strangely warm beneath her fingertips. Her hand jerked instinctively. Books shouldn't feel alive. The spine cracked softly when she opened it.
Age had ragged its pages and faded its ink, but some margins bore Nellith's unmistakable handwriting, notes in a tight, hurried scrawl. The core text, though, was in a tongue Idonea didn't know; the script coiled in the shape of a resting dragon, and she could sound out nothing of it.
She flipped page after page, brow furrowed. Obscure ritual references. A sketch of a tree without roots. A map of stars that didn’t belong to their sky.
A margin note in Nellith's hand caught her eye: 'Five marks. Five years. The vessel must be prepared slowly.' Idonea flipped past the page; she'd no need for any rituals.
She turned another page and immediately flipped back, her breath catching.
A detailed illustration filled the parchment: a heart-shaped relic about the size of a fist, sketched in delicate ink that caught the light in strange ways; pale where pale should not be, gold-veined where the artist had tried to render shadow. Ancient runes etched along one face of the crystal, and Idonea’s heart skipped a beat; the pattern echoed the same runes tattooed along her spine.
A chill needled through her ribs as she read the translated margin notes, penned by Nellith herself.
The crystallised heart of Ffyrnedd, the Witchwyrm. Slain during the First Sundering. Hidden, not destroyed. Still, it beats beneath realms, waiting…
Ffyrnedd, a name older than language.
Even the name sat wrong in her mouth. Nellith used to forbid stories about the devourers, reality-thinning creatures. Dragons steeped so deeply in the Primal Current that the world bent around them. Children in Draugaros whispered that Ffyrnedd's death scream tore the first wound in the Nexis. Idonea used to think that part was metaphor.
Her eyes moved faster across the page. The heart survived, and not merely as a relic. As a key. Heat crawled slowly up the back of her neck.
A key capable of opening a permanent gateway in the Nexis. A key, the margin note read, that required a vessel to fit.
The words on the page swam before her eyes. The Nexis was the only thing standing between the daemon plane and theirs, its barrier keeping their horrors from slipping through every shadow. A permanent breach would swallow the world.
And Nellith had somehow become involved with the key capable of opening it.
A shard of cold fury lanced through her. “What have you done?”
If the daemons knew Nellith possessed the Heart, they would never stop hunting her. Idonea looked back at the text desperately, searching for some explanation that sounded less catastrophic. Nothing improved.
Only one thing remained clear: Nellith had hidden this deliberately.
She tore the page free before she could reconsider. The parchment resisted strangely, closer to separating wet cloth than paper. Wonderful, cursed parchment. Exactly what her morning required. She snapped the tome shut hard enough to rattle the desk.
“Let’s go, Lance.”
His tongue flickered once, and he shot past her.
Idonea shoved the torn page into her satchel, strapped on her coat, and tugged her goggles down over her glasses before stepping outside.
Cold ait struck sharp against her face. Morning smoke rolled through the streets in heavy layers. Factory exhaust stained the fog strange colours above the lower districts; green, bruised purple and sickly yellow. Thalorica smelled like rusted lungs in winter.
Lance circled above, his sinuous body twisting through the pale morning light. He veered northward, towards the higher tiers of Thalorica, the clifftop neighbourhoods of the wealthy, where homes were carved from the mountain’s stone.
Steam hissed from sewer grates, and workers shouted somewhere below. A factory bell rang twice. Nobody hurried towards the sound. Factory deaths happened too often to inspire urgency anymore.
She followed with her chin low, heart pounding beneath her corset, doing her best not to meet any eyes. Her presence in town was a stain on many memories. Some still remembered the incident; the boy, the bleeding shadows, the way the Current had snapped free. She’d left after that.
Lance hissed, veering towards the cliff’s edge. A knot twisted in her gut.
They wouldn’t take Nellith down there, would they? Down into the daemon plane?
Her feet stopped. Cold sweat gathered at the back of her neck. The Nexis. If Nellith had been dragged through—No.
Idonea forced her feet forward to the cliff's edge, salt stinging her lips. The sea stretched below in endless green-blue depths, water crashing white against the rocks far beneath. Here, the Current thinned to a mere whisper.
