The black book hit the floor with a sound like a coffin lid. It did not fall so much as land—an exhausted, final thing settling on the wooden boards—and from Elias something tore loose.
"Burn it… burn it… BURN IT!" His voice wrenched from him, raw and ragged, breaking over itself. Tears carved furrows through the dust on his face; his lips trembled and slicked with saliva. The words tumbled in a frenzy, half-shouted, half-prayed, each repetition less sense than a demand hurled at the world. He was a man unmoored, the shore pulled far away by tide.
Daren and Lyra snapped toward him, startled. Daren's hand went to his sword out of habit; Lyra's expression shifted from cautious curiosity to sharp alarm. For a moment neither spoke—Elias's hysteria filled the space between them like a living thing.
He paced, scarcely aware of the boards beneath his boots. The book's pages, open to grotesque diagrams, fluttered in a draft he didn't remember making. The inked sigils glowed faintly at the edges, a light like old blood seeping in reverse. From the alcoves and rafters the tower seemed to lean in and listen, old wood creaking a tired sympathy.
"Elias—" Daren started, voice an attempt at steadying him, but words slid uselessly off the panic curdling Elias's thoughts.
"Burn it," Elias repeated, lower now, as if the phrase were a spell he might will into being. "Burn it before it remembers. Before it finishes. Burn it—please."
Lyra moved before she let herself think. She crossed the floor in three long strides, seized the book with both hands, and carried it toward the smoldering bundle of scrap they had used to light the library. Her fingers trembled, but her face had a hard, bright clarity—an intent so fierce it steadied the room.
"Daren—help me," she said, not as a question.
Together they heaved the book into the small fire. The edges took flame with a whisper, ink hissing as if it were blood meeting heat. At first the fire seemed to hesitate—black paper resists flame for a heartbeat—but then the flames remembered how to hunger. Orange tongues licked the pages; smoke rolled and curled, tasting of pine and old iron. The book's cries were silent; the tower swallowed the sound like it had swallowed millennia.
Elias sank to his knees and watched as the flames ate words that had wanted to write the world anew. His chest heaved. His hands clawed at his sleeves, as if to scrap away the memory of the sigils that now glowed and quivered beneath heat. He babbled to himself—fragments of the last pages, the demon's grief, the requirement of a hundred souls. Tears came harder, stinging in his nose. The repeating mantra fell into a ragged sob: "Burn it… burn it…"
Across the stone floor the ritual circle, the dried bloody lines that had looked so absolute in the firelight, began to change. At first it was a trembling: the red lines dimmed, their edges losing the razor-sharp definition they'd held. The geometry shivered as if someone else had been holding it taut and was loosening its grip. The center, which had seemed to pulse like a slow heart, flickered—then guttered. Where the ink had once caught the light with a hungry luster, now it took on the dullness of old scars.
Lyra breathed shallowly. She prodded embers with her heel, feeding the flame as if it were a weapon. "Faster," she urged, not cruelly but with the steel of someone who understood what would happen if the words survived. Daren placed himself between Elias and the darkened doorway as if his bulk and will could keep the tower's eyes away.
Smoke thickened. The book curled, pages folding in on themselves, the demon's handwriting blackening into ash. The hieroglyphs bled as they burned, the lines of the sigil echoing with each hiss until they, too, began to scrawl away like ink in rain. The circle's glow waned, switching from heartbeat-bright to a slow, melancholic fade, like dying lamps in a half-empty house.
Elias watched the disappearance of the lines as if the world were being erased and then, mercifully, rewritten. Each vanishing stroke soothed and terrified him in equal measure. He had seen the ritual awaken in his head—seen the ways it reached for breath—and now to watch it die was to feel the world's wound stitch itself closed. His knees loosened; his hands stilled.
When the last page fell into grey powder the fire spat once, a small, almost triumphant flare, then settled again into a steady, weak amber. Where the matrix had been, there hovered only a ghost of a pattern, ghosted into the boards—then nothing. The red was gone. The lines had faded into the bare grain of the floor. The room felt lighter; the oppressive press at the back of Elias's skull eased like receding tide.
He did not notice when his body finally surrendered. One moment he was kneeling, the next he was collapsed, the wooden floor cold against his cheek. He lay there shuddering, chest heaving, tears dried into caked tracks along his face. The tower no longer pressed at him with hungry air; instead it breathed like an exhausted animal that had been denied its meal.
Daren crouched beside him, rough hands warm where they touched Elias's shoulder. "You did right," he said, voice soft but firm. "You saw it. You burned it."
Lyra knelt, watching Elias as if seeing the man for the first time in a long while. Her hand hovered over his hair, then rested lightly on his forehead. For the first time since they'd met, her voice lost its usual sharpness. "You were brave," she said, though it sounded too small to hold the weight of the night.
Elias blinked up at them, the tremor in him slowing. The terror still lingered in his eyes—the echo of the axe, the taste of iron on his tongue—but under it a thin line of resolve was forming, as if the act of watching the ritual die had allowed him to stitch himself back together a little.
He sucked a breath through cracked lips. The world felt raw and dangerously new. "It's gone," he whispered, a small, disbelieving thing. "It's—gone."
Daren's jaw loosened into a tired, bleak smile. "For now," he said. "But we don't stay here. We move. We find answers. We make sure nothing like that ever awakens again."
Elias closed his eyes, letting the sound of their voices anchor him. The shock did not evaporate—it would not, quickly—but the immediate terror had been smothered by flame, by light, by the simple, human act of burning a bad thing until it could no longer speak.
Outside, the watchtower's dark silhouette held the moon, silent and patient. Inside, three figures gathered around a dying fire—bruised, wary, but alive—and for the first time in a long while, the night felt a little less like a verdict and a little more like a beginning.
Elias sat up slowly, the cold of the wooden boards seeping through his clothes and into his bones. The tremor that had held him like a vise all night loosened enough for him to breathe in long, searching gulps of air. Around him the little fire guttered, casting an uncertain, wavering light on the ash-gray circle that had once pulsed with terrible intent. Daren and Lyra hovered, tired and watchful, as if the simple act of watching might keep the night from uncoiling into further horror.
Elias pushed himself to his feet with effort, fingers rubbing at his face as though he could scrub the images from his skull. He looked at the scorched remnant of the black book, eyes still wet and raw, then at the ruined geometry beneath their boots. When he finally spoke, the words came slow and ragged, as if each one had to be dragged free from some thicker place inside him.
"Let's move," he said, voice thin. "But—when I read that book… it was like a curse. It took me over. I… I couldn't control myself. I was almost paralyzed, like something in those pages reached out and clamped down on me. I barely forced myself to throw it into the fire. I was breaking apart from the inside."
Lyra stepped closer, folding her arms in a rare show of softness. "You did the right thing," she replied quietly. "You burned it."
Daren's face was grave; he nodded once, slow and firm. "You have a strong will, Elias. If you hadn't acted, we might have all been trapped by whatever that book wanted. You—" He paused, looking the younger man in the eyes. "—you did well. You held on."
Elias's jaw clenched; for a moment he seemed to search for the right words, then let them out in a rush, part accusation to himself and part confession. "I thought it was trying to control me. It felt like it crawled under my skin. I fought with everything I had to destroy it. If I hadn't—"
"—we would be dead," Daren finished, without heat. "Yes."
The three of them stood in uneasy silence. Elias turned to glance once more at the chained figure across the room—Veran, still bound to the chair, his face ragged and slack. The chains had held him so far, but the sight of him stirred something in Elias, a memory of being on the floor and seeing that face bend over him seconds before the world went out. He had not yet reconciled the two versions of the man: the smiling stranger who offered shelter, and the hulking thing that had made a mockery of that welcome.
He stepped forward. "We should go," he said again. "We need to leave this place before—"
Something moved.
A sound like cloth rubbing on wood, a soft scuttle that Elias registered before he felt the pressure of it. Veran, though tied and slumped, was not still. For all the bindings, he was sliding—jerking, grunting, hauling himself with arms and teeth and a perverse, animal cunning that made Elias's skin go taut.
Before anyone could react, Veran's body lunged. His jaw snapped and found Elias's calf with a desperate, inhuman bite.
Pain ripped through Elias with red-hot immediacy. He staggered, both hands flying to the wound. Something tore into the muscle; the throb was immediate, hot and fierce. He emitted a sound that was part curse and part plea, a raw, animal noise that had nothing to do with the composure he'd tried to stitch back together.
"Elias!" Lyra cried, dropping to her knees beside him.
Daren's reaction was a single, clean movement of steel. He crossed the room in three strides and drove his sword down into Veran where he found him—stab after stab—sharp, brutal, meant to end the motion. The blade sank again and again as Daren fought to force the monstrous man's teeth from his friend's leg.
Veran's hold loosened at last, though he clung until he could cling no more. His jaw released with a wet sound that made Elias's head swim. Blood slicked the air between them—Elias's and Veran's mingling in a dark smear where the bite had worked deep. Elias fell back, knees folding under him as the world narrowed to the taste of iron and the urge to pull his leg up as if the weight of gravity would stop the leak.
Daren continued to drive the sword, not with any clean mercy but with a frantic, fearful force intended to stop the movement—intended to stop anything that could still act on that room. Even so, Veran's body moved with a strength that seemed wrong for a man so mortally wounded; he snarled and roared, the sounds ugly and low, and for an instant it felt as if iron and will were at odds.
Eventually, the motion slackened. Veran's knuckles lost their grip on Elias's calf. The man's chest heaved; his breaths came sharp and ragged. He blinked around him as if surfacing from a long dive into darkness, then turned his head and spat a string of words, half-coherent with bile and fury.
"You… you bastard—" he managed, voice hoarse and thin. His lips cracked as he forced the next words out. "I spent twenty years… twenty years for this… ninety-seven lives… ninety-seven—" His voice broke like an old rope.
"What did you say?" Lyra demanded, sharp and immediate.
Veran's hands scrabbled at the wood, trying to pull himself upright despite the chains. The effort only seemed to make him more frantic; his eyes darted like a trapped animal's. The words tumbled out, ragged and bitter.
"I did it for a purpose. For a pathway. I hunted… I took… I bent them to me." He laughed then, a sound with no joy in it. "Ninety-seven. Ninety-seven souls. Twenty years. So close. So close and you burned it— you burned it."
He spat, and the sound was half-tear, half-curse. He groped blindly forward and seemed to bring himself to the brink of a last, resentful confession—his breath shallow and spent.
"Just one more," Veran rasped, each word an edge. "One more and I would have had the power… I—" His voice failed. His arms went slack. For the first time since Elias had seen the man smile in the daylight, there was no cunning left in his gaze—only a tired, bitter resignation.
He closed his eyes.
The fight ebbed from him like a tide finally losing sun. Daren lowered his sword and stared, chest heaving, while Lyra crouched beside Elias and tried to wrap a rag around the bite to staunch the flow. The three of them were breathing too loud in the sudden, stunned quiet of the tower.
Elias pressed the cloth with shaking hands against his leg. Warmth and wet soaked through — the life that refused to be easy to live. He looked up at Veran's face and found it strangely small in the half-light, the menace gone and in its place the ruin of a man who'd been waiting too long for some impossible reckoning.
Daren kept his sword ready, eyes narrowed and watchful even as the finality of the moment settled. "He's gone," he said at last, voice flat. He didn't say whether Veran was dead by blade or by despair. It didn't matter. The danger had been broken — for now.
Elias's throat worked. For a heartbeat he was not the survivor who had burned a demon's pact; he was simply a man, age nothing, who had felt his blood mingle with another's and was left to reckon with what that meant. Guilt, relief, horror — the three braided into one tasting in his mouth.
He let the cloth press hard and drew his knees up against his chest, shuddering. The watchtower around them was quiet as a held breath; outside the forest was only wind and distant, indifferent night. Inside, ash smoldered and a chain lay slack.
Veran's final words hovered, raw and unfinished: "Ninety-seven…" The promise of the pact, the meaning behind the ritual, had been broken. For the moment, at least, the tower's hunger had been starved by flame.
Elias closed his eyes against the flood of memory, against the ache of his calf and the image of Veran's twisted face. He did not know what would come next — only that they had been spared, and that the cost had been uglier than any of them would have wanted.