Chapter 12 - The book

It had been three days since the lake. Three days since the mask. Since the voice and the woman and the parting that left her feeling like she had stitched her heart back together with gold thread—and now didn’t know if it would hold.

Eirian had told Sera and Orlen about how she wanted to practice more rituals; there was so much more to learn, she needed to understand more about her powers, and the path she should follow in life.

The garden was quiet as dusk settled, light bleeding down the sky like watercolor. The scent of crushed herbs and warm dirt filled the air. Eirian was almost finished drawing the outer circle. She’d used fine chalk mixed with ground amber and green ash—materials more attuned to this world, as Orlen had insisted.

“Rituals need anchors,” he had said earlier that day, watching her test sigils in the margins of her journal. “Especially if you're diving into the soul. No more half-made inks from dream fragments. If you're going to walk between things, do it with roots, not wings.”

“How do you know that?” According to Eirian, his father was a smith; he shouldn’t know anything about magical powers.

“What? Your old man can’t know certain things?” He appeared offended at the idea of his daughter belittling him.

“I… I didn’t mean it that way…”

“If you must know, I used to live in the capital.”

“In the capital?! Then why do we live here?”

“Well…” He didn’t finish his story; instead, he looked in Sera’s direction.

“I guess we can tell you now,” Sera finally answered.

“What do you mean?”

“I used to be one of the sisters of the capital’s temple, but your dad kidnapped me.”

“What?!” It was Orlen who reacted exaggeratedly.

“What do you mean ‘what’? You wanted me to run away with you.”

“I mean… yeah… But that’s not the whole truth; you also wanted to be with me.”

“That is indeed correct,” she said before getting closer to him and kissing him on his forehead.

“And why did both of you need to escape?”

“We already told you, sweetie,” Sera answered. “I was a sister in the temple, and they don’t allow us to marry. If I wanted to be with your father, I needed to say goodbye to my old life.”

“But your family…”

“They were never in the picture; I have always been an orphan,” Sera said with an awkward smile.

“Oh, I didn’t know that. Then Dad’s family is the same?”

“No, my family disapproved of our relationship, so I severed my relationship with them.”

“But all of that doesn’t tell me why you know about magic or rituals,” Eirian brought the topic to the table once again.

“We were getting there. My family is from a noble house; being in that position brings you opportunities to learn all kinds of knowledge.”

“Then, how do you learn smithing?”

“After we ran away, I needed to make a living for us. I learned under a smith in a town close to this village.”

“And what about Mom? The way she works with plants couldn’t be learned anywhere close to this place.”

“That was one of my roles in the temple, sweetie,” Sera said while caressing Eirian’s head. “The more talent you show them, the more they want you to remain with them.”

“That doesn’t sound good. How can people support the religion then?”

“Don’t question the church in public,” Orlen warned Eirian, looking really serious.

“Why?”

“Let’s just say that if someone reports you to them, it could get really ugly for everyone close to you.”

“Now, if you don’t have any more questions, you should start with the ritual. You tell us how you wanted to practice, and we would only permit it if we are together with you.” Sera ended our conversation and urged me to commence.

Orlen stood off to the side, arms crossed over his chest, sword strapped to his back like he expected something to leap out of the circle and bite him. His leather apron was still stained from the forge, sleeves rolled back. He looked like someone who didn’t belong anywhere near ritual space—and yet here he was.

Sera sat on a nearby stool, a basket of fresh-cut rosemary beside her, though her hands weren’t moving. She wasn’t weaving garlands tonight. Her eyes were fixed on Eirian.

“Are you sure about this?” Sera asked softly.

Eirian nodded. “I’m not trying to copy everything about the woman in the lantern; I just want to see the place I saw her dance.”

“That lake?” Orlen asked.

“It wasn’t a lake, or not the normal kind.” She looked down at the drawn threads, then added gently, “If I’m right, the memory she gave me wasn’t just symbolic. It was encoded with intent.”

Orlen made a sound under his breath. “Ritual-encoded dreamwalking. Spirits help us.”

“They are helping,” Eirian said. Then she sat cross-legged inside the circle, mask in her lap, the Mugu bell already tied at her wrist.

She inhaled deeply.

Then she began.

The Mugu gave off its low, echoing chime as she moved her wrist in time with her breath. Her fingers traced the rune at the circle’s center, pressing mana into each line until the shape hummed gently beneath her skin.

The threads responded.

They rose from the ground like dewlit strands of spider silk, glowing faintly against the dark. They curled around her fingers, her shoulders, and her brow, wrapping her in something softer than mist but far heavier than air.

She leaned into them, not with her body but with her soul—reaching, following the trail she had seen in that dream, the way the owl-masked woman’s feet had carved intention into the lake’s surface.

Her mind drifted.

And there, in the threshold between moments, the threads parted.

She saw her again.

Her mother, kneeling in the ash-ringed circle of the old talisman shop. Candles flickered around her shoulders. Her lips were moving in a chant that Eirian couldn’t quite hear—but the meaning poured through: hope, grief, searching.

Eirian reached out.

Just as the connection began to solidify—just as she felt the first pull of warmth between them—

A shape tore through the vision.

A figure—tall, shrouded in white priest robes, face hidden beneath a silver-trimmed hood. His presence was sudden, absolute. Like a hammer dropped into glass.

A sword hung from his hip. And his hands glowed with authority.

Eirian tried to pull back, but the priest moved faster.

He reached out.

And with a single gesture, the soul-thread between her and her mother was severed.

The line snapped like dry wood. Pain burst through her skull. The priest turned toward her—his eyes fully visible now beneath the hood. Pale gray, nearly white. And furious.

“How dare you trespass in sanctified dreamways?” he hissed. “This is not your place, child of a dead world.”

His gaze locked with hers.

And in that gaze—deep, ancient, searing—she felt something recognize her.

“Outrageous,” he snarled, as if choking on the word. “The gall to return…”

And then the threads shattered.

***

Eirian gasped and arched, her hands flying to her head.

Blood poured from her nose, dripping into the chalk sigils and staining the ritual cloth. She fell back, breath caught in her throat, the Mugu bell still chiming softly.

The threads connecting Eirian with her previous life were gone.

All of them.

Ripped away like someone had slammed shut a thousand doors at once.

Sera rushed forward immediately, cradling her shoulders. “Eirian! Eirian, look at me. Stay awake.”

Orlen was already checking the circle, his boot scraping through one of the chalk lines. He knelt beside them a moment later.

“I told you to anchor it harder,” he muttered, but there was no anger in his voice—only tightly banked worry.

Eirian’s fingers trembled.

“Did you see someone?” Sera asked gently.

Eirian nodded. Her voice came out like gravel. “A priest, he was in white robes. He cut the thread between us—me and… and Mom. He knew I was there.”

Orlen’s jaw tightened. “Priest? From what order?”

“I don’t know. His eyes—they were like frost. Like moonlight through bone.” She swallowed, her mouth dry. “He knew who I was.”

Neither parent spoke.

But Sera’s hand closed around hers and squeezed.

“We’ll figure this out,” she said quietly.

Eirian didn’t reply; things were starting to get more complicated.

***

The room was quiet except for the crackle of the hearth and the slow drip of water from the eaves outside. They had come inside the house after Eirian’s failure; a storm had passed earlier—brief, sharp, and summer-warm—but the scent of rain still clung to the wooden beams. She lay in her bedroll beneath a quilt Sera had made from old festival scraps, eyes closed, breath shallow.

She hadn’t told them about the priest’s eyes, the recognition in them, how much hate she could feel from his gaze, and the way she thought that she had been marked.

Closing her eyes for a little rest, a dream came to her: she stood in front of thousands of mirrors, cracked and endless. A thousand reflections of herself staring back—some bleeding, some screaming, some smiling with teeth that weren’t hers. And above them all, falling ash like snow that burned.

She turned in the dream, and someone was waiting in the dark behind the glass.

A shape. A coil. A voice like silk and embers.

“Little soul,” it whispered. “Little thief.”

She woke up choking.

Air burned in her throat. The fire had long since gone cold, but sweat beaded her forehead. She sat up, clawing free from the quilt, her fingers trembling. The room was bathed in shadows, long and shifting. Moonlight touched the corner of her journal but didn’t reach her bed.

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The space beside her moved.

A sigh of wind—though the window was closed.

Then the shadows twisted.

And Askariel unfolded from them.

With time, the demon that resided inside her had been changing the more he recovered his lost memories, the same memories that haunted Eirian in her sleep. She knew how powerful he used to be based on the nightmares she saw. At first she thought that he could become her teacher or a helper, but the more she learned from his life, the more she knew that was impossible. She feared that someday, he would recover and decide to kill her. Eirian didn’t know if that was possible for him but didn’t want to find out.

He did not step into the room so much as bleed into it. His form was only half-real: smoke shaped like bone and ink spilled through water, flickering in and out of focus. But his presence—that was undeniable.

He stood near the rafters, spine crooked like a marionette out of joint, head tilted sideways, as if examining her through some pane of reality she couldn’t see.

“You dream loudly,” he murmured.

Eirian scrambled to grab the Mugu.

“Don’t bother,” he said, a coil of darkness sliding over her shoulder like a mockery of a shawl. “The bell only works when you’re trying to reach something. Not banish it.”

She stared at him. Swallowed. Her voice came low and flat.

“Why did the priest attack me?”

Askariel’s smile was all teeth and shadow.

“Straight to the knife. I admire that.”

“Answer me.”

He circled slowly, half walking, half drifting—never touching the ground, though his presence dragged like chains in the corners of the room.

“Because you stepped somewhere you were not meant to,” he said at last. “There are territories in the dreamscape—veins of meaning, echoes of power. That priest belongs to one. A sanctum of sorts. And you, little Eirian, wandered in with muddy shoes and no offering.”

“He called me a child of a dead world.”

“Mm.” Askariel paused. “Accurate, if unkind.”

Eirian’s nails dug into the blanket.

“He knew me.”

Askariel turned his head toward her in a slow, unnatural motion.

“Soulwalkers have been hunted before. You are not the first. You will not be the last. But your… signature,” he breathed, “is very old. It also carries a significant weight. Some names do not fade cleanly across lifetimes.”

Her chest tightened.

“You didn’t answer the real question,” she said. “Why are you helping me?”

He grinned.

It was a sharp, terrible thing—like a hole cut into the world that let something older peek through.

“And you’re a girl holding threads meant for gods.”

Silence fell between them. Outside, an owl hooted once. Far away, the wind stirred the leaves of the garden.

Eirian shifted. “You’re a demon.”

“Is that the name that makes you feel safest? Fine. Demon, then. Traitor angel. Whisper-thing. Flame-born exile. Choose what lets your spine hold still. The truth is messier.”

She hated that he could speak like that. Like a poem composed of secrets no one had earned.

“What do you want?” she asked.

His voice dropped.

“A body.”

The word hung in the air like incense, thick and cloying.

“I am sick of being smoke,” he hissed. “Of slipping through cracks. Of talking through dreams and bones and half-made masks. I want to feel heat again. To bleed. To bite. To take.”

Eirian flinched but didn’t look away.

“In return,” Askariel said, tilting his head, “I will teach you the old ways. Not the hedge magic your sweet mother guards like sacred bread, not the charms and chants that your blacksmith father hammers into shape with iron will. No. I offer you the real threads. The hidden names. The rituals even the Golden Order feared to trace.”

Her hands shook.

“I don’t want power,” she whispered.

He leaned close—his breath like wind passing over the mouth of a crypt.

“But you need it.”

And she did.

She saw the priest’s eyes again. Saw the blade not yet drawn.

She remembered the vision severed, the ache in her soul, the blood in her nose, and the way her very presence had been rejected—like a sickness, like an invader.

No matter what she told herself, she was not safe.

“I’m not going to kill someone just to give you a vessel,” she said.

Askariel raised a hand in mock surrender.

“Nor did I ask that. Find me a dying thing. A fading shell. A husk already circling the drain. Let me in before the light goes out.”

Eirian stared at the shadows curling around the floor. Her breath was loud in her ears.

This was wrong.

This was dangerous.

But she couldn’t shake the priest’s voice.

“How dare you trespass—”

And she couldn’t walk those paths alone again.

Slowly, she extended her hand.

Askariel’s form shifted. Smoke condensed. A clawed, half-made hand reached toward hers.

Their fingers didn’t touch—but the pact did.

A chill swept over her.

“Done,” he whispered.

Then he was gone.

Eirian sat in the quiet.

She could still feel the shape of his presence clinging to her skin, like a cold dream or the memory of fire.

She had taken the first step off the known path.

The threads would follow.

But they would not be kind.

***

The merchant came again with the dusk.

His cart wheeled into the village square just as the shadows stretched long over the cobblestones, creaking like an old thing remembering its joints. Canvas bundles swayed from its sides, stitched in faded thread, fluttering like prayer flags in the wind. His bell—a string of cracked jade beads and tiny rusted bells—jingled once.

Eirian felt it before she saw it.

A thread—silver, thin, and humming—stretched toward the cart like a spiderweb catching sunlight. Her heart stirred.

He was carrying something new.

By the time she and Sera approached, a small group of villagers had already formed. Most left with trinkets or muttered curses about high prices. But the merchant stood undisturbed behind his weathered table, smiling like someone who’d already bartered for what mattered.

Then he unwrapped the book.

It was swaddled in dark cloth bound with bone toggles. When he undid the last knot, a hush fell over the air. Even the wind seemed to hesitate.

It was red, a leather so deep it looked like dried blood under glass. Silver trim ran down the spine in curling symbols too old to read and too sharp to forget. Its cover bore no title—just a burnished sigil, something between a keyhole and an eye.

Eirian’s breath caught.

Sera stepped forward. “What is it?”

The merchant’s eyes glittered. “A Soulcall Codex,” he said softly, reverent. “Very rare. Very dangerous.”

Sera folded her arms. “How much?”

He smiled wider. “Enough to bankrupt a baron. Possibly two.”

Sera snorted. “So, useless, then.”

“Only if you cannot read between the lines,” he said, stroking the book’s spine. “This isn’t a spellbook. It’s a weapon—each page written in mana-infused ink, distilled from soul-impressions and dream-trance. Every word you speak aloud from it vanishes forever.”

Eirian leaned closer.

“Not a charm,” he continued, eyes flicking to her. “Not a chant. An act of will, pressed into ink. Pure magic, untethered from rules. Imagine: a line from this book—just one—could boil a river, charm a king, or send a beast back to the void it crawled from.”

Sera narrowed her eyes. “Or ruin a girl who doesn’t know better.”

The merchant inclined his head. “That too.”

Eirian couldn’t stop staring. The silver threads coming off the book shimmered faintly. Dozens of them. Some snapped, others taut, and one—just one—connected to her hand like a question waiting to be asked.

She reached out.

“May I?” she whispered.

The merchant studied her. “If you drop it, your soul might get dizzy.”

“That’s not a no.”

“No more than a minute,” he said. “More than that and you need to buy it, and I doubt that someone in this village can afford it.”

“Then why do you bring it to the village?”

“Your village is not the only place I visit; sadly, for the past month, not even one person in a town has been able to afford it.”

“So what are you going to do with it?”

“I said that no one in a town could afford it, but after this trip, I’m planning to visit a city.”

He handed it over.

The leather was warm and alive, like every spell inside it was dreaming, waiting to wake.

The moment her fingers touched the cover, silver threads exploded outward—dozens, maybe hundreds, unfurling like spider silk caught in moonlight. They didn’t loop backward into the past like the memory threads she knew. They vibrated forward, alive with tension, trembling with things not yet done.

Each thread pulsed with barely contained magic, their edges sharp with intention; they were waiting to happen.

Eirian’s breath hitched. She reached for one.

The moment her fingers brushed it, her vision snapped into another world.

A nobleman. No older than twenty. Red cloak. Dust-covered boots. He stood atop a ruined carriage, book open in his hands, his guards screaming around him.

A creature lunged from the woods—twisted, scaled, something that should not have lived past the first war.

He spoke a line aloud. One line.

The words glowed on the page and then ignited.

A fireball erupted from the book, roaring forward with divine heat, engulfing the beast mid-leap. The creature shrieked and vanished in smoke.

When the smoke cleared, the nobleman lowered the Codex. One of the pages inside had turned to ash, the ink gone. The spell—gone forever.

Eirian’s knees buckled.

The vision ended.

She staggered and clutched the book tighter, barely keeping her grip.

But her head—mercifully—didn’t ache.

She returned the book.

The merchant nodded once. “Told you that you could get dizzy.”

And with that, he wrapped it again.

She understood now these weren’t memory threads; they were fate, unspoken tomorrows.

For the first time in weeks, she felt small again. Not powerless—but like a thread caught in a loom too vast to see the edges of.

And yet… she was part of it now.

Something old had turned its eye toward her.

And it was watching.

***

The roof creaked softly beneath her weight, warmed by the last light of the sun. Evening bled violet across the sky, washing the hills in bruised color. Below, the village settled into its familiar rhythm—shutters closing, hearths lighting, and distant voices softened by stone walls.

Her palm itched again. No rune marked it now, but she could still feel the place where the soul-thread had burned, the scar left behind by the priest’s sword—if not on her skin, then somewhere deeper. A wound on the thread of her soul.

She opened her journal. The pages were brittle with pressed petals and old ink. She had begun it as a child’s project—part herb log, part spellbook, part confession. Now, it felt more like scripture. A record of what couldn’t be spoken aloud.

Her pen scratched gently.

“If red is pain and green is life…

Then silver is fate.

And fate is not fixed.

But it always demands a price.”

The ink glistened briefly before sinking into the page.

“You’re learning,” said a voice behind her, smooth and soft as a blade in velvet.

She didn’t turn.

Askariel did not need form to be present. He slid into her space like mist, like heat rising from stone, like smoke curling in a sealed jar. His presence was a pressure in the lungs, a whisper in the teeth.

“Now you see,” he murmured, “why threads are more dangerous than any sword. Thought becomes law. Voice becomes fire. Desire carves the future.”

Eirian tapped the page once with her pen.

“If I can see it… can I change it?”

Askariel didn’t answer.

She closed her journal and stared at the horizon. The forest was darker now, and the lake—barely visible in the distance—shone like a buried coin in moonlight.

The wind picked up.

It curled around her, playful and sharp, tugging at the mask’s edge. Her hair lifted slightly, and a loose page from her journal fluttered, nearly escaping into the dusk.

She caught it just in time.

But something else moved—just at the edge of sight.

A silver thread hung in the air near the chimney, taut and trembling, pulsing softly like a vein of moonlight stitched into the fabric of the world.

It led somewhere she couldn’t see.

She didn’t touch it.

She turned her head slowly, watching it sway. Every part of her wanted to reach out, to follow it, to see what waited at the end. But the ache in her bones, the bleeding from earlier, the fire in her breath—those were lessons too.

Eirian reached for the mask and held it in her lap. The carved eyes stared back—silent, knowing.

“I made a pact with a demon,” she whispered.

The mask said nothing.

“And I don’t think I regret it.”

Still silence.

But somewhere inside the house, a floorboard creaked.

Tomorrow would come with new choices. New threads.

Tonight, she stayed still.

And watched the silver line dance.