A subtle vibration washed over the stone slab as the tome drifted upward, floating with grace into Caldreth's hand as he reached for it. The moment the worn leather touched his skin, a spark ricocheted through his body, snapping down his spine.

  Caldreth stiffened, his fingers curling instinctively around the bindings.

  That's curious.

  A scarlet wave glimmered across the cracked leather.

  He turned it over, revealing its title: The Tome of Sanguination. The words rang in his mind with certainty. He tried to open the cover, but the object shuddered in refusal. When he tried to pry it, he was met with an unfriendly red zap.

  "Ow! Why does it refuse me?"

  Krim began to move around the chamber with a restless energy. He knelt by the chalk circles, using the hem of his tattered cloak to smudge the violet runes back into the dust.

  "I wouldn't mess with that," he said dryly, peering over. "It wants something first. Books that tear their way into the Underworld aren't kind. It stole the blood of the fool in my service."

  He reached out and snatched the obsidian stone from the slab, tucking it into a leather pouch at his waist with a sharp clack.

  Caldreth exhaled before placing the tome down. Though shaken, he forced poise into his voice. "A heavy price for a resurrection. He has my thanks. Your name?" He inclined his head, a refined gesture.

  "Krimarion Netherbane," he grunted.

  He didn't wait for a response. Scalpel in hand, he moved toward the bodies of Serintha and Morvain. With a casual flick of his wrist, he made a precise incision along Morvain's collarbone.

  "Where's home, boy?" Krim asked, his eyes fixed on the dark, sluggish blood filling the first vial. "You recognize these two? They were wearing your colors. Died in this hole right alongside you."

  Caldreth's brow tightened as he fought to bring his limbs under control. His muscles were fighting him, each movement dragging through a deep, marrow-level cold that hadn't fully released its grip, but he forced himself upward, sliding off the slab. His boots hit the stone with a thud, but he managed to limp over, standing nearly over the necromancer.

  Krim remained hunched, his focus anchored to his work even as Caldreth's shadow eclipsed the stone. A bony elbow jabbed into Caldreth's shin, a sharp, dismissive strike that demanded space.

  "Move back," Krim snapped, his focus on the second vial. "You're crowding the light and breathing on the specimens. Give me some space to work."

  Caldreth's grey eyes sharpened, a cold flicker of red pulsing at the edges of his irises. "Mind your tongue, Netherbane. I am not one of your thralls to order around."

  Krim let out a dry laugh that echoed off the ceiling. He shifted his weight, moving to drain more of Morvain's ichor.

  Krim chuckled, shaking his head. "You sound sheltered. You didn't get out into much of the Underworld before you ended up on that slab, did you? Manners are a luxury."

  Krim moved to roll Serintha over, his scalpel poised for a fresh incision. The moment Caldreth's hands made contact with her shoulder to assist, the crypt vanished.

  The smell of singed ozone returned, giving way to a familiar scorched throat. He was back in the Wastes, the sky a bruised purple, Serintha's gold hair whipped in a gale that tasted of sulfur. She chased after him toward the crypt's opening as the demon's clicking grew closer. For a half-second, he heard her voice, the sound of his name in her mouth when he was small enough that the world still felt safe.

  Then the crypt came back.

  Caldreth's grey eyes flared crimson. Before Krim could touch the blade to her skin, Caldreth lunged. He shoved the necromancer with a surprising burst of strength that sent Krim sprawling across the grit.

  "Get away from her!"

  Caldreth scrambled through the dust, grabbing Morvain's heavy frame and dragging him toward Serintha. He huddled between them, his hands shaking as he touched their cold, lifeless faces. The void in his mind had been filled with a crushing weight.

  "Serintha... Morvain..."

  He screamed their names, the sound raw and agonizing as it tore through the vaulted chamber.

  Krim scrambled to his feet, his violet eyes wide with a jolt of genuine surprise. He stayed back, observing the display with a scholar's morbid curiosity. He hadn't expected the mere touch of the dead to trigger cognitive recognition.

  Tears carved clear, wet streams through the grit on Caldreth's cheeks. His chest heaved, breath hitching as he drowned in the reality that his caretakers were now nothing more than corpses.

  Behind them, the Tome of Sanguination stirred.

  It lifted silently from the stone slab, hovering with a predatory grace. It drifted toward Caldreth's bowed head. A single, heavy pulse of red light radiated from its bindings, a wave of aether that made the very air hum. A stream of thick garnet mist bled from the pages, a heavy, iron-scented shroud that sought the warmth of Caldreth's skin.

  Inside the haze, Caldreth reached for the memory of Serintha's smile. He found it, and then felt it move. Not dissolve, not shatter. Simply recede, drawn inward like a tide pulling back from shore, leaving the sand bare and cold beneath his feet. Morvain's laugh followed, the sound intact but growing distant, as though a door were closing between him and it. He lunged for both and found only the door.

  "No," Caldreth said through gritted teeth. "Don't take them away from me." His fingers tightened against their skin a final time before they went limp, released against his will.

  The heavy vapor pulled inward, retreating back into the tome's binding as though it had found what it came for. The frantic heaving of Caldreth's chest slowed. The tears stopped.

  A moment ago, he'd been leaning forward, crushed by grief; now he sat back, his posture settling into stillness. Not hollow, exact. The quality of a room whose door has been shut and locked from the inside. He didn't feel empty. He felt like something had been put away.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  The tome pulsed once more. The door held. Whatever weight had pressed against his chest was gone, and in its place was a clean, directionless clarity. He did not go looking for what had caused the weight. He didn't know there was anything to find.

  Krim shuffled backward on his haunches, eyes locked on the red mist. "Look at that..." he whispered, his voice cracking. "Such a foul object."

  Caldreth's gaze dropped to the bodies at his knees. He remained still for a heartbeat, his head tilting a fraction as he looked at them, the way a man looks at something he is certain he should recognize and does not. His voice came out flat.

  "Just meat."

  "What was that?" Krim asked, leaning in.

  Caldreth didn't answer. Something pulled him forward, not grief, not will exactly, more like the absence of any reason not to move. His hands found the thick puddles of blood without instruction. He watched them do it. There was a faint pressure at the back of his skull, directionless, like a sound pitched too high to hear properly. He couldn't name it. He filed it as irrelevant and pressed his palms flat against the stone.

  The tome reacted instantly, a wave of power radiating from its bindings as Caldreth's eyes flashed violently red before settling into a dull sheen. Beneath his fingers, the blood stirred, strands of crimson crawling forward and sinking into his pores.

  "Impossible," Krim rasped, his voice thin and brittle. He stared at Morvain and Serintha as their bodies turned to husks, then back to the book. "It hasn't been seen in ages..."

  Caldreth rose, the blood still tethered to the floor, flowing upward like liquid silk into his palms. Once the last drop was drained, the tome flashed, sharp and blinding, and everything it had fed him erupted back out in a fine, misty spray, drawn straight into the book's now open pages.

  Consciousness crashed back into Caldreth like cold water. He gasped, his legs nearly buckling, his palms burning where the blood had moved through them. He didn't know what he had just done. Only that his hands had done it without him. Something in his veins felt different from a moment ago. Mapped. Like a road newly surveyed and marked for use.

  The vacant stare was gone, his eyes returning to their observant sharpness. He turned that sharpness inward for a moment and found clean, unobstructed silence. No grief. No weight. Nothing pressing from the wrong direction. He didn't know what he'd expected to find. He filed the silence as acceptable and turned his attention outward.

  Chapter I: Rite of the Vein

  In vein and marrow, the pact is sealed. The blood remembers the name: Caldreth.

  The vessel is weak. To return is to become whole. Seek Shatterdeep.

  Caldreth's fingers traced the pulsing ink. "Shatterdeep," he whispered. The name carried a pull he couldn't account for, a direction that felt less like a thought and more like a destination. He didn't know where the certainty came from. He simply knew it was east.

  He turned toward the stairs, but a hand clamped onto his arm.

  "Where do you think you're going?" Krim snapped, his eyes wide. "Care to explain what that was?"

  Caldreth's eyes dropped to the hand clamping his arm before drifting up to meet the necromancer's wide stare. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "The sanguinmancy!" Krim's voice cracked. "You just fed the blood of those two people to the book in your hand. You drained them dry."

  Caldreth's focus was drawn toward the two grey, papery husks on the floor. He looked at them for a moment longer than nothing would warrant. No grief rose. No recognition. But his jaw tightened once, briefly, before he controlled it, a reflex with no source he could identify. He let it go and turned away.

  "The tome required it," Caldreth said. "They were already spent. I must get to Shatterdeep."

  "Already spent?" Krim repeated, a rare note of genuine disbelief in his tone. "Morvain and Serintha. That's what you called them. You screamed their names until the dust rattled."

  Caldreth went still. Not the stillness of confusion, the stillness of a man who has pressed a bruise and found it doesn't hurt, and can't decide if that's a relief or not. He cocked his head. "Those names hold no meaning to me." His voice was steady, but his eyes moved back to the husks once more, briefly, before he caught them doing it and pulled them away. "If they were important to you, Krim, you have my sympathies. Now release me. You are wasting my time."

  Krim let go of his arm as if it had turned to ice. He studied the boy, not the weeping child of minutes ago, but not quite the ice-veined shell he'd expected either. Something between the two that he didn't yet have a name for. The boy had looked at those husks twice, once without meaning to, and once to stop himself. Krim had caught both. He filed it carefully and said nothing.

  "Shatterdeep," Krim said, testing the word. "Where is it? Some mountain fortress? A vault? I've never heard of such a place."

  "East," Caldreth answered, his gaze fixed on the crypt's exit. "I believe. Past the Cinder Fields."

  Krim wiped a smear of dust from his chin. He had no timeline. Curator Malcor expected him to die out here or show up begging for forgiveness. Returning with a living Sanguimancer and the coordinates to a lost Sangrathi stronghold was a better hand to play.

  "The Infernal Wastes aren't kind, boy," Krim said, stepping into Caldreth's line of sight. "You've got the book, but a stiff breeze would likely snap your spine. You won't make it ten miles alone."

  Caldreth weighed the words. The terrain ahead was a blur of heat and jagged shale in his mind. He knew the direction, but the logistics were a void.

  "You wish to come?" Caldreth asked.

  "I wish to see what's left of your people," Krim lied easily, his violet eyes glimmering. "And I have a professional interest in that book. Consider me a guide. A partner."

  Caldreth's palms turned upward, empty. A weightlessness settled in his chest, an absence where steel should be. His fingers curled, seeking a familiar hilt that wasn't there.

  "I am unarmed," Caldreth said, his fingers twitching in a phantom grip. "It is... incorrect."

  Krim retrieved Phylin's pack and hauled it onto the slab, the canvas heavy with the gear of a dead boy. He dug through the layers of supplies until his hand caught on a leather-wrapped hilt. He pulled out a short, sheathed sword, standard Grave Watch issue, utilitarian and unremarkable.

  "Here," Krim said, tossing the weapon toward Caldreth with a careless flick. "The boy won't be needing this anytime soon. Neither will I."

  Caldreth's hand shot out, snatching the scabbard from the air before it could tumble past him. Without a heartbeat of hesitation, he drew the blade in one fluid motion. The steel hissed against the leather, a sound that seemed to wake something buried deep in his nerves.

  He flexed his fingers around the hilt of the sword. His grip was firm, the crushing fatigue that had plagued him since he first gasped for air in the crypt was fading. To his welcome surprise, his limbs moved with a preternatural lightness.

  "I will survive the trek," Caldreth said, his voice regaining its resonance. "But your knowledge could prove useful."

  Caldreth's blade hissed through the stale air in a series of surgical arcs, the steel catching the dim glowstone light in a silver blur. His feet slid into a low-centered stance, his frame settling into his skin.

  "Terribly balanced," Caldreth muttered, his thumb testing the edge with a frown. "And dull."

  Krim raised an eyebrow, admiring the display with a grunt of begrudging respect. "Looks like you've handled steel before."

  Caldreth sheathed the blade with a sharp clack and offered a faint, dangerous smirk. "Something like that, yes."

  Krim hoisted the pack, his mind whirring. He had three vials of Morvain's blood tucked safely in his belt, enough to satisfy Malcor and secure his place in the Grave Watch if things went south. But the boy and the grimoire were a much larger prize. If he could steer Caldreth toward the Necropolis, he'd be a legend.

  Caldreth didn't wait for the necromancer. He turned toward the steep, narrow incline of the stairs, the short sword sheathed at his hip, and the tome floating freely at his shoulder.

  "Enough talk, Netherbane," Caldreth said, his voice ringing with a cold, newfound authority. "The air in this hole is stagnant, and Shatterdeep lies east. We move, now."

  He climbed through a throat of carved rock. With every step upward, his marrow seemed to hum in anticipation. The air grew thin, smelling of sulfur and baked earth, as the orange light of the brutal sun bled down the walls to meet them.

  Behind him, the necromancer tracked the boy's silhouette, noting the effortless, predatory grace of his stride. They climbed in silence, the rectangle of light at the summit growing larger, a jagged doorway leading out of the past and into the fire of the Cinder Fields.