The Obsidian Atrium was not a place—it was a scream trapped in stone.

  Arcana Apprentice felt it before she saw it. The walls, jagged obsidian slabs, pulsed like the ribs of some great, dying beast. Each breath of the Atrium scraped against her skin like unseen claws. Her bare feet sank into the floor, a thin membrane that wept black ichor, thick and hot, curling around her ankles like the tongues of starving gods. Overhead, the ceiling was a void punctured by malignant stars, writhing in formations that seemed to watch. They pulsed sickly—bruised-purple, bile-green—a dying spectrum of unearthly hunger. A fractured moon dangled from the abyss, its edges leaking ink-dark tendrils that slithered down, reaching, reaching.

  She knelt. The Grimoire of Unseen Tongues lay open before her, its pages shifting like raw, flayed skin stretched too tight over something still writhing. The cover was no cover at all—stitched flesh, mottled and feverish, quivering with obscene life. It had come to her three nights ago, after the villagers set fire to her cottage, after she crawled from the ashes coughing up soot and blood, the sound of their laughter ringing in her ears.

  “You are more than prey,” the book had whispered, voice thick with rot. “You are a shadow in the dark.”

  Now, it demanded its price.

  Arcana pressed her palm to the book’s gnarled spine. The shadows writhed around her wrists, cold as grave soil. They had names. Lirath, the First Betrayer, who spoke in the rustle of flayed skin. Vyrga, the Maw Beneath the World, whose voice was the wet suck of marrow from shattered bone– a visceral sound that had plagued her sleep since she was small, often following unsettling dreams of dark, gaping holes in the earth and a gnawing emptiness that no amount of childish comfort could dispel, leaving her with a lingering sense of dread that clung to her even in the bright light of day. They had haunted her since childhood, crawling from the void between dreams, their influence manifesting in a persistent feeling of otherness, a sense that unseen eyes were always observing her, whispering doubts into her nascent sense of self-worth, subtly shaping her isolation and perhaps even making her more susceptible to the Grimoire’s dark allure when it finally arrived. These weren't just fleeting nightmares; they were persistent, insidious intrusions into her young life, leaving behind a residue of fear and a strange, unsettling familiarity that she now recognized with a sickening jolt as the nascent presence of the entities bound to the Grimoire.

  Now, they were real. The cold on her wrists wasn't the fleeting chill of a childhood unease; it was the deliberate, possessive grasp of Lirath, a being whose whispers she now understood had been the subtle currents beneath her lifelong anxieties. The wet, sucking sound wasn't the echo of a forgotten nightmare; it was the immediate, tangible hunger of Vyrga, a presence that had lurked in the darkest corners of her subconscious for years, now demanding to be unleashed upon the world that had rejected her. The Grimoire, therefore, wasn't a random savior; it was the key that had finally unlocked the cage holding these long-familiar terrors, making the invisible tormentors of her youth terrifyingly, irrevocably real.

  “Vashta nyral’ath, kesh vor’nath…” The chant clawed its way from her throat, each syllable a wound in the air. The walls of the Atrium shuddered. Her reflection stared back, but it was wrong. It wore her face, her tattered cloak, but its eyes were hollow. Its lips were stitched shut with tendrils of shadow that writhed with hunger.

  The reflection smiled. The stitches tore.

  A hand—wet, skeletal, too cold to be human—clamped onto her shoulder. She spun.

  Nothing.

  The Grimoire’s pages ripped free, swirling in a storm of ink and agony. Words twisted midair, dripping:

  FEED US.

  Lirath coiled around her spine, voice like rusted steel on bone. “You promised flesh.”

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  Vyrga purred, thick with drool. “Liar. Thief. You thought rabbits would satiate us?”

  Arcana’s stomach twisted. She had tried. Gods, she had tried. She slit the throat of a stag, watched its blood soak the roots of the fen. But the shadows had recoiled. “Too clean,” they hissed. “Too pure.”

  They wanted suffering.

  The book slammed shut, catching her fingers. Pain lanced up her arm as blood welled between the cracks of the pages. The shadows tightened, slipping beneath her skin, pulsing.

  “The village,” Vyrga crooned. “They owe you.”

  Blackroot Hollow festered. The sky overhead was the color of curdled blood, heavy with the stench of rot. Arcana stood at the edge of the trees, watching the villagers huddle around the Harvest Pyre. They tossed dolls of straw and bone into the flames, muttering their prayers like worms gnawing through flesh.

  “Bless this bounty, Mother Earth…”

  Hypocrites. They had cursed her name as they burned her home. They had blamed her for the blight, the stillborn lambs, the fever that devoured old Margit from the inside out. They chased her with torches, their voices raw with fear, their hatred as thick as the smoke that had choked her lungs.

  The Grimoire hummed against her chest, its hunger a gaping wound in her ribs. She stepped into the firelight.

  Tomas, a boy no older than ten, saw her first. His chubby fingers trembled. “W-Witch!”

  The crowd stilled. The priest, a shriveled husk of a man, raised a rusted iron cross. “Begone, demon!”

  Arcana chuckled.

  The sound peeled from her throat in layers, warped and inhuman. “You called me a curse,” she murmured, stepping closer. “Let me show you what a curse truly is.”

  She raised her hands. The Grimoire unfolded, pages dripping ink and blood. The villagers screamed as shadows tore free, stretching, unfurling into things that should not be. Wolves with too many joints. Serpents with human faces. Eyeless beings that clicked as they crawled.

  “Kesh vor’nath y tum balyria!” she roared.

  The darkness obeyed.

  Tomas screamed as something reached for him. A tendril of shadow plunged into his chest, wrapping tight around his heart. His body convulsed, veins swelling, his skin sagging as the thing inside him fed. His mother choked, her scream cut short as Vyrga slid down her throat, ribs snapping outward as the shadow hollowed her from the inside.

  The priest, like a coward, ran. His robes tangled around his legs, his desperate flight ending in a stumbling fall onto the blood-soaked ground. He scrabbled uselessly, hands slipping on the gore as he tried to regain his footing, a choked, terrified whimper escaping his lips.

  Arcana knelt beside him, her breath hot against his ear. “Fire purifies, doesn’t it?” she whispered. “Let’s see.”

  She snapped her fingers.

  The pyre roared to life, twisting into a spiraling inferno of screaming flame. The priest writhed, flesh bubbling, melting, his eyes bursting like overripe fruit. The shadows sang with his screams, the book’s pages drinking his agony like fine wine.

  Then—

  A whimper. Small, fragile, cutting through the triumphant hisses of shadow and flame.

  Beneath the pyre’s wreckage, a girl cowered, no older than six. Her eyes—gold and gray—were Arcana’s own. Reflecting back a childhood she had once buried. A younger self, innocent and terrified.

  Lirath hissed. “Finish it.”

  Vyrga tightened around her throat. “She is you. Weak. Afraid. Crush her.”

  Arcana hesitated. This child… her eyes… it was like looking into a forgotten past, a vulnerability she thought she had purged. Memories flickered – the sting of tears, the hollow ache of loneliness, the desperate yearning for a kindness never received. Was this a cruel trick? A torment conjured by the Grimoire?

  The child reached out, her fingers small, trembling. “P-please… don’t hurt me.”

  For a moment, the present blurred. Arcana saw herself: small, helpless, alone as the flames had licked at her own cottage. The child’s whimper echoed the silent screams of that night. A sharp pang of something akin to empathy, buried for so long, twisted in her chest. A terrifying instinct flared: this child was a weakness, a tether to a past she couldn't afford. That was me. That terrified little girl, vulnerable and at their mercy. But the shadows around her pulsed, a cold reminder of the power she now wielded – a power that demanded a severing of that past vulnerability. If that child lives… then a part of me, the weak part, still lives. And they… they will exploit it.

  No. That child is gone. The thought was a steel shutter slamming down on the unwelcome empathy. I am not that little girl anymore. I had to become this… to survive.

  She clenched her fist. The girl’s neck snapped like brittle wood.

  The shadows feasted; their hunger intensified by this brutal severing of her former self.

  The Atrium screamed.

  The shattered moon wept.

  And something answered…