The Key That Bleeds
The Rootbound Tome no longer waited for him to open it.
It called to him.
Each night, its pages flipped on their own, revealing symbols that shimmered like heat on stone. Cuco couldn't read the words—but he understood them.
Or maybe…
They understood him.
The first spell was short. Simple.
A breath. A gesture. A drop of blood.
He thought it would summon light.
Instead, it silenced the entire forest for two miles.
Even the wind.
Even the insects.
Just—nothing.
Cuco dropped the page. His nose bled. His ears rang.
And something deep beneath the earth stirred.
---
By the third spell, he was losing time.
He would wake up with the Tome open on his lap, hands stained black with sap or ash. Strange lines would appear on his arms. Not cuts—grafts. Like bark growing from beneath his skin.
Tariq saw it first.
"You're not sleeping, are you?"
Cuco shook his head. "I don't think I need to."
Tariq's voice lowered. "What does the book take from you?"
Cuco met his eyes. "I don't remember my mother's voice anymore."
The silence between them cracked.
---
The fourth spell was a binding.
He didn't mean to cast it.
He had a nightmare—of Hollow Ones ripping through the walls, pulling Nox into the dark—and when he screamed, roots burst from his mouth, coiling around the dream and choking it to death.
When he woke, Nox stood across the room.
She looked at him like he was something sharp.
"I felt that," she said.
"I was trying to protect you," he whispered.
"Next time," she replied, "don't choke my thoughts."
---
The book was winning.
He knew it.
But he couldn't stop.
Not when the next page whispered of something ancient—older than the gate—buried beneath the Circle.
A spell with no name.
One that required blood.
Not spilled.
Given.
He read it aloud in the quiet.
And something inside him snapped.
A wave of pain hit him like a tidal force. His vision fractured into a hundred versions of reality. In some, the Circle was burning. In others—it was gone.
And in one—
He stood over a version of himself, holding the Tome in one hand, a blade of root and bone in the other.
That Cuco smiled.
> "This is what we are now," he said.
"A lock made of skin. A key made of pain."
When Cuco came to—
The spell was complete.
And burned into his arm, right beside the mark, was a new symbol.
The Key.
And under it, in the Tome, one sentence glowed:
> "A key that bleeds… opens both ways."