"I can't just let you get close to that beast," the man insisted, puffing up his chest as though his words carried the weight of command. Mayor? Lord? Magistrate? Whatever pretentious title he'd saddled himself with, it didn't matter. He wore authority like a child wearing oversized armor—loud, cumbersome, and utterly laughable.
Aelius's patience, thin as spider silk, strained under the weight of the exchange. His hands curled behind his back, more to stop himself from snapping the man's neck than out of any gesture of respect.
"I can't do the job you put out if you don't let me," he growled, voice sharp enough to cut. The words came low, clipped, like a blade scraping stone.
The puffed-up man blinked, startled at the venom in Aelius's tone but too proud—or too stupid—to step back. His powdered wig, his jeweled buttons, the way his jowls shook when he spoke—it was almost impressive how a single mortal could embody so much waste.
Aelius found himself wondering—not for the first time—how such people survived. How fate, chance, or some absurd god's grace kept this rotund excuse for a leader alive long enough to annoy men like him. By all logic, the world should have devoured him years ago. Or the wyvern. Or a heart attack. Yet here he stood, flapping his gums like a barnyard animal with opinions.
"You misunderstand," the man said, drawing himself up to his full, unimpressive height. "The beast has already slain two dozen trained men. I can't simply allow you—"
"Allow?" Aelius's head tilted, just slightly. The mask caught the lamplight, reflecting it like the eyes of a predator in the dark. His voice dropped, colder now, humorless. "You think you allow me?"
The mayor—lord—whatever pompous title he clung to—stumbled on his words, color draining from his cheeks for the first time. In the pause, the air between them tightened; he felt the truth of it, a small man pressed against a far stronger, far colder will. Something that could, with little trouble, snuff him out like a candle if it desired.
Aelius didn't lower his voice to whispers or lean in to menace in theatrics. He simply straightened, shoulders back, and spoke slow and deliberately so every syllable landed where it ought to.
"Let me make this clear," he said, each comma a deliberate strike. "You do not control me. I will deal with the beast. I will come back. You will sign off on the job, you will pay me what was agreed, and I will leave—without having to turn you into fertilizer."
There was no flourish to his threat, no drama. The line read like a contract: terms, conditions, consequences written in muscle and tone rather than ink. The men around them shifted; the lord's aides looked past the windows as though the carriage of fate might sweep them up. Even the guards hesitated, uncertain which authority demanded obedience now: the petty civil one or the raw, efficient danger that sat across from them.
The mayor's mouth opened and closed. He made a sound—an attempt at a retort, or a plea—but the words dissolved when Aelius's expression did not. Under the mask, his eyes were quiet, but those eyes fixed on the man like an indictment. The kind of look that promised follow-through.
Sweat formed at the lord's hairline. He reached for the parchment with trembling fingers, the official packet of the quest sitting too innocently between certificates and seals. He thumbed the ribbon loose, searching for something to ground himself in ritual and law. Ritual and law, of course, rarely mattered much against a quiet vow held in one very dangerous chest.
"You'll sign?" Aelius prompted, flat.
The mayor swallowed, throat bobbing. He fumbled for a pen, knocking over his inkstand in his haste and sending a black puddle toward the edge of the desk. Two aides lunged to save the stationery; one of them offered a useless cluck. The room smelled of ink and sweat and something metallic—fear, perhaps.
"Yes," the mayor whispered finally, as if the word were a charm that might keep his intestines from uncoiling. "Yes—of course. I will sign. We will—"
"Not now. After. When I kill the thing. That I completed the mission," Aelius cut in, half-sigh, half-growl. His fingers twitched with the urge to strangle the man where he stood, but he refrained—at least until the human stain did his part and the signatures dried. There were rules, and then there were necessities. Contracts could be enforced. Pride could not.
The mayor's face went still, eyes darting to his aides as though seeking a lifeline. They babbled something about security bonds, guarantees, and witnesses. It all sounded thin and useless to Aelius, a parade of paper meant to soothe guilty consciences. He listened for form, then barked the terms once more in a voice that left no room for bargaining.
"You sign it after I return." He let the word proof hang heavy, a shadow on the desk between them. "No interference. No patrols in the ruins, no armed fools wandering where I'm working. You want heads to roll because you're proud? You'll manage it after."
The mayor swallowed hard, Adam's apple bobbing like it might choke him. His hand—unsteady at first—reached for the quill again, pulling it back as though the feathered shaft had turned into a viper. The pause stretched, his fingers trembling faintly over the inkpot.
"Good." Aelius's tone slid back to business. He collected the parchment with the same fluid motion he used to gather tools. He didn't want the thing in his hands any longer than necessary. He tucked it into his requip space; the paper vanished as casually as breath. Ritual done. Promise given. Time to work.
He left them to their nervous gestures and the slow, embarrassed bustle of men pretending there had been no intimidation at all. He walked out of the municipal office the way he moved through battle—efficient, unhurried, with every step measured and the world reduced to the next necessary action.
Outside, the town smelled of dust and bread; children chased hoops along the square with the blessed ignorance of those who did not know what lurked beyond the road. A natural sound, and it gripped him like a nail. He watched them for a heartbeat—small, ordinary lives—and felt the old, complicated churn: resentment, pity, and the sterile, cold relief of having something to do with all that useless noise..
When he moved through the market, people pressed away as they always had—some out of respect for the Fairy Tail mark, some out of caution for the man under the mask. A trader tried to palm a coin his way with a compliment. He accepted none of the gallant chatter. Money was currency; it made the world quieter. He paid, took his sack, and walked out toward the road where the path narrowed and the fields took over.
He considered the approach, mentally sketching the ruins in the way a mason measures a wall before breaking through it. The quest board had given coordinates: a cluster of broken stone where a temple might once have knelt, blackened by weather and age. The villagers' reports had been enough to mark a perimeter: three months of isolation, corpses that did not get eaten, a purple sheen to the wyvern's scales. That last detail still gnawed at him like a persistent rat.
He walked, and as the town fell away, the wind sharpened, carrying with it a smell he noticed with the instinct of a man who had learned to read the atmosphere: not rot exactly, but complication, old blood in tea. He slowed, hands tightening slightly in preparation, ears attuned for the smallest sound.
There was a caution he had learned not to neglect: not everything that roared or spilled blood was the greatest threat. Sometimes the danger was in what the roar hid. So he went forward like a shadow, methodical. No fanfare. No reckless charge. The ruins were not a stage for his anger; they were an equation to be solved.
The path to the ruin's edge threaded through scrubland and a line of battered pines. The closer he drew, the more the air felt wrong—subtle, a pressure at the back of the throat, like a stone that had been waiting for him. He crouched behind a length of shattered wall and scanned the line of sight, eyes narrowing. The wyvern had not come to the outer tree line to hunt; it patrolled the collapse like a priest guarding an altar. There were tracks—talon marks in the earth, the drag of something heavy. The kills lay scattered within the shadow of toppled columns, pale shapes half-covered in rot and lichen, the parts that had been ravaged left raw and bright as if a butcher had abandoned a block before the spoil set in.
"Found its kills… so where is it?" Aelius hummed, his voice barely more than a vibration beneath the mask as his eyes swept across the broken stone. The ruins sprawled before him like a carcass left to rot—arches split and sagging, walls collapsed in heaps of dust and moss. The carcasses he had found lay scattered across the edges—sheep, a mule, one unlucky merchant's horse—all in varying states of ruin. What struck him most wasn't the blood, but the lack of decay. Flesh clung too cleanly to bone. Eyes were still wet in their sockets. No rot, no insects, no scavengers daring to touch them. A field of offerings left untouched.
His boots crunched over gravel as he stepped forward, the sound sharp in the silence. Even the wind seemed reluctant to breathe through this place. The quest had said a wyvern, but wyverns were not careful—they left trails, nests, scat, and claw marks gouged deep into stone. Here, there was nothing but bodies, and that unnatural stillness.
Aelius narrowed his gaze, scanning the shadowed archways and collapsed columns. No glint of scales, no purple hide shifting against the pale ruin-stone. He adjusted his pace, slow and deliberate, every step measured.
His steps carried him deeper into the ruin, his eyes combing every shadow, every fragment of stone that might conceal the beast. The silence pressed tighter the further he went—like the whole place was holding its breath with him. Then his gaze snagged on something ahead.
Half-collapsed rubble gave way to an open stairwell, its mouth yawning wide in the cracked flagstone. The staircase spiraled downward into darkness, far larger than most basements or crypts should have been. At first glance, it looked like nothing more than another broken passageway, but the stone around its rim told a different story. Deep scrapes marred the edges—long gouges carved into the masonry, sharp enough to catch the light like glass splinters.
Aelius crouched, brushing his fingertips near one groove. Not talons, not entirely. The marks were too broad, uneven—like the beast had shoved its way through without care for the walls themselves. Some stones had been cracked outright, forced aside by sheer mass. He glanced downward, noting the way whole steps had caved inward beneath a weight far greater than a human's. The edges of some were chipped, as though scales or wings had scraped past more than once.
"Down…" he murmured, low and thoughtful. His mask tilted slightly as he peered into the stairwell. The air wafting up was damp and stale, heavy with a coppery tang that clung to the back of the throat. Blood, old and new, mixed with something harsher—sour, almost metallic.
The further he studied it, the clearer it became: whatever was inside hadn't just passed through this way. It had claimed the space below. Forced it to bend around its presence.
Aelius straightened slowly, his cloak shifting against the dust, and cast one final glance across the ruins above. No movement. No sound. Everything waited below.
He let out a breath, steady and controlled, before placing one foot onto the first broken step. The stone groaned faintly beneath his weight, echoing into the depths like a warning bell, swallowed almost instantly by the dark.
"Of course it wouldn't stay out in the open," he muttered, voice flat. "Why make it easy?"
Step after step carried him downward, farther than the structure should have ever allowed. He counted at first, out of habit—ten steps, twenty, fifty. His boots cracked against the stone, the sound chasing itself into the hollow dark. By the time he reached what should have been the end of any reasonable crypt or cellar, the stairwell showed no sign of stopping. It just kept winding, pulling him further beneath the ruins like a throat swallowing him whole.
The air grew thicker the deeper he went. Damp at first, then stale, then outright foul—humid with rot that wasn't rot, a kind of stagnant miasma that left his tongue tasting of rust. Every breath scraped down his throat like wet grit. His hand brushed the wall as he walked, stone rough beneath his fingertips, but even that comfort was stripped away the further he went. At some point, the cut blocks gave way to something older, rough-hewn and unnatural, as though the wyvern—or whatever force twisted it—had carved deeper than the builders ever intended.
Aelius paused once, pressing his palm flat against the wall. The stone was warm. Too warm for anything buried this far underground. He drew it back slowly, flexing his fingers, and kept walking.
The steps themselves had begun to warp. Some sagged inward, cracked down the middle, as if under constant strain. Others bulged, pushed outward, edges crumbled like teeth ground down by pressure. Whatever had forced itself through here wasn't small—and it had done so often.
Minutes stretched into more minutes. He stopped trying to keep count. The descent felt endless, the stairwell bending in on itself, the spiral tighter, the air heavier. His cloak brushed the edges as he went, picking up dust that had no right to exist this deep. At some point, he tilted his head back, half expecting to see the faint glow of daylight above—but the spiral had already swallowed the entrance. There was nothing. Just the dim green shimmer of his own conjured light trailing ahead of him.
By the time his boots struck flat stone instead of steps, he knew he was far below the ruins. Far below anything natural. The stairway opened into a cavern, vast and silent, its ceiling lost somewhere above. His light caught on broken pillars that had no business being down here—arches half-buried in stalagmites, masonry fused with raw stone. As though the earth itself had been reshaped to accommodate both ruin and beast.
Aelius let out a quiet exhale through his teeth. Farther than it has any right to be, he thought, scanning the cavern. The job had mentioned a wyvern. This was something else. Something that burrowed too deep, claimed too much, and made the world bend in its wake.
The cavern stretched before him like the ribcage of some impossible beast, a cathedral of stone bent inward. Aelius moved carefully, boots clicking against a floor too smooth in places, too melted in others. His conjured glow pushed against the dark, but the shadows here didn't behave—didn't retreat as they should. They lingered, draped across corners, heavy, clinging like cobwebs spun of tar.
At first, it was only the stone that looked wrong. The walls rippled in places, not carved, not weathered, but as if they had once been soft and molten, pressed outward by something living. Veins of color pulsed faintly beneath the surface, not minerals but something closer to flesh—thin bands of red, purple, and oily green, glowing faint as a heartbeat. Aelius brushed a hand across his mouth to stifle the cough rising in his throat. The taste of iron was thick now, crawling up the back of his tongue.
Deeper still.
The ruins continued, but they no longer resembled ruins. Masonry jutted out of the cavern walls, stairways leading nowhere, doorframes fused into rock. One section looked like an entire street had been swallowed whole, cobblestones half-submerged in stone that wasn't stone at all. A wagon lay frozen in the wall, its wooden wheels twisted into shapes like roots, spokes stretching, curling, almost alive.
"Not just a wyvern," Aelius muttered under his breath. His voice sounded too loud here, echoing off surfaces that shouldn't carry sound. "Never is."
He pressed on. The deeper he walked, the more the cavern betrayed the world above. What had once been stone turned to something closer to marrow—chalky, porous, almost brittle under his boots. The air pulsed in waves, like the whole place was breathing. He passed a pillar where glyphs had been etched, lines of some old ruin-script, but the words were half-swallowed, half-stretched into grotesque shapes, warped as if the letters themselves resisted being read. His light flickered across them, and for a moment the symbols seemed to writhe, shifting when he wasn't looking straight at them.
Aelius clenched his jaw and kept moving.
Then came the bones.
The first was small—a goat, or what might have been one once, its skull cracked, horns lengthened into thorny spirals. The deeper he went, the larger they became. Cattle, twisted into long centipede-like spines. Horses with ribs fused into a single cage, hollow and ringing faintly when the air stirred. And then—men. Or at least their remnants. A human ribcage blackened and warped, fused into the wall. A hand with too many fingers stretched out of the floor, reaching upward as if grasping for air.
And worse—some bones were fresh.
Aelius crouched beside one, fingers brushing what should have been a femur. But it wasn't just bone. It pulsed faintly under his touch, slick with a sheen of oil. The marrow inside hadn't dried—it writhed, sluggish, like worms shifting in mud. He hissed softly through his teeth and drew his hand back.
Something had claimed this place, something deeper than the wyvern's hunger, deeper than any beast's instinct to kill. The wyvern had been changed by it, yes, but the corruption had roots of its own, old and buried, festering for gods knew how long.
He rose, light trembling faintly in his palm. The cavern stretched farther still. A low sound reached him—distant at first, then clearer. Not breathing. Not the rush of wind. A thrum, like a heart echoing through stone, slow and steady.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
Every step he took seemed to sync with it.
Aelius let the sound guide him, even as every instinct clawed at him to turn back. His gut twisted in ways he hadn't felt in a while. That weight in the chest, that sense of being pressed down by something that had no body, no face, but still was. It wasn't fear, not really. Fear was simple. This was the same sick current that had run under his skin the first time he crossed paths with something wrong, something that didn't belong to this world or the next. Something like Nameless.
But this wasn't the same.
Nameless had been absence given form—something without shape, without claim, a rejection of existence itself. This was the opposite. It pressed, but not to drive him away. No—this was a call. A pull. Everything in its reach seemed bent toward one conclusion: to return, to fold inward, to become part of it. Aelius felt it in the marrow of his bones, in the steady pulse that filled the air like a drumbeat. Not destruction. Not erasure. Consumption. Absorption.
His lips twisted into something halfway between a grimace and a grin. The surprise wasn't that it was here, lurking beneath these ruins, but that he had never once felt its kind before. He thought he'd seen it all—beasts, gods, warped sorcery, ancient ghosts rattling in borrowed flesh. This wasn't any of them. Not close.
And that, to his own bitter amusement, lit a spark in him he hadn't felt in far too long.
Excitement.
The kind that clawed at his insides, made his hands twitch with the urge to draw steel, to bleed something new into the ground. Aelius lived with the weight of repetition—jobs, beasts, blood, always the same patterns looping. And here, finally, something different had stepped out of the dark. Something that made him lean forward instead of back, that pulled a rasping laugh low from behind his mask.
"Finally," he muttered, voice rough as the cavern air. "Something worth the effort. I hope anyway."
The thrum answered him, louder now, rolling through the stone like the pulse of the earth itself.
Each step took him closer.
Each step felt heavier, yet his blood sang sharper.
He wasn't sure if he was walking to his death or something worse—but either way, he welcomed it.
The sound guided him still, that thrum-beat, that sick rhythm pulling him farther down until at last the stairway vomited him into a cavern vast enough to hold an entire cathedral. The ceiling arched so high he could barely see it through the gloom, stalactites like the teeth of some long-dead god hanging low and dripping with black ichor. And at the center—slumped in a crater of its own filth—was the wyvern.
Or what had once been one.
Aelius stopped cold, gaze narrowing. Wyverns were proud creatures—scaled, lean, savage in their beauty. This thing was nothing of the sort. Its wings had rotted into leathery tatters, holes yawning wide enough to see ribs beneath. Chunks of purpled hide sloughed from its flanks like meat boiled too long, clinging to the stone in dangling ribbons. Its chest still rose and fell, but with each labored breath, a slurry of black fluid bubbled out between broken scales, oozing to pool in the crater around it.
Its face was worse.
One eye had burst entirely, sagging down its cheek in a slick cord of tissue. The other was swollen and luminous, glowing faintly with a sickly violet light that pulsed in time with the cavern's heartbeat. Its maw hung half-open, teeth cracked and blackened, strands of some fibrous rot webbing its jaws together like ropes. When it shifted, the bones beneath its hide cracked audibly, as though the corruption had hollowed them out.
The corpses he'd seen above had not lied—the beast was not starving. No, it couldn't starve. Its flesh was feeding on itself, devouring, recycling, refusing to die. Parasites of magic writhed under its skin—he could see them bulging, wriggling, crawling like a thousand worms beneath a stretched sheet. Aelius had seen the dead. He had seen the cursed. He had seen abominations. This was none of them. This was something still alive, but rotting inward and outward all at once, a creature refusing both death and life, chained to a hunger not its own.
The wyvern stirred then, its ruined wings dragging across stone with a noise like tearing flesh. The glowing eye fixed on him, unblinking, burning violet. Its jaw creaked open, wider, until the webbing strands snapped wetly—what spilled out wasn't a roar but a gurgling, phlegm-thick shriek, half-liquid, half-scream.
And in that sound, Aelius heard not defiance, not rage—just the endless summons of the corruption, a call for him to step closer, to join, to become.
He flexed his fingers, slow and deliberate, as the cavern thrummed louder.
"…Ugly bastard," he whispered, voice tight with something dangerously close to a smile. "You sure you ain't one of my creations? Certainly looks like it—half-rotted, half-formed, a meal and a corpse all in one."
He stepped forward, boots crunching on the slick stone, the pulse of the cavern thrumming underfoot. The wyvern shifted, low and wet, dragging its ruined wings like broken sails, its eye tracking him with unnatural intelligence. Even through the mask, Aelius's jaw tightened, the corner of his lip twitching.
"You've been… fed," he muttered, more to himself than the beast. "Kept alive, yet starved in every other sense. Not natural. Not… fair." He tilted his head, assessing the spread of corruption crawling over its body—the iridescent sheen of infected flesh, the patches where scales had melted into open sores, the veins of magical filth pulsing beneath the surface like coiling worms. "And yet, you survived. Adapted. Modified. Interesting."
A low gurgle echoed from the wyvern's throat, a sound part scream, part liquid hiss. Aelius's fingers twitched, craving the friction of magic, the familiar burn of conjured power. "You've got fight in you, I'll give you that," he said, pacing slowly, circling the crater it had dug. "But you're weak. All surface, no backbone. You're barely a step above an experiment gone wrong."
The beast stirred again, wings scraping the stone, each movement releasing a spray of purple and black rot. The pulse under the cavern floor quickened, syncing with the gurgle of its voice. Aelius's eyes narrowed, mask catching the faint reflection of violet light. "…I wonder," he murmured, "what made you like this. What magic, what hand, what filth warped you beyond what nature intended?"
Then his gaze shifted—past the hunched and rotting frame of the wyvern—to the thing behind it. At first glance, it might have been mistaken for stone, but the longer he stared, the more it revealed itself for what it was: a massive, beating heart, half-fused with a stalagtite. Veins of blackened flesh crawled outward across the stone like roots strangling their host. And there, sunk deep into its surface, was what appeared to be a book.
Or something that wanted to be a book.
The cover bulged faintly with each beat. Symbols crept across its surface like maggots, never still, never fixed. The whole thing pulsed in time with the heart, as though the organ itself was trying to read it, to keep it alive.
"Was it that?" Aelius asked, his voice dropping lower, words meant more for himself than for the beast that twitched before him. His head tilted, the mask catching the wavering violet glow in sharp, unnatural angles. There was no fear in the motion—only measured, clinical interest, the kind one might use when dissecting something already dead. "That book. That heart. Did they rot you into this?"
But the longer he stared, the less detached he felt. The cavern pressed in around him, air thick with the stink of iron and bile, and still his eyes stayed locked on the thing buried in living flesh. The more Aelius looked, the worse he felt. It wasn't revulsion, nor the sickness that rose from breathing corrupted air. It was something stranger—an unease he couldn't set aside, as if the beating organ behind the wyvern had wound its rhythm into his own body.
He thought—briefly—that this must be what it was like to fall ill. To feel something creeping through you from the inside, not striking at your skin or bone but eroding certainty, eating away at the parts of yourself you thought untouchable.
And the book—if it was even a book—was the source. He could see it more clearly now, the flesh-binding pulling taut with every pulse, the shifting script never still, crawling and searing itself against his sight. It whispered, not in words but in the cadence of memory, like a thought half-remembered from a dream. It called to him. Not like temptation—not like corruption. Something else.
Kinship.
The thought unsettled him more than the stench of rot or the twitching wyvern's moans ever could. The book felt familiar, though he could not place why. Familiar like a reflection in distorted glass, something both his and not his, alien yet intimate.
Aelius's hand hovered near his blade, not in preparation for battle, but to steady himself—as if the act of touching cold steel might tether him back to the present. He narrowed his eyes, searching memory, trying to place it. Where? When? Why? What had shaped him to know this book's call?
The whispers grew clearer. Not words, but recognition.
It knew him.
Aelius moved forward, boots crunching against the blackened stone, each step measured but unhesitant. The wyvern stirred at his advance, its chest swelling with a rumbling growl that echoed through the cavern like thunder caught in tar. Yet it did not lunge. Its wings twitched, its claws scraped furrows into the ground, but still it remained—docile, if such a word could even be stretched to fit this ruin of flesh.
Another step, and another. The air thickened, the smell of rot so dense it clawed at the throat, but he pressed on until he stood before the beast itself. It loomed over him, a carcass given hateful motion, its skin splitting with every shift, its breath leaking black mist that seemed to writhe of its own accord. Then, slowly, it lowered its head. Its single ruined eye—ringed with pus and violet glow—locked with his, the reflection of his mask caught and held in its gaze.
"Is that book why I felt the need to take this specific job?" Aelius asked, voice carrying into the hollow chamber. He didn't expect an answer. The words were half a question, a thought spoken aloud, his tone laced with a curiosity that felt more dangerous than any blade.
The wyvern blinked once, the sound of grinding stone echoing from its throat, but it remained silent.
The call pressed against him now—stronger, but never violent. It wasn't the thrall of domination or the choking grip of corruption. It was… patient. An invitation dressed in the guise of familiarity. The book pulsed in its cradle of meat, and the heart surrounding it throbbed in rhythm with his own, each beat syncing closer until he could no longer tell which belonged to him.
It wanted him. Not as prey. Not as another husk to twist. But as something else.
And the worst part—the part that made his breath drag sharp behind the mask—was that it wanted him to choose.
Aelius's head tilted ever so slightly as the wyvern's single eye followed him. For a moment, it felt like the entire cavern held its breath—stone, rot, even the air itself waiting to see if he would dare. His boots shifted, slow, deliberate, and instead of raising his blade, instead of bracing for the inevitable lunge, he simply stepped forward.
Past it.
The wyvern did not move to stop him. It's great head swiveled as he passed beneath its shadow, the sound of wet sinew pulling taut echoing above him. Its ribs heaved, its claws scraped furrows deeper into the stone, but no strike came. It only watched, one grotesque sentinel guarding the pulsing mass that waited in the dark.
The cavern widened into a hollow that felt wrong to look upon. The walls were no longer stone but flesh stretched too thin, veined with rivers of violet light. And there—rooted into the bedrock like a tumor—beat the heart.
It was colossal, each throb rattling dust from the ceiling, veins the size of tree trunks pumping sludge that hissed where it touched the floor. The heart wasn't just alive—it was aware. Every beat seemed to answer his own pulse, the rhythm syncing with his blood until it felt less like an echo and more like it was setting the pace for his body.
And buried deep into its surface, half-swallowed yet unmistakable, was the book. Its cover bulged against the muscle that tried to claim it, the script on its spine shifting like ink too fresh to dry. Aelius's eyes lingered on it, and the call surged in his head—stronger now, clearer. Not words, not quite—but an urging. A kinship, familiar yet unplaceable, whispering that this was meant for him, had always been meant for him.
Behind him, the wyvern rumbled again, low and guttural, but not hostile. Almost… expectant.
Aelius didn't reach for it—at least, not yet. His boots shifted over the slick floor as he began to circle the massive, pulsing organ. The air grew thicker with every step, hot and damp, carrying the stench of old blood and something worse—something sweet, cloying, like spoiled fruit left too long in the sun.
As he moved, his eyes traced the debris littered around the chamber's edges. Not just debris—bones. Dozens, maybe hundreds, piled and scattered, all stripped bare, picked clean of every last thread of sinew. Too clean. No knife, no scavenger left such polished ruin. Flesh didn't rot here. It was taken. Absorbed. Devoured.
His gaze flicked back to the heart, its surface swollen and twitching, veins bulging as if trying to hold down what it had already claimed. He looked at the bones again and exhaled through his teeth, low and harsh. "All that flesh," he muttered, "fed into you, didn't it? Into that beating mound of filth."
The book glistened where it was half-swallowed, its edges slick with clot and rot but still unbroken, unmarred. And up close, he could see it better—black leather etched with crimson ink, the symbols shifting whenever his eyes tried to settle on them. They writhed like worms beneath the skin, coiling into shapes he recognized, then unraveling into ones he didn't. But the style, the weight, the sheer wrongness—it gnawed at his memory until the thought finally surfaced.
A book of Zeref.
The realization made his stomach twist and his jaw tighten beneath the mask. If that was true—if that was one of Zeref's grimoires—then this wasn't just a corrupted wyvern, wasn't some wild aberration born of chance. The heart wasn't an accident. It was a construction. A vessel. The makings of a demon, still incomplete, still raw, still feeding.
Aelius's eyes lingered on the book, narrowing, his mind racing between calculation and disgust. He felt the pull of it—the quiet call that wasn't a command but a lure, coaxing him to draw closer, to claim it, to let the heart and the book and himself become aligned.
He shook his head once, sharply, as if to cut the thought off before it could root itself deeper.
The wyvern shifted behind him, the cavern trembling faintly with its weight. It didn't lunge, didn't roar. It only waited.
"So why does such a book…call to me?" Aelius murmured, his voice dropping to a low rasp as his gloved hand lifted. The faint lamplight of the cavern caught the sheen of black leather beneath the slick membrane, and for a moment it looked alive, breathing with the same rhythm as the swollen heart that cradled it. His fingers hovered just before the surface, close enough to feel the heat rolling off the organ, the steady throb pushing damp air against his palm.
"What does this evil thing and me have in common?" he whispered. Aelius drew in a slow breath, and then he plunged his hand into the mass.
The flesh of the heart gave way with a sound like tearing cloth, hot and wet, sucking at his arm as if reluctant to let him through. Veins strained and split, black blood spurting over his sleeve as he pushed deeper. His hand closed around the book, the texture both wrong and solid—leather slick, pulsing faintly like it had a heartbeat of its own.
With a sharp pull, he tore it free.
The cavern seemed to gasp. The pulsing under his feet slowed, no longer insistent but sluggish, stuttering. The light that bled faintly from the heart dulled, its violent rhythm faltering as though a tether had been cut. The enormous organ sagged in on itself, its surface deflating in shallow waves.
Aelius stood there, mask reflecting the faint gleam of the grimoire now in his grasp. The book dripped with ichor, the symbols writhing faintly beneath his fingers as though aware of him—of what he was.
Behind him, the wyvern gave a keening cry, more mournful than hostile, its massive frame trembling as though the loss of the heart was also the loss of its own strength.
And yet…nothing else came. No surge of power, no catastrophic eruption. Just silence, broken only by the beast's wheezing breath and the dying stutter of the heart.
Aelius looked down at the grimoire in his hand, tilting his head slightly. "…So that's all you are," he muttered. "A parasite with a spine."
The words echoed back in the cavern, swallowed by the silence left behind after the heart's death throes. He kept staring, his thoughts racing faster than his breath.
What did one do with such a thing? A Book of Zeref—if that's what it was. Illegal, dangerous, coveted, the kind of relic that could topple kingdoms if it slipped into the wrong hands. To open it would be reckless, maybe suicidal. To destroy it—if it even could be destroyed—might be the smarter option. Yet part of him resisted that thought instinctively. His fingers brushed the edge of the cover, and he swore it thrummed under his touch, as if sensing him, recognizing something in him.
And then came the questions.
If it was truly one of Zeref's tomes, what knowledge lay within? Spells to unmake flesh? Curses that could rend souls apart? The very formulae that shaped demons like the one he had just stolen it from? His mind spiraled faster, imagining the pages filled with answers to questions no mage had dared ask. The kind of knowledge that could put even Fairy Tail's greatest to shame. The kind of knowledge that made his pulse quicken—not from fear, but from the endless possibilities,
His breath drew slow and deliberate, though he could hear the faint edge of it rasping in the mask. "If I open you," he muttered, thumb tracing the cracked spine, "do I become a fool chasing power and knowledge—or a corpse worth remembering?"
The thought of consequences clawed at him. Erza's voice, lecturing, condemning. Makarov's heavy sigh, full of disappointment. The Council, oh, the Council—how quickly they'd string him up as proof that Fairy Tail bred monsters. He could picture it clearly: his name, his mask, tied forever to a forbidden grimoire and whatever chaos came from it.
And yet…
The book still pulsed faintly in his hand, still not demanding, still not forcing—still inviting.
"…So why me?" Aelius whispered. "Why call to me like kin?"
He hadn't realized he'd been pacing in a slow circle around the corpse-heart until his boots crunched over old bones again.
"No risk, no reward. Basically, my whole life," Aelius sighed, the words heavy but edged with a bitter humor that only he could appreciate. His thumb pressed down, prying apart the rotten spine, expecting—half-dreading—that the moment the cover split, he'd be drowned in glyphs, in wards, in summoning rites meant to peel flesh from bone and rebuild it into something unholy.
Instead, the pages opened with an anticlimactic flutter. No wave of dark magic, no shrieking echoes of damned souls—just parchment, yellowed and stiff with age, stained here and there with what might have been ink or blood. His eyes scanned the first lines, and for a moment he simply… stared.
"…A diary?"
The words weren't neat incantations or mathematical formulae for curses. They were notes. Observations. Fragments of thought. Some passages were sprawling and meticulous, others hurried, as though scratched down mid-step, desperate to hold onto an idea before it slipped away. Ink blotches interrupted the flow. A page turned, and he found not diagrams of demon-creation but sketches—anatomical breakdowns, skeletal structures, hearts dissected and labeled with precision bordering on obsession. The next page, however, was just words. Sentences broken halfway through, questions left unanswered.
He flipped again. Some passages detailed magical theory: "Life does not end—it alters. Decay is only transformation…" Other entries rambled into near incoherence, a hand slipping into madness.
And the more he read, the more that gnawing familiarity returned. The cadence of the words, the obsessive tone—it wasn't foreign to him. It wasn't alien. It was like looking into a mirror written decades before he was born.
His gloved hand lingered at the edge of the page, hesitation pressing heavily on his chest. This wasn't a weapon, not directly. Not yet. But it was something perhaps more dangerous—knowledge shaped like confession.
"Of course," he muttered, almost scoffing. "The most illegal, hunted-down grimoire in existence… and it reads like someone vomiting their thoughts onto paper."
The wyvern's corrupted bulk twitched faintly in the cavern behind him, a wet sound of rot shifting, reminding him that it had once been alive, once natural, until something—perhaps this very book—had bent it out of shape.
Aelius's gaze dropped back to the page, to a line scrawled sharper than the rest:
"Creation is not creation—it is a correction. A return to what was always meant to be."
His hand froze, the words resonating, threading into the marrow of his own unease.
"Grandfather?"