The Blackthorn Codex
Episode 1: The Book That Breathes
Only the fire remained. A pale, motionless fire, as if the wind itself had deserted this place. The monk was alone, his knees on the cold stone, his pale face lit by the hesitant flames. He wrote quickly. His hand trembled, but the letters were precise, ancient, as if born of their own accord from the parchment. All around, the walls dripped with dried blood and ash. The silence was broken only by the creaking of the collapsed beams and the whispers no one should have heard.
When he had finished the last line, the monk put down his quill. He stood up, unsteadily, then whispered to the shadow that moved behind him: "May this book be my tomb, and may no one survive its reading." The figure—tall, slender, with a gaze split in gold and black—barely inclined its head. The monk threw himself into the fire, clutching what he had written to his chest.
The grimoire burned... but it was never destroyed.
Nearly six centuries later, in a dusty amphitheater at the University of Lyon, Professor Léandre Vauvert received a package with no sender. A simple, ancient yew wood box, marked by humidity and time. Inside: a fragment of bone-colored parchment, covered with an esoteric circle he immediately recognized. The seal of Asmodeus. One of the Seven Princes.
Vauvert was not superstitious. He had studied apocryphal texts, cursed grimoires, tales of exorcism. Nothing had ever shaken him. Until that night, when the dream began. A voice—feminine, hoarse, unreal—called him in the dark. It whispered his childhood name. The one only his mother, dead for twenty years, used. The walls of his room warped in his sleep. The mirrors became opaque. And every morning, his reflection seemed to cast a deeper gaze than his own.
He traced the fragment back to a ruined abbey in the Cévennes. Morterane. The place spoken of only in footnotes. There, beneath the damp stones, he found a slab sealed with tiny bones. Children's bones. He wasn't alone: three other researchers had followed him. Arielle, a medium disowned by the Church. Yuri, a defrocked monk haunted by visions. Milo, a cryptoarchaeology hacker. And Sister Elora, a mute exorcist, her skin tattooed with inverted prayers.
They opened the cursed chamber. And the Blackthorn Codex was freed.
It wasn't a book. It was an organism. A labyrinth of flesh, ink, and pacts. Each page vibrated beneath your fingers. Each word breathed. It wasn't read: it read you. And it made suggestions.
Arielle was the first to give in. She signed to see her sister again, who had disappeared in a fire. One night later, she returned... but no longer had a reflection. Yuri, panicked, tried to burn a page. The page bled. Then the fire poured down on him, from within. Milo disappeared into a mirror. Elora, however, remained standing, her eyes fixed on the book, unblinking, endlessly reciting a forgotten psalm.
Leander understood too late. The Codex didn't want to be destroyed. It was looking for an author. A host. Someone to write the Eighth Circle, a new Hell, conceived by men themselves. Each reader became a link, each pact a syllable. There remained a blank page. Just one. And the ink waited.
He contemplated it for a long time.
When he finally looked up, the library was empty. The world outside had changed. The faces bore other names. Memories mingled. Only the Codex remained.
And in the distance, a child approached, curious.
"Tell me what you desire," a voice whispered through the pages.
"And I will teach you what you are willing to lose."