I settle on a low stone, iron box open at my knees, and lift the book into the faint crimson glow of my Blood Spark. The ledger is heavier than it looks—layers of reinforced parchment and hair-stitched binding—and the dried blood used as ink has a subtle iridescence, as if the script itself still thrums with memory.
I set the the grimoire across my knees and lean in, letting the crimson bead of Blood Spark cast a steady, clinical light over the pages. I work carefully, turning each leaf with deliberate care so as not to flake the fragile ink.
The Hemalcodex is no mere grimoire; it is a meticulous record of blood magic, rituals, and the intricacies of life force. It is a book intended for a Weaver, a record of experiments and pacts and the dangerous byways of Hemalurgy.
A mix of Common script, coded runes, and anatomical sketches create a unique visual. The primary language is an archaic Common dialect, but many passages are intentionally obfuscated with ciphers or esoteric symbols. These are not casual notes. They conceal secrets.
Initial sketches of blood vessels, organs, and circulatory systems of various creatures—humans, animals, and things less easily classified. There are diagrams of leeches and arteries and vessels, as well as crude drawings of crystalline structures.
The script shifts into a chronicle of ritual experimentation. Here, the language grows more fevered and coded, mentioning names, dates, and locations; most notable are references to "Saint Mavra's Line," "the bell cadence," and "two markers." There are recipes for potions and powders involving rare herbs, minerals, and crystallized life-force.
- Notable entries:
- A Chronicle of Bindings: spells and rites to siphon vitality, twist the forms of living beings, and command their life force. They range from simple bloodletting techniques to grand, horrific rituals involving willing and unwilling subjects.
- A Bestiary of Blood Constructs: Instructions for creating temporary servitors out of blood. They range in complexity from simple blood-golems to more sophisticated entities animated by stolen life essence. Most require a steady supply of fresh blood to maintain.
- Weave Patterns: A complex mapping of Eldoria's weave of magic, focusing on points where life force is concentrated or corrupted. These depict the leylines or magical currents that flow through the land. The maps denote known locations with celestial or terrestrial power.
- Forbidden Arts: forbidden knowledge of blood magic. Methods of how to control a body like a puppet through blood.
The last entry ends abruptly with a frantic scrawl. The final words—"they come for the cadence; protect the line"—are underlined thrice in a darker ink and then smeared with what looks like a desperate attempt to erase them. The page is torn, and the ink has bled—a clear sign of urgency and interruption.
The binding has been carefully unstiched. The grimoire is not complete; someone removed vital sections, perhaps to hide dangerous secrets or to prevent the knowledge from falling into the wrong hands.
The Hemalcodex offers a dark, alluring path. But as I turn the last page, I understand: blood magic, like a blade, cuts both ways. Its power is undeniable, but it demands a price. The grimoire is a chronicle of that price—the cost of life, sanity, and the soul itself.
I lift the thumb-sized shard of crystalline ore from the iron box. It hums faintly, warm against your palm, like a heartbeat caught in stone.
I hover my palm an inch above the crystalline shard, letting the faint crimson bead of Blood Spark paint the chamber in bruised light. The air between skin and stone feels charged, like a held note before a choir begins; the shard hums under that silence, a tiny caged thunder that answers when I press my Lifeblood Sense outward.
My Weave probe slides along its facets like a careful fingertip. The image that comes is precise, cold, and stubbornly logical — the shard is not mere mineral but a lattice of condensed vitae, its inner geometry keyed to the same living currents that run through blood and bone.
The shard is a lived crystal — a crystallized concentrate of life essence. Its matrix is composed of woven vitae and mineral, formed where raw blood-rituals met a vein of strange, conductive ore beneath the earth. It smells faintly of iron and old rain. I sense an origin point in the marshlands of Eldoria, where ley-threads run close to the surface and the earth drinks easily of spilled life. The shard's outer surface bears microscopic striations that match the glyph patterns in the grimoire: someone bound blood to stone here, shaping a battery for life-magic.
Inside the crystal something moves, not as flesh moves but as a beat moves. There is a slow pulsing cadence — not the quick, frightened tapping from the memory but a steadier, colder rhythm, like a clock. That pulse resonates faintly with my own lifeblood when I focus, though it answers more readily to a cadence keyed to the crescent-and-line sigil than to a simple heartbeat. The shard stores a small reserve of animus: it will grant a minor focal point for blood rituals, a way to channel or amplify life-magic without drawing excess from a living host. It is a battery of sorts and a memory store.
The crystal is sympathetic to Hemalurgy and Weave manipulations. It passively strengthens nearby bindings and mnemonic lattices — which explains its presence in the iron box beside the Hemalcodex. Left alone, it will slowly leach ambient life-energy from living things nearby to "recharge" its pulse; in a crowded, blood-rich environment it would brighten and hum louder. It is keyed to certain ritual rhythms and thus acts as a lock-and-key conductor; the cadence from the woman's memory would synchronize the shard's pulse and allow a ritual to draw feedstock from it in a controlled way.
The shard is potent but finite. It can amplify a ritual, stabilize a binding, or act as a relay for a short burst of Hemalurgic effect — but if asked to do too much at once, it will spike and radiate a backlash: a keen, metallic nausea, a jolt of searing coldness through exposed flesh, and a brittle echo in the mind like teeth chattering. Prolonged exposure will leave a faint resonance in the user's blood, a lingering itch in the veins that other Weavers or attuned wards could later detect.
The crystal is small enough to be carried, but it should be wrapped in oiled silk or cloth if moved through populated areas to avoid inadvertent draining of passersby. It will respond to Lifeblood Sense and other Hemalurgic probes; a Weaver could draw on it directly for a modest boost in weaving potency or use it to stabilize a fragile mnemonic lattice, though both uses would dull the shard's pulse. I sense also a faint trace of the crescent-and-line sigil in its matrix — someone wove their mark into its birth.
When I withdraw my Lifeblood Sense, the shard's hum recedes to a soft vibration. I taste iron at the back of my throat and feel the smallest afterchill where the probe brushed too close — nothing burning, only that thin, echo that hangs in the marrow when a ritual was recently present.
I wrap the crystalline shard carefully in a scrap of oiled silk from my pack, tucking it into a small inner pocket against my chest where the warmth of my body will keep it from bleeding energy into the world. The cloth muffles its faint hum but does not silence the memory of its pulse against my ribs — a tiny, persistent drumbeat.
I unfasten the locket's tiny clasp and ease it open beneath the thin, sickly glow of my Blood Spark. The silver is cold enough to bite, and the hinge sighs as it reveals its hidden contents.
Inside the locket I find two things, arranged with quiet intent.
A folded scrap of vellum, yellowed and salt-stiff. Unfolding it reveals a miniature sketch rendered in a tremulous, precise hand: a face in three-quarter profile — a woman, young, with a long nose and high cheekbones, hair pulled back from her brow. A single teardrop has been shaded at the temple and rendered in a delicate wash of red. Along the bottom, in cramped script, is a single line in an older Common dialect: "M./For when the bell forgets." The initial could be a name or a mark.
A lock of hair, dark as oil, bound into a tiny loop with a thread of silver wire. When I hold the strand up to the light it seems ordinary at first, but under the faint pulse of the shard I still feel a ghost-trace: this hair once rested against a living throat that sang the cadence. The hair carries a faint scent — brine, ink, and something floral like rue — and when I let my Lifeblood Sense skim it, I pick up a memory-fragment so delicate it is barely a whisper: the woman in the cabin arranging papers, humming the slow beat beneath her breath.
The locket's interior is engraved with a tiny motif: a tear-shaped pendant repeated thrice around the edge — the same silvered tear-shaped pendant Bramwell mentioned worn by the traveling scribe. The metal has been polished smooth by handling, as if someone carried this close to their heart. The combination of image, hair, and inscription suggests the locket belonged to the woman from the memory — likely the scribe who bound part of the Hemalcodex.
I refold the salt-stiff vellum with careful, practiced fingers and slip it back into the locket. The tiny hair follows, nestling against the paper, preserved. I close the locket and fasten its clasp; the faint, private chorus of memory still hums at the edge of perception, but it is securely contained.
I tuck the silver locket, the Hemalcodex (grimoire), the corroded iron key, the pouch of crescent-and-line coins, and the wrapped crystalline shard carefully into my pack. I arrange them so the grimoire lies flat against the back of the satchel, the shard cushioned in cloth in an inner pocket, and the smaller items in pouches and folds where they won't rattle.
I rise from the low stone chamber, settle the satchel more securely on my shoulder, and move to the stair mouth. The lodge is sunken and half-swallowed by reeds; footprints and the smell of brine are recent.
I push the satchel strap tighter against my shoulder, step out through the warped threshold, and let the marsh air wash over me — a cold, briny breath that smells of iron and old bone. The ruined lodge squats behind me like a bent tooth in the mud; reeds whisper and the ground squelches underfoot. I plant my boots where the damp earth promises to hold impressions and tune my senses to the subtle language of trails.
With a practiced eye I read the mud like a page. The prints nearest the lodge are fresh, edges still crisp. There are three distinct tread patterns: a heavy boot with a square heel (the booted figure Bramwell's scrap and my earlier sighting suggested), a lighter, rounded sole (perhaps a scribe or someone in softer footwear), and a smaller, near-bare print that might be a child's or a barefoot adult. The stride length and depth indicate hurried travel — short, quick steps — and occasional scuffed marks where someone dragged something cumbersome (a satchel, a crate, or perhaps a bundle).
The trail trends southeast toward the reeds and the shoreline but takes a wide detour curving inland through a shallow drainage channel before approaching the water again. Where the path skirts the drain the prints are muddied and overlapped — as if two of the party moved faster while one lagged or slipped. I can also see where someone paused and peered back toward the lodge, leaving a smear as if they scooped something from the mud or steadied a balance.
Between two sets of prints there are deeper scrapes and a long, dragged furrow suggesting something heavy was pulled on a rope. Near one such furrow I find a torn loop of canvas fiber knotted crudely and a drop of reddish residue half-dried on a pebble — not fresh, but not old either. That ties to the ritual items I found; they were moving something important.
The trail crosses a narrow branch of brackish water via a sheet of sunken planks and reeds. On the far side the prints become more spaced and go lighter, as if the travelers moved onto firmer ground and then quickened into a more purposeful, oceanward pace. Occasional shell and reed imprints mix with boot marks, confirming a route to the southeast pier area Bramwell described.
About two hundred yards from the lodge the trail forks. One branch continues toward the shoreline reedbeds and a low set of piled stones that could hide a skiff; the other winds toward an old causeway leading into a shallow, sheltered inlet where small boats could be beached. Scratches in the mud alongside the causeway look recent and deep — as if oars or a keel were hauled up — and a faint smear of foreign oil is visible on a flat rock (consistent with a skiff's wake).
Given the freshness of the prints and the tidiness of the drag-marks, the party could still be within half an hour's travel of the lodge, likely near the causeway or beached skiff. The heavier boot prints show a repeated toe-scare pattern you remember from the dock cloaked men; that sigil-marked coin and fabric fragment find a match in the tread wear and trimmed leather style.
I move along the shoreline, keeping to the lee of rocks and ruined pilings where reeds are thin and the mud holds firmer. The tide is low but creeping; the gulls cry and the air is thick with brine and the metallic tang of old blood. My steps are careful but purposeful.