Time in the Inkwell was nonlinear. The crushing void of the trial had receded, replaced by a space that resembled an infinite, dimly lit study. Floating islands of bookshelves drifted in the grey ether, and the floor was no longer liquid, but a solid expanse of obsidian, etched with white chalk lines like a tactician’s board.
Mordekai stood in the center, his chest heaving. He reached for the familiar rage that Adramalech had always stoked in his belly—the fire, the brimstone, the explosive desire to burn. He found nothing but a cool, quiet library.
“Stop reaching for the torch,” a voice chided. “You are not an arsonist anymore, Mordekai. You are a Knowledge Keeper.”
Madame Biblia circled him. She was no longer the terrifying titan of sludge. She had refined herself into a humanoid avatar of striking, severe beauty. Her skin was the color of old parchment, and her dress was a masterpiece of impossible tailoring—hundreds of individual pages from lost grimoires, stitched together with golden thread, rustling softly as she moved. Her eyes still held that turquoise glow, but now they peered over a pair of spectacles that hadn’t been there before.
“The Fiend granted you power through destruction,” she lectured, tapping a long, black cane against the obsidian floor. “I grant you power through understanding. To destroy a thing is crude. To understand its construction, and then dismantle it? That is art.”
She flicked her wrist. The air warped. She wasn’t summoning a monster; she was weaving a spell of terrifying complexity, a lattice of illusion and enchantment designed to shatter a mind.
“Analyze it,” she commanded. Mordekai flinched, his instinct screaming to throw up a wall of hellfire. But Kazumi’s blessing kept his panic at bay, allowing his mind to work. He looked at the spell flying toward him. He didn’t just see magic; he saw the math. He saw the syntax of the weave.
Time seemed to dilate. Mordekai saw the arcane formula Biblia was using. He recognized the weave, the specific verbal component, the somatic twist of her fingers. It was a phantasm, a killer of the mind, but he saw the structural flaw in its logic. “I see the error in the design,” he whispered. He didn’t dodge. He simply stepped to the left, exactly where the spell’s “blind spot” was. Because he had identified the mechanics of the spell, his mind fortified itself against the intrusion. The nightmare washed over him and shattered against his mental defenses like glass against a stone wall.
“Good,” Biblia said, a hint of approval in her voice. “You see the structure. Now, use the Archive. You need a shield, but you do not know the spell.” She raised her hand again. A bolt of pure, green force—disintegration energy—formed at her fingertip.
“I don’t have a counter for that!” Mordekai shouted.
“You are in the Library of All Things!” she snapped. “Find it!”
The green ray fired. Mordekai closed his eyes and reached… not into his own memory, but into the connection he now shared with her. He rifled through the mental shelves of the universe, bypassing his own limited knowledge. He found a dusty tome of Abjuration magic that wasn’t his, ripped the concept from the page in his mind, and burned a massive amount of his own energy to fuel it. He cast a spell he had never learned, channeling the wisdom of the ages. A shimmering barrier of Abjuration magic sprang up around him—high magic usually reserved for the most studied wizards, stolen for a moment by the Warlock. The green ray struck the barrier and dissolved into harmless light.
Mordekai fell to one knee, the mental strain of channeling the foreign magic taxing him. “That… was heavy.”
“Knowledge has weight,” Biblia observed, walking through the fading barrier. “You must be strong enough to carry it. But you are still reacting. A Keeper must predict.” She waved her hand, and the room spun. Bookshelves began to orbit them rapidly, turning into a blurring cyclone. She began to chant, her voice echoing from everywhere at once. She was preparing something massive, something that would require him to hold his ground against a tempest.
Mordekai centered himself. He cast a simple divination to find her true location in the chaos, locking his mind onto hers. “There,” he muttered. A bookshelf slammed into his back. Pain exploded in his spine. Normally, his concentration would have broken, the spell lost to the agony. But his mind had hardened. Because he was channeling the sight of the diviner, the pain didn’t matter. The distraction didn’t matter. His focus was absolute, a steel rod in his spine. The connection to her mind didn’t even flicker.
“I see you, Madame,” Mordekai growled, standing up despite the pain. “And I see the lesson.”
“Then show me the final truth,” Biblia challenged, floating above him now, her dress of pages swirling like a storm cloud. “Show me the true form of your magic. No limits. No hesitation. The power of Omniscience.” She descended, bringing the full weight of the Archive down upon him—a crushing pressure of psychic energy.
Mordekai looked up. He stopped thinking like a mortal man with limited intellect. He opened the floodgates. He combined his street smarts, his book learning, and his sheer force of personality into a single, terrifying moment of clarity. For a few heartbeat-seconds, his capacity for magic was no longer just his force of will. It was the sum of everything he was. His intellect, his wisdom, his presence—all synchronized into a perfect engine of casting. The air around him turned gold and turquoise. His eyes went completely white. He saw the past, the present, and the future of the room. He saw the molecular structure of the air. He saw the narrative arc of the combat.
He projected a single, perfect truth into Biblia’s mind. With his mind expanded, the spell was amplified beyond reason. It wasn’t just a scream; it was a revelation. The study exploded. Not with fire, but with force. The bookshelves were blasted back against the void. Biblia’s avatar was thrown backward, her spectacles shattering, her dress tearing as the sheer magnitude of the logic he projected overwhelmed her defenses.
Silence fell over the void.
Mordekai stood in the center of the room, smoke rising from his shoulders. The golden light faded from his eyes, leaving him gasping, his nose bleeding, his head pounding with a migraine that felt like a dagger.
Biblia lay on the obsidian floor, a heap of ruffled pages. Slowly, elegantly, she sat up. She repaired her spectacles with a touch and smoothed her dress. She looked at him. The severity was gone. In its place was something like pride. “A perfect equation,” she murmured. “You solved for X, and you removed the variable.” She stood and walked to him, offering a hand. He took it, his grip weak from exhaustion.
“You are ready, Knowledge Keeper. The Archive is open to you. But remember—knowing the secret is only half the battle. You must be willing to use it.”
“I am,” Mordekai said, his voice raspy. “I’m ready to rewrite the ending.”
“Good.” She tapped his forehead with a single, sharp fingernail. “Then wake up. Your story continues.”
The world dissolved into ink once more.
Light assaulted him.
Mordekai gasped, his body jerking violently as if he’d been defibrillated. He wasn’t in the void. He was lying on the cold, hard floor of the Guild Tower’s library.
The room was a disaster. Shelves were toppled. Books were scattered like corpses. The air smelled of ozone and… blood. His blood.
He tried to sit up, but a sharp pain in his hand stopped him. He looked down. The pact mark of Adramalech was gone. In its place, running up his forearm like a sleeve of tattoos, was complex, shifting script—turquoise ink moving under his skin, detailing the terms of his new agreement.
He was alone in the wreckage, the silence of the tower heavy around him. But as he looked at the ink flowing beneath his skin, and felt the lingering warmth of the holy mark on his shoulder, he knew he wasn’t truly alone.
He had a library in his blood, and a light in his soul.
Mordekai Malthezar stood up among the ruins of his old life, dusted off his coat, and prepared to face whatever came next.