[TW: Drowning/Suffocation]
The blow Mordekai expected never came. There was no rending of flesh, no scorching hellfire. Instead, there was a sensation of absolute, suffocating fluidity. The floorboards of the Guild tower dissolved beneath his knees, melting away into substance.
He fell.
When his eyes snapped open, the wreckage of his library was gone. The smell of ozone and old parchment had been replaced by the heavy, metallic scent of iron and stagnant water. He was standing on a surface that rippled like a black mirror, stretching out into an infinite horizon. Above, the sky was an oppressive vault of obsidian. There were stars, but they were wrong—dim, smothered pinpricks of grey light that offered no illumination.
“You grant me the role of Executioner,” the voice returned, stripped of its screeching hysteria and replaced by a resonant, omnipresent vibration that shook the black liquid beneath his boots. “Then welcome to the block, Oathbreaker. Welcome to the text that has never been read.” The darkness coalesced before him. It rose in a tidal wave of viscosity, swirling and hardening until it took the shape of a colossal figure—vaguely female, but composed entirely of shifting, flowing script. Runes, letters, and ciphers boiled on her skin, a living history of the knowledge Mordekai had once stolen.
Madame Biblia.
“I am here,” Mordekai said. He instinctively reached for the Weave to steady himself, perhaps to call upon a simple ward, but he grasped at nothing. The severance was absolute. He was a scholar without a book, a soldier without a sword.
“You are nowhere,” Biblia retorted. She loomed over him, a titan of ink. “This is the space between pages. The inkwell of forgotten things. You bound me in leather and chains, Malthezar. You used my essence to twist the minds of the weak. I shall fill your lungs with the Void until you are nothing but a footnote.” She exerted her will, and the atmosphere plummeted. A supernatural cold—the chill of the grave—washed over him, designed to freeze the blood and shatter the mind. It was a necrotic pressure that should have left him catatonic with terror.
Deep within his chest, a subtle warmth flared against the cold. The blessing Kazumi had bestowed upon him acted as an anchor. While his mind screamed that he should be terrified, his spirit remained strangely insulated. The warmth was a single ember in a blizzard, keeping his heart beating, keeping the terror from stopping his pulse entirely.
“Words!” Biblia roared, seemingly offended that he was not cowering in madness. “The tongue of a Warlock is forked and silvered! Let us see how you speak when your throat is filled with my truth!”
The floor erupted. This was not a capture; it was an annihilation. Tendrils of black liquid lashed out, striking Mordekai with the force of a battering ram. They didn’t just wrap around him; they crushed him. He heard a rib crack as the ink coiled around his chest, lifting him into the air.
Then, the ink moved to his face.
It forced his jaw open, pouring into his mouth—thick, bitter sludge that tasted of iron and ancient sorrow. It flooded his nose, his ears, blinding him, deafening him. It wasn’t just drowning him physically; it was invading his mind. He felt memories dissolving—the face of his beloved, the layout of the Guild, his own name—all being rewritten by the aggressive narrative of the entity.
He was dying. He was being unmade. The darkness was absolute. His lungs burned, spasms racking his body as the ink replaced the air in his blood. Kazumi’s Sanctuary kept his soul from shattering, but his body was seconds away from failure. I accept this, he thought, the darkness closing in. If this is the price…
But the mark on his shoulder did not accept it.
Just as the last pocket of air left his lungs, just as his heart stuttered to a halt, the blessing reacted to the hostile intrusion. It was not a conscious act of Mordekai’s will, but a violent, autonomic rejection of the darkness by the light that had claimed him. A blinding explosion of pure, white light detonated from inside the cloud of ink. It wasn’t a beam; it was a nova.
The shockwave tore through the silence of the void. Biblia shrieked—a sound like tearing metal—and the pressure around Mordekai vanished instantly. The ink tendrils evaporated into hissing mist, burned away by the radiance.
Mordekai dropped to the liquid floor, splashing down hard. He curled onto his side, retching violently, coughing up lungfuls of black ichor. His vision swam, grey spots dancing in his eyes, his throat raw and burning.
“MY EYES! THE LIGHT! IT BURNS!” The flash faded, leaving the mark on Mordekai’s shoulder smoking, the skin around it red and angry. He couldn’t stand. He could barely breathe. But he was alive.
“I… I…” Mordekai wheezed, spitting out the last of the ink. He looked up, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed with black stains.
The giant form of Biblia was writhing, clutching at her face, her form boiling. She shrank down, condensing to escape the lingering aura of the rebuke, solidifying into a woman made of shadows and ink, tears of black sludge streaming down her face. “Light…” she hissed, backing away, her voice trembling with pain. “You carry the sting of the Seraphim? You, a creature of the dark? You burn me with the fire of the Hells and the Light of the Heavens?”
“I am… a creature of regret,” Mordekai rasped, forcing himself to sit up. It took every ounce of strength he had left. “And that light… is the only thing keeping me from the dark you inhabit. I have no magic left, Madame. I am empty. But as you can see… I am not unprotected.”
Biblia opened her eyes slowly. The turquoise glow within them was dim, wary now. She looked at the broken man, stained black, shivering violently, yet protected by a force that repelled her very nature. “The Devil’s mark is gone,” she observed, her voice quiet, calculating. “And the holy fire protects you, yet you cannot command it. It defends you like a mother defends a child. You are a vessel emptied.”
“I am a blank page,” Mordekai whispered, his voice cracking. “I have no master. All I have is my mind… and the will to set things right. You can try to drown me again. The light might save me, or it might not. But if you kill me… Adramalech wins.”
Biblia drifted closer, the floor rippling beneath her. She stopped just outside the range of his touch, wary of another rebuke. “A blank page…” she mused. “Yes. The Devil wants your soul. The Guild wants your loyalty. But I… I require your narrative.”
The turquoise light flared, consuming the darkness.
“I will not be your master, Mordekai Malthezar. But I will be your Muse. I will dwell in the ink of your veins. We will hunt the knowledge Adramalech fears. I will give you words that cut deeper than steel, and cloak you in the shadows of history.”
She leaned in, her face inches from his. He flinched, expecting the pain again, but she merely inhaled the scent of the ozone and the holy magic clinging to him.
“But betray me, and I will find a way past that light. I will erase you. You will never have existed at all.”
Mordekai looked into the void of her eyes and saw the vast archive of the universe staring back. He extended a trembling, ink-stained hand.
“Let us write… the next chapter… Madame.”
She took his hand. The cold was agonizing, but he did not let go. The world dissolved into a whirlpool of deepest, darkest ink, and Mordekai was pulled back to the waking world—no longer a Warlock of the Fiend, but a Keeper of Knowledge.