The whispers about Adam followed Ann out of the hall as she left.
She felt them on her back as she crossed to the records wing, the same route she had walked a hundred times in the last week. The guards at the door straightened and she nodded once and stepped inside.
A side monitor still showed portal schematics from earlier, left open by a junior scribe who had been pulled away to the grounds. Ann shut it down and brought up the Veritas interface.
The apprentices had kept the secure link stable, and tonight it mattered. She typed in the search terms that Lexi had mentioned months ago that she could remember and she let the system chew through the restricted catalogs.
Even Ann had to admit, having Bartholomew's apprentices here to catalog the library itself and link with those of the Enclave was more useful than she had ever thought it would be.
Daemonology. Binding Rituals. Pact law. The known Dameon Lords…specifically Eromaug.
Results stacked up neatly in a column. Some were flagged, some half redacted, and a few buried in outdated classification that no one had bothered to revisit. She pulled the oldest entry first hoping to find some sort of information that had escaped the notice of anyone trying to erase connections.
"Here we go," Maeve said. "Graveyard reading. Wow, you really know how to have a good time don't you?"
"Shut up, I'm concentrating." Ann murmured in reply.
"On what? Learning how to summon a Daemon Lord? Do the nobles not have enough gossip about you and Adam? You really want to hand them this as well?"
"Look, I just want to find out why Eromaug suddenly became such a major player. There has to be a reason, surely. It's not like he just sprung up overnight. Someone had to have handed him that power."
"Does it really matter though Ann?" Maeve sighed, "He's a twat. We all know this. Twat's often don't have any reason for doing the things that they do. So, honestly, I think your time could be better spent elsewhere."
"What? Handling more nobles and their dramas?"
"Well I was thinking…"
"I swear to all that is holy Maeve if you mention a fucking puppuccino one more time I'll block you out for the rest of the day."
Maeve was silent for a moment before huffing haughtily.
"Just so you know it was not a puppuccino related conversation, but now I don't want to talk with you. So I'm going to sulk"
"You do that.." Ann sighed.
Ann opened the first text. "On Summoning Contracts" The translator's notes were stiff and academic, but the diagrams were clear.
A circle for intention, a second for consent, a third for price. She read through the titled clauses and the scribe comments that tried to argue with them. The comments were full of excuses but the clauses were not.
She made a list. Pages, symbols, cross-references to other volumes. Then she moved to the second text.
"The Voices That Answer." This one had no diagrams. It did however hold accounts of summonings that went wrong. People who thought they were bargaining with daemon lords and in fact it was nothing more than a random daemon, people that thought they had borrowed power to claim as their own for the duration of the contract and yet had ended up with a power that would not let go and eventually consumed them.
Ann read each entry twice and took notes in a steady hand.
Hours slid by and she soon lost track of time. The books were fascinating and she was only more certain in her belief that when Lexi returned, she had to get started with some sort of lectures for the realm on Daemonology.
She couldn't wait to see Lexi tear the nobles apart, and laugh gleefully while they flounder helplessly.
"You need sleep," Maeve said. "And food. And a reason to stop before you start worshipping the alphabet that you're reading. That's not something that you should be playing around with. If Adam knew just how dangerous any of that was he would.."
"Well he's not going to find out, is he Maeve," Ann shot back, "I'll rest when I find this connection. It's here somewhere, I'm sure of it."
Maeve rumbled her disapproval as Ann kept working and she opened a third text titled. "The Crown, the Gates and the Anchor."
Maeve rumbled her disapproval as Ann kept working and she opened a third text titled "The Crown, the Gates and the Anchor."
The writing was far older here and it was clear that the paper had been scanned from a copy that was no longer fit to touch. It paired royal rites with ancient blood magick, all of which had been outlawed.
She skimmed the rites and paused at a note in the margin that had been underlined twice. "Where the crown stands in as the ritual anchor, the one who wears it must be a new bloodline pledged or an heir of the ancient lines. Any hidden bonds will warp the anchor and the results will be unstable at best, catastrophic at worst."
Ann sat back with a huff of disbelief. She read the line again but it would not sink in.
"Say it out loud," Maeve said, her interest piqued. "So you can hear yourself and your thoughts clearly."
"If the King bound himself," Ann said slowly, "then any portal he opens, or even stands near during a ritual, will carry the mark of that bond. The magic won't flow clean. It'll bend to whatever pact he made, and the structure of the gate will warp."
She tapped the margin note again, her voice tight. "That means every crossing, every transport, every summoning that runs through him is poisoned before it even starts. And if the bond is to Eromaug, then what comes out of the gate won't just be unstable. It could come out twisted into something else entirely."
Like the constructs, Maeve said, sharp now. They cut people open and carved fragments of oath marks into them because they were trying to fake what the King already had , a direct line to daemon power. He feeds it through himself, they stitch it into flesh. Different paths to the same rotten goal.
Ann swallowed and opened a set of scanned diagrams that mapped known sigils used in relation to Eromaug. She did not like the familiarity of any of them. Her fingers moved over the keyboard, calling up images from field reports. Ely's constructs, their skin marked with patterns that the healers could not explain, bones that had been bent and healed wrong.
Painstakingly she lined the images up next to one another and stared. The healed scars on one construct's shoulder matched the lower half of a sigil triad. The scale was wrong and the alignment rotated, but the bones under the skin had been forced to lie along the same points of the sigil. She traced them with the cursor, matching angle to angle.
She clicked rapidly through the files, bringing up the next one. A second construct appeared on screen. Its chest had been split and stitched, the scars still visible even through grainy photographs. Two lines were carved straight down the sternum and then curved out along the ribcage. In the middle of the chest sat a broken circle.
Ann leaned closer. The broken circle wasn't random. It was identical to one in Lexi's file of counter-seals , marks designed by scholars to interrupt a binding. A circle cut open to break the flow of power, a deliberate gap that meant the bond could never be complete.
She clenched her jaw. The counter-seal only existed because of the full oath. Every daemon pact required it: a circle drawn whole and unbroken, the sigils inside completed by both parties. One side gave power, the other gave loyalty or sacrifice. That was the full oath , a closed system, permanent and absolute. Once it was sealed, there was no pulling free without ripping the person apart from the inside out.
Ann felt her stomach turn. Whoever had done this had tried to mimic that structure without the oath itself. They had carved the marks onto living bodies as though people were test pages.
"They're not experimenting with theory anymore," she said. "They're carving pieces of the oath directly into flesh."
"They tested on our people," Maeve snapped. "They cut them open to see how close they could get to a full binding without demanding the real deal. That's not research. That's slaughter masquerading as ritual."
Ann forced her voice to sound steady even though her heart was in her mouth.
"So this is the confirmation that we need. The constructs aren't accidents or just shoddy spellcraft and Ely's experimentation... they're deliberate attempts to fake the structure of a daemonic pact by carving the marks onto flesh. They were trying to cheat the cost of the full oath, no consent, no equal bargain, just force."