The hallway groaned beneath the pressure.

From beyond the sealed door, the beast let out a guttural, bone-rattling roar. The sound echoed down the corridor of ruined portraits, shaking flakes of ancient paint from their torn frames. The door shuddered violently as something massive slammed against it—once, twice—each impact followed by a sharp, anguished yelp.

Like it was hurting itself trying to get in.

"Damn persistent, aren't you?" Balth muttered, unfazed. "Learn it already."

He didn't even flinch. He just tilted his head toward the door like it bored him. I stared at him, baffled by his calmness. He noticed, and gave a crooked smile—half sardonic, half tired.

With a practiced motion, he reached into his sleeve and produced five nails, fanned between his fingers like a conjurer revealing a hand of cards. Each one gleamed with a different hue under the strange hallway light: one silver, one sapphire blue, one crimson, one forest green, and one pitch black, darker than shadow.

"This is how I survive," he said flatly, holding them up for me to see. "My Arte? Useless. Decorative at best. What I do have is Providence, and a few good skillcubes. One of my Shells grants me control over nails—placement, function, feedback. So, most assume my Arte is nail manipulation."

He twirled the silver one between his fingers before tucking it back. "Let them think that. Easier to keep people guessing."

"And… the red one," I said, gesturing toward the nail still embedded in the door. "That one causes pain on contact?"

Balth let out a dry, humorless chuckle. "Excruciating, kid."

He nodded toward the door as the creature outside slammed into it again—only to let out another shriek of agony, like it had touched a live flame. "Pain so potent it wraps around the nerves like barbed wire. Physical, spiritual, sometimes even conceptual depending on what it hits. That's why it's howling."

He tapped the edge of the green nail against his palm. "Each one's different. Triggers, traps, thresholds. You don't need a flashy Arte when you can turn the world into a minefield."

Then he looked back to me, the grin gone.

"Remember that. You don't need power to win. Just the right kind of cruelty."

"I'll… remember that," I said quietly, letting the words settle like dust. "Cruelty is a kind of kindness when it comes to survival."

I exhaled slowly, the breath dragging the weight of something heavier than fear.

"Sire," Lumivis interjected, his voice a dry parchment-thin whisper—correcting, but more than anything, somber. "Balthis's outlook is jaded because it has to be. He dives into forbidden knowledge not out of ambition, but necessity. Imagine Blightfang—resurrecting daily, after you've slain him thousands and thousands of times. That is what he faces. Hour by hour. Cycle after cycle."

I tried not to let the image root in my mind, but it did anyway.

Blightfang. The rotting, never-dying corpse of a death knight. A monarch of the damned who composed death knells from the screams of the slain. A nightmare stitched together by betrayal, his kingdom built from stacked bones and corrupted oaths. He never stayed dead. Never stayed buried.

And Balthis fought him—again and again. Not as a tale. Not as a fable.

But as his reality.

Gods, no wonder he was the way he was.

"Blightfang?" Balthis looked over with a curious tilt of his head. "The Betrayal of Bath? Where did you get ahold of that history?"

"Danatallion's Halls," I replied. "I meant it when I said I was an illegal contractor… until recently."

Balthis stared at me, lips parting just slightly. "Devil's balls, kid. If you're a legal contractor of his, then why in the—?"

A violent crash rocked the door, followed immediately by a strangled yelp from the creature outside. The red nail held, but the pressure was increasing.

He didn't even flinch.

"…As I was saying," he continued with a dry cough, "If you're a contractor of the Lord of Libraries, then why are you in here? What exactly are you trying to find?"

I met his gaze. Steady. Honest.

"Power. Myth. More." I shrugged. "I'm looking for anything I can use. Anything to grow. I'm weak. So very, very weak. And I'm poor. Almost penniless. I didn't plan to dive into the works of Vex, but now that I'm here…"

I paused, considering the weight of my next words. No sense hiding it now.

"…I accepted a contract. For the Dagger. From The Dagger and the Dancer. I'm not diving into the play yet—not until I've gathered more of it. It's too dangerous."

Balthis didn't speak for a moment. He stared. Then, slowly, carefully, he reached into his coat and pulled out a black nail—unlike the others. Matte. Dead. As if it ate light.

"Don't collect all of it," he said, voice suddenly low. "Don't even try. If you reach too deep, you'll find something far worse than me at the bottom. And it won't warn you."

He tapped the black nail against the wall beside him.

"Seventy percent. That's the highest we allow for Vex's plays. Even then, we keep a Watcher on those fools for the rest of their lives."

I narrowed my eyes. "Why seventy?"

"Because seventy percent is when you start seeing the audience."

He grabbed my wrist without warning, yanking me down the hallway with sudden urgency.

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"Move!"

I barely had time to process the command before the door behind us exploded open with a thunderous crack. Shards of wood and screams of pressure filled the air.

Thousands—literally thousands—of red nails flooded into the corridor like a rushing tide. Mixed in were streaks of green that shimmered like venom, and two black nails that hummed with dread, anchoring the ground in silence.

We didn't stop to look.

Down the corridor we sprinted, boots pounding over shattered stone and the eerie light of the falling nails. The once-proud hallway of ruined portraits blurred past us—faces of kings and traitors melting into one another as though fleeing their own frames.

At the next intersection, Balthis didn't hesitate. He turned left, dragging me with him. The hall changed—portraits vanished. In their place: doors. Endless doors. Each one marked with an obscure sigil, some whispering, some bleeding, one or two weeping.

The door to our immediate right creaked open with a sinister invitation.

Without asking, Balthis shoved me through it and dove in after me. The door slammed shut behind us with a definitive click—like the snap of a lock on a prison cell.

But it wasn't a room.

It was… outside.

Or something that pretended to be.

Before us stretched a vast field of rotting forests and wilting foliage. Flowers bloomed in bursts of vibrant color, only to wither into dust within seconds—then bloom again, caught in some cruel loop of rebirth and decay. The sky was choked with crows—no, not a murder, a conspiracy. They wheeled in silence, knowing spirals like they were watching from above.

In the fields below, guillotines moved. But not by wind or wheel.

Skulls piloted them, empty-eyed and driven. And men, or things that wore the shape of men—skeletons dressed in tattered coats and rusted armor—tended the fields. Their movements, mechanical. Dutiful. Grim.

The air was thick with a scent that wasn't death, but the memory of it.

I swallowed hard.

"…Where are we?"

Balthis didn't even pause. His tone was matter-of-fact, almost casual. "Terror," he said. "The Fields of Terror. One of the few ironically safe havens in all of Vex's archives."

I stared at him. Then at the crows. Then at the execution machines with eyes.

"…Safe?"

He gave a tired grin, like someone who knew the punchline to a cosmic joke and was sick of hearing it. "Depends on what you mean by danger. Here, at least, everything's honest."

***

The skeletal farmers didn't react with alarm at our approach. One looked up, tilted its bare skull with a soft clack, and gave a subtle nod—more like a gesture between colleagues than guardians of a cursed field. Another wiped its browless skull with a rag that served no purpose. The rest continued their eerie, rhythmic work, tending soil that was half ash, half bone.

But something strange happened as we moved past them.

Everywhere my presence touched—no, not me, but my aura—life responded. A halo of verdancy bloomed outward from my steps. Flowers erupted in shades the world had forgotten, reds too deep to be natural, violets with veins of gold. Saplings split through the husks of ancient roots, drinking in phantom light. Even the crows overhead momentarily stopped circling to watch.

It was as if the field wanted to live again—but only when I was near. The moment anything slipped outside the range of my influence, the color faded. Petals shriveled. Leaves blackened. Saplings twisted in a slow, deathlike spiral and turned to dust.

"Don't linger," Balthis warned, without looking back. "They get jealous."

I didn't ask who they were. I didn't want to know.

We passed a crumbling stone wall, then a fence made from rib bones lashed together with braided hair. At the end of the path stood a cottage—a paradoxical structure in this sea of rot. Ivy clung to its sides, though it too wilted and regenerated as I approached. Smoke curled from a crooked chimney in slow spirals that defied the wind. Something in it smelled like cinnamon. And copper.

The door creaked open before we knocked.

An old woman stood inside the threshold, gazing at us.

She looked...normal.

Not unscarred, not pristine, but simply as one might expect an old woman to appear. Deep smile lines, crow's feet. A shawl of midnight wool hung over her shoulders, stitched with runes in a language I couldn't read. Her eyes were pale. But the moment she saw Balthis, they sharpened into focus.

"Balthis? What are you doing here? This isn't your assigned station." Her gaze narrowed slightly, then shifted to me. "And who is this? An apprentice?"

Balthis gave a small shake of the head. His voice was tight, but not rude. "We were hunted by the Beast. I couldn't fight it and protect him at the same time. No, he isn't an apprentice. He's a Tome-Walker."

Her expression shifted. The casual annoyance of an unexpected visit vanished. In its place came a subtle gravity. A spark of interest.

"A Tome-Walker, hm?"

She stepped aside without another word and let us in.

The inside of the cottage was…warm. Wrongly warm, as though the room hadn't quite accepted it was in the middle of a dead field. Jars lined every shelf, containing strange things: feathers soaked in ink, quills that blinked, melted candles that hadn't been lit, vials of dream-dust and solid smoke. A book hovered over a fire, pages turning of its own accord as a kettle hung over the hearth beneath it.

She moved slowly, deliberately, over to an old chair. Once seated, she gestured toward the chairs opposite her, as if this was all some polite tea-time discussion and not something happening inside a cursed forest farm, surrounded by skeletons and guillotine-riders.

Balthis didn't wait. "Do you still have your fragments of The Dagger and the Dancer?"

She narrowed her eyes. "Why do y—" She stopped. Her head tilted. Her attention flicked back to me like a predator suddenly catching a scent. "Oh. I see."

Her stare grew wide.

And then it shattered into something impossible.

Her eyes didn't simply look at me—they multiplied. I felt them, hundreds, thousands of them, all watching me. Every angle. Every pore. It was like being placed beneath a microscope made of raven wings and broken mirrors. There was nowhere to hide. Nothing left unexamined. Every lie I'd ever told felt like it was crawling to the surface of my skin.

My breath caught in my throat.

"You don't want it for the main reasons," she said, voice now layered and echoing in an impossible harmony. "You want it for the Dagger. Foolish."

I tried to speak, but her presence had turned to iron.

"You should want the Mask. Or the Book hidden within it. Not the dagger. The dagger is a means, not an end. So… why?"

"I was contracted in Vassago's Market," I managed, though my voice cracked. "For the dagger. I was to be given a quill in exchange. It lets me record history. Permanently."

There was a pause.

And then, unexpectedly, she laughed.

It was full-bodied and wild, a cackle like dry leaves and bells, but not unkind.

"HAH! That King of Rats still wants the dagger to separate his tails?"

My spine stiffened. "Y…You know who wants the dagger?"

Her smile turned from humor to memory, and then to something bittersweet.

"Of course I do, boy. He's my husband."

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