Lucas knew the old blood stories. His mother had whispered them when she thought he slept—tales of the First Doors, cracks in the world where the veil between realms thinned. The Ashen Veil had drawn from such rifts, but never created them.
Lucas had.
When he called Malgros into his body, the summoning was imperfect. Fueled by pain, rage, and a half-remembered spell torn from a dying priestess's notes, it had ripped a wound in the boundary between worlds. Lucas had sealed it—or so he believed.
But the wound bled.
At the town library—what remained of it after the cult's purge—Lucas uncovered a forbidden tome buried behind false walls. The Ars Feralis. Unlike the Ashen Veil's sleek grimoires, this was primal: stitched skin pages, bone ink, chaos-bound runes. It detailed a race older than demons—creatures who fed on possibility, memory, identity. Not destroyers. Unmakers.
They were coming through.
Lucas touched a name scratched in human blood at the book's end: Ephraal.
Malgros surged.
"Close the door. Or Ephraal will unwrite us both."