The air in the Great Library of Kor-Athek was a thick, stagnant sea of dust and silence, but Veridia was a storm tearing through it. She ripped through a brittle scroll, its ancient script dissolving into meaningless flakes in her hands. With a snarl of frustration, she threw it aside and seized a heavy stone tablet, scanning its runes before shoving it off the table. It crashed to the floor, the sound of its shattering an echo of her own fraying composure.
"An excellent methodology," Seraphine's voice dripped with saccharine poison from a few feet away. "If our goal is to redecorate in a style I can only describe as 'toddler demolishes a museum,' you're succeeding brilliantly."
Seraphine struck a theatrical pose of weary patience, one hand on her hip as she held a delicate, crystalline shard to her temple, pretending to sense for magical resonances. It was a useless gesture; the library's ancient wards were a dense fog that blinded any such efforts.
Veridia ignored her, her gaze frantic. "There has to be something. Some simple counter-curse. A severing ritual."
Asterion, a mountain of patient stillness amidst their hurricane of panic, paid them no mind. He stood before a massive pillar, his gaze tracing the intricate web of index runes he had carved into its surface over centuries. His huge, calloused finger moved with geological slowness, cross-referencing one entry with another.
The initial, frantic hope of a quick fix was curdling into despair. Every scroll was a dead end, every tablet a history of a forgotten war or a treatise on subterranean fungi. The curse hummed between the sisters, a cold, unbreakable wire of shared dread.
"Are you even trying?" Veridia rounded on Seraphine, her voice a low growl. "Or are you enjoying this? Watching me grovel in the dust you helped put me in."
"Oh, don't be tedious," Seraphine retorted, lowering the useless crystal. "I assure you, being shackled to your monumental arrogance for all eternity is not my idea of a victory tour. Your pride is the cage, dear sister. I'm just trapped in it with you."
Their bickering rose, a familiar, hateful cadence that filled the silence. It was the only language they had left.
"Enough."
The single word was not loud, but it had the weight of a mountain. It rumbled from Asterion's chest, cutting through their argument like a chisel through soft clay. They both fell silent, their heads snapping toward him.
The minotaur's ancient eyes settled on them, devoid of judgment but full of an immense, weary gravity. "You are searching for a cure to a symptom, not the disease," he stated, his voice the slow grind of stone on stone. "This curse is not a wild magic. It is a work of legal artistry, forged by the Consortium. You will not find a simple counter-spell in the public archives."
He turned, his massive form moving with a deliberate grace that belied his size. "Stop looking for a way to break the lock. We must look for the schematics of the lock itself." He gestured with his head toward a shadowed archway at the far end of the chamber. "We must search for their own scholarship on punitive sanctions."
***
The hidden section of the library was colder, the air still and heavy with the scent of old secrets and dangerous knowledge. The space was smaller, the shelves more ordered, but the titles on the spines of the ancient tomes and leather-bound folios sent a shiver down Veridia's spine. *On the Binding of Unwilling Souls. Compendium of Metaphysical Cancers.*
Here, their animosity was a luxury they could not afford. A grim, silent truce settled between them as they began their search, Asterion pointing them toward a specific, dust-choked alcove. Their desperation was a shared language now, their movements synchronized by a mutual terror.
Seraphine was the first to find a flicker of hope. "Here," she breathed, pulling a heavy book from the shelf. *On Symbiotic Wards of the Elder Fae.* "The power structure is similar, a shared reservoir of life force." She scanned the pages, her eyes darting across the text. Then, the hope in her expression collapsed. "Voluntary," she spat, slamming the book shut. "It requires willing, mutual participation. Useless."
A few minutes later, it was Veridia's turn. Her fingers brushed against a tablet titled *Analysis of Parasitic Soul-Tethers*. A frantic pulse hammered in her throat. This was it. She read the incised text, her hope soaring with every line that described a curse identical to theirs. She traced the final passage, the section on severance rituals. Her breath caught. The ritual was simple. And it required the willing sacrifice of both linked souls to power the spell. It wasn't a cure; it was a suicide pact.
"Nothing," she choked out, shoving the tablet back into its slot with a trembling hand.
Asterion located the next text, a slim volume titled *Forced Metaphysical Links and Their Decay*. He said nothing, simply placed it on the table before them. They read it together. The author, a long-dead scholar, outlined with academic certainty how such a bond, if left to its own devices, would naturally erode. Over the course of three to five centuries.
The last of their hope crumbled into dust. Seraphine slid down the wall, her perfect posture finally breaking as she buried her face in her hands. "It's over," she whispered, her voice stripped of all its wit and venom, leaving only a hollow, brittle despair. "We're trapped. Forever."
Staring at her sister's defeated form brought Veridia no triumph, only a white-hot surge of pure, defiant rage. She would not accept this. She would not be a footnote in a dusty tome. Her hand swept out, slamming a useless, heavy tablet off the table in a blind fury.
It struck the stone floor with a sharp crack. The impact jarred a section of the nearby shelf, and with a soft click, a false panel sprang open.
Inside, there was no grand, ancient book. There was only a single, thin folio, no thicker than her finger. It was bound in a pale, leathery material that looked unnervingly like flayed demon-skin. The title, inscribed in shimmering silver ink, was a punch to the gut, chillingly precise.
*The Unbreakable Sanction: A Thesis on the Consortium's Life-Link.*
***
A tense, absolute silence descended. They huddled over the small folio, their shoulders brushing, forced into a grotesque intimacy by their shared, desperate need. Veridia could smell the faint, ozonic scent of her sister's magic, a scent she had associated her entire life with mockery. Now, it was the smell of a fellow prisoner. Asterion stood a few paces back, a silent, grim shadow watching them read their own death sentence.
The spidery script was a masterpiece of cold, legalistic sorcery. It detailed the curse's architecture with an academic's detachment, describing its true purpose not as a bond, but as a political weapon. A tool designed to force two powerful rivals into a state of mutually assured destruction, a permanent checkmate. Page after page confirmed their worst fears, speaking of its permanence, its immunity to all known forms of arcane severance, its elegant, inescapable design. With every word, the walls of their prison grew thicker.
They reached the final page.
The last section was titled, in the same elegant script, "Avenues for Abrogation."
A final, desperate surge of hope, sharp and painful, lanced through Veridia. Her eyes devoured the text, searching for a loophole, a forgotten clause, a single crack in the perfect prison.
But the section contained only two sentences. Two sentences that served as the scholar's final, devastating conclusion. The Censor-Symbiote's unseen camera zoomed in, the world narrowing to the silver words on the page as Veridia read them aloud, her voice a horrified, disbelieving whisper.
"This bond, once forged, cannot be broken."
She paused, her throat closing around the last, impossible words.
"It can only be… transferred."