The rain didn't fall in Dregmoor.
It bled.
It slid down soot-stained rooftops and into alleyways reeking of piss, smoke, and rot. The puddles didn't ripple when something dropped into them—they hissed, like the world itself was warning you to turn back.
And Elias had never listened to warnings.
He crouched beside a rusted gutter, thin fingers clutching a jagged iron shard. Blood slid down his forearm from a fresh cut he hadn't noticed. The rat he'd killed twitched once before falling limp, its tiny eyes staring up at him like it wanted revenge. He stuffed it into a canvas sack, one more carcass to sell for copper.
"Three more," he whispered. "That's bread and a book."
Books cost silver. But the right ones—the forbidden ones—weren't sold. They were whispered about. Hidden. Lost. The kind of knowledge that got you strung up by your wrists and burned without trial. The kind Elias wanted more than warmth.
He stood, joints cracking like old wood, and moved through the labyrinth of backstreets. He didn't look at the other beggars. Didn't speak to the priests muttering half-truths under their breath. Didn't flinch when a drunk noble's carriage splashed sewage on his cloak.
He had something better than dignity.
He had direction.
It was beneath the collapsed wing of the Saint Virel Chapel that he found it.
No one went there anymore. Not after the fire. Not after the screams.
He slipped through a crack in the stone, dragging his sack of dead rats behind him. The chapel's insides were strangled by roots, half-eaten pews, and the kind of silence that buzzes in your ears.
And then he saw it.
A jagged hole torn into the earth, as if the ground had been clawed open from below. Bones lined the edges—too small to be adult. Charred, half-melted.
He should have run.
He should have.
Instead, Elias dropped the sack, climbed into the hole, and felt his breath catch.
It wasn't a tomb.
It was a library.
Or what was left of one. Shelves rotted into splinters. Stone tablets crumbled to sand. But in the center, bound in black sinew and locked beneath glass sealed with arcane runes, sat a book.
And as his fingers brushed the glass, something whispered behind his ear:
"You are the first in three centuries."
He spun. No one was there.
He looked back. The book was no longer behind glass.
That night, Elias didn't sleep.
Not because he couldn't.
Because the book wouldn't let him.
The letters crawled across the page like insects. They slithered into his eyes, etched themselves beneath his fingernails, behind his teeth, inside his mind.
They told him things.
Real names.
Unseen truths.
Spells that didn't need incantations—only understanding.
And for the first time in seventeen years, Elias smiled.
The world had taken everything from him. But now, finally...
He was going to take it all back.