Luna's:
The rain had been falling for hours, a steady percussion against the balcony doors that felt almost like a warning.
I hadn't lit the candles. The room was a hollow shape in the dark, shadows stretching into corners like they were waiting to listen. My cloak was still draped over the chair where I'd tossed it earlier, its damp hem dripping into a small puddle on the marble floor. I couldn't make myself move it.
I should have been sleeping. Instead, I found myself pacing again barefoot, the chill of the stone floor biting into my skin with every step.
Aezrel had disappeared before sundown. No explanation. No message. Just that sharp look he always gave me before leaving, like he was carrying a secret in his teeth and didn't trust himself to open his mouth.
I hated him for that.
I hated him for how it made me want to follow.
I pressed my palms to the cold glass of the balcony doors, watching the rain streak like silver threads down the night. Somewhere out there, beyond the fog and lamplight, he was moving in places I wasn't allowed to see.
And yet every time he came back, it was always with something in his eyes. Something I wasn't sure I wanted to understand.
My father's voice echoed in my head, unbidden:
> Never ask a question if you're not ready for the answer.
But I was ready.
Wasn't I?
...
The door creaked open before I could answer my own question.
The sound was soft, but in the silence of my pacing, it was deafening. I turned, my pulse already shifting to that treacherous rhythm it always found around him.
Aezrel stepped inside, the rain clinging to him like a second skin. His coat dripped onto the marble, darkening the veins in the stone. The faint lamplight caught in the strands of his hair, slick and darker than usual, and for a moment he just stood there watching me as if I were the one caught doing something I shouldn't.
He didn't speak right away. That was his way, I was learning making silence feel like a loaded weapon.
His eyes flicked to the balcony doors, then to the puddle beneath my cloak.
"You've been awake," he said finally. It wasn't a question.
"So have you." My voice came out calmer than I felt.
He didn't react, just shrugged off his coat and draped it over the back of the nearest chair. The movement was smooth, deliberate… hiding whatever he kept tucked inside until the very last moment.
That's when I saw it something wrapped in black cloth, small enough to fit in his hand, but heavy enough that he placed it on the table like it might break the wood.
"What is that?" I asked.
"Something you're not supposed to see." His voice was low, almost conversational, but there was no mistaking the warning in it.
I stepped closer. "Then you shouldn't have brought it here."
His jaw flexed, and for a moment I thought he might smile he didn't. Instead, he leaned against the table, arms crossing in a way that made it clear he wasn't moving until I backed down.
But I didn't.
I reached for the cloth.
His hand shot out, closing over mine. Warm despite the rain, his grip was firm not painful, but enough to still my movement. Our eyes locked.
"Luna," he said, and my name sounded different when it came from him like a confession and a command wrapped in the same breath. "There are answers that change you. This… would change you."
I should have pulled away. I should have told him to keep his secrets.
But my fingers tightened beneath his.
"I think I'm already changing," I whispered.
...
The rain outside had turned to a steady hiss, like the city itself was leaning against the glass, listening.
Aezrel's hand lingered over mine for a heartbeat longer than necessary, as though weighing whether to push me away or pull me closer.
Then, slowly, he released me.
I didn't waste a second I pulled the cloth open.
The first thing I saw wasn't an object it was a color. A deep, bruised crimson, almost black in the lamplight, seeping through worn leather bindings.
It was a book.
But the cover… gods, the cover was wrong. Its texture wasn't leather not exactly. It felt warmer, almost like skin stretched too thin over bone. And the symbols carved into it… they weren't any script I recognized, yet they moved as I stared, as though the lines were breathing.
"What is this?" My voice cracked despite my best effort.
Aezrel didn't answer right away. He studied my face instead, like he was memorizing the moment before it broke.
"It's called the Sable Codex," he said at last. "And you weren't meant to touch it."
I glanced down at my hand still resting on the cover. "Too late."
His jaw tightened. "Luna, that book isn't read—it reads you. It remembers who you are… and decides what you'll become."
I laughed, but it was thin and brittle. "You're making it sound like it's alive."
"It is."
That silenced me. Not because I believed him, but because part of me the part that had been restless for months wanted to believe him.
I looked back at the shifting symbols. My fingers itched to open it, to hear whatever story it had been waiting to tell. And yet, in the pit of my stomach, something cold began to coil.
"What happens if I open it?"
Aezrel stepped closer. Close enough that I could smell the rain on his skin, the faint metallic tang that wasn't from water.
"You'll stop asking questions," he murmured. "Because you'll finally have the wrong answers."
His gaze locked with mine, and there was no mistaking the flicker of fear behind his calm mask.
That fear wasn't for him.
It was for me.
...
The moment stretched, taut and breathless. My pulse thudded in my ears, drowning out the hum of the rain outside. Aezrel's shadow loomed over the table, his presence pressing down on me, warning, forbidding.
I should have listened.
But I've never been good at obeying warnings.
My fingers tightened on the cover. "You think you can scare me away from it?"
"It's not fear I want from you," he said, voice low. "It's restraint."
"Then you've already lost."
I flipped the book open.
The air changed instantly heavy, charged. The lamplight guttered and surged, throwing jagged shadows against the walls. My breath hitched as I looked down at the first page.
There were no words.
Only an image.
It was me.
Not me as I was now, but me standing in a place I'd never been. A desert of black sand under a blood-red sky, my eyes… gods, my eyes were not my own. They glowed with the same symbols that danced across the cover.
I snapped my gaze to Aezrel. "What is this?"
He didn't answer. He was staring at the page like a man watching a prophecy he'd prayed would never come true.
The symbols began to move, spilling from the page like molten ink, curling up my wrists, wrapping my skin in their shifting embrace.
Aezrel swore something guttural, not in any language I knew and reached for me. "Luna, let go!"
But the Codex wasn't letting me go. The leather-like cover pulsed under my hand, the heartbeat syncing with mine until I couldn't tell which was which. I should've been terrified, but instead…
I felt seen.
Truly, terrifyingly seen.
"Do you feel it?" the book's voice was not sound—it was inside my skull, soft and cold like silk against steel.
"You have been wandering blind, little one. But I can give you the eyes you were meant to have."
My mouth was dry. "And the cost?"
The answer was a slow, hungry smile in my mind.
"Everything you've ever called yours."
.....
Aezrel POV:
The instant she opened it, I knew I'd lost her.
The Codex doesn't tempt in whispers it consumes. I'd seen it happen before, to warriors, scholars, men far stronger than her, and it never ended with a body you could bury whole.
The air around her shimmered, heatless yet suffocating, the symbols pouring from the pages like smoke and branding themselves along her arms. Her eyes widened, but not with fear no, worse. With recognition.
"Luna—drop it." My voice was sharper than I intended, but the ground between us felt like it was stretching, as if the book itself were pulling her into some hidden dimension.
She didn't even look at me. She was listening to it.
The markings were crawling higher now, curling over her collarbone, burning into her skin with an elegance that mocked the violence beneath. I could almost hear the Codex speaking its words not meant for me, but I caught fragments, like echoes from behind a locked door. Promises. Threats.
I lunged forward, but the moment I crossed into the shadow pooling at her feet, my boots sank an inch into the floor. Not wood anymore, sand. Black, endless, shifting.
The vision was leaking into the room.
"Do you even know what it's showing you?" My hands closed around her wrists, but the warmth of her skin was gone, replaced by a strange, cool pulse.
Her gaze snapped up to mine then, and for a heartbeat, she wasn't Luna anymore. Her irises burned with the same symbols carved into the Codex, the patterns alive, swirling, rearranging as if testing me.
"I see everything," she said, her voice and another voice woven together.
And in that moment, I felt something I hadn't felt in a century.
Dread.
Because the Codex wasn't just claiming her.
It was remembering her.