The Blackthorn Codex
Episode 3: You Are Now My Scribe
So he began to write.
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When dawn broke, he finally put down his pen.
His reflection in the mirror now held a new, almost unreal glow. He was both the author and the prisoner of a story that knew no end.
And outside, in the world that had changed, a child continued to approach, his gaze shining with a curiosity that defied time.
He knocked at the door. Only once.
A dull sound, like a low note deep in a living organ.
Léandre slowly descended the stairs. Each step seemed longer than the last. His thoughts no longer entirely belonged to him: he remembered things he had never experienced, languages he had never learned, deaths he had never mourned.
When he opened the door, there was no one on the threshold. Just an object, lying on the floor: a cracked mirror the size of a book. He picked it up. Immediately, a sharp pain shot through his temples.
In the mirror, it wasn't him.
It was someone else—or rather, himself elsewhere, older, his eyes empty, his face furrowed with burned symbols. The man in the reflection reached out slowly, and on his lips, a silent phrase repeated itself:
"You've already written to me. You no longer have a name."
Leander threw the mirror to the ground, but it didn't break. On the contrary: it began to ooze a thick, black liquid, which flowed slowly to the threshold. There was no sound. Not even the sound of the shard.
In the attic, the Codex was now open of its own accord. The blank page was filled, but with writing he didn't recognize. Not his own. An unknown hand had continued his, in his exact style, as if the boundary between the two had melted away.
Each night that followed, the Codex wrote itself. All he had to do was sleep. And in the morning, new pages appeared. Prophetic pages. Cruel pages. Living pages.
He read Arielle's name, then Yuri's, accompanied by a date. The day before.
At midnight, the press announced the discovery of two bodies in the Rhône: a naked man, tattooed with inscriptions in reversed Latin, and a woman without a tongue, her eyelids sewn shut with gold thread.
Léandre understood.
The Codex didn't want to be read.
It wanted to be answered.
And every written word became truth.
---
Léandre stopped writing for three days. He didn't even dare go near the attic. He ate little, slept in fits and starts, trying to convince himself he'd dreamed of the dead. But every morning, a new page appeared, covered in an unknown handwriting... which was nevertheless his own.
The entire house was changing. The walls became more porous, as if covered with a fine, invisible mold. Inexplicable noises echoed between two silences: breathing behind the partition, the scratching of something that never slept, and sometimes, a muffled laugh... a child's.
He thought about fleeing. Leaving Lyon, burning the Codex, going into exile. But every time he crossed the front door, the city seemed more hostile, more blurred. Passersby no longer saw him. Cars slowed down for no reason. He was still there, but he no longer belonged there.
On the night of the fourth day, a power outage plunged the house into darkness. Leander went up to the attic by the light of an old hurricane lamp. The Codex was waiting for him. Open. The pages fluttered gently. And on the last one, a sentence:
You will read me aloud now.
He wanted to close the book. His hands didn't move. An invisible weight pinned his arms to the table. His breathing quickened, but his body remained frozen.
The voice of the Codex rose—but it wasn't an external voice. It spoke from within him, with his own vocal cords.
He read.
And from the first line, the room changed.
The walls of the attic disappeared.
The space expanded.
Before him, faces appeared in the void: children without eyes, a woman with a sewn-up jaw, a priest with three mouths, a skinless angel.
They didn't move.
They watched.
And behind them... a throne made of charred books.
On this throne: a figure. Tall. Narrow. Crowned with a circle of inverted feathers. Its arms were made of chains. Its torso was a blank page. And its face... had none.
She held out a hand.
Leander fell to his knees.
"I am not God," said the voice.
"But I am everything you were not allowed to read."
The pages of the Codex opened around him like wings. Each line was a cry. Each word, a forgotten pact. He saw the birth of ancient blood pacts, the betrayal of the first monks, the original language written with slit veins. He understood that the Codex was not a book.
It was a cosmic debt.
A remnant of all forgotten oaths.
A place that feeds on unfulfilled human promises.
He woke with a start, covered in sweat. The Codex was closed, lying beside him. But on his chest, someone—or something—had written in blood:
You are now my scribe. Your silence starves me.
Léandre screamed. Not out of fear. Out of lucidity. He knew he would never leave that house again.
He spent the next day rereading his own notebooks. He wanted to remember who he was, but the words seemed foreign. As if he were reading them in another language.
As night fell, the mirror on the floor—the one that had never broken—began to vibrate.
And in its reflection, Léandre saw the child.
The child stared at him through the glass.
But this time, he was crying.
His tears were flowing backwards.
And behind him, a voice spoke.
Clear. Definitive.
"You are no longer the author, Léandre. You have become the character."
The mirror went dark.
And the Codex opened by itself, once again.