The Blackthorn Codex
Episode 6 – The One Who Signs for You
Someone had signed for him.
From the beginning.
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The silence returned, denser than before, as if every sound was now filtered by a damp veil. Léandre took a step back. The emptiness before him didn't disappear.
The giant page still floated, suspended in the darkness, alive.
It trembled slightly, as if breathing.
He looked at the signature: Léandre.
But it wasn't his handwriting.
Not his gesture.
Not his inner movement.
"Who…?"
The question didn't leave his lips. He thought it, but the silence held it.
Another signature appeared, lower down. Slowly. It was written before his eyes, letter after letter, with ink that oozed like tar:
"He who writes in the shadows."
Leander stepped back again. His back hit something.
It wasn't a wall.
It was a body.
He turned around as one.
But there was no one there.
Only a silhouette imprinted in the air, like an afterglow.
A human form made of dust and memory.
It flickered, then disappeared.
In the attic, the Codex closed slowly.
The sound it made wasn't that of a book.
It was the sound of a heart being closed.
Leander felt something dripping from his nose. He brought his hand to his face:
not blood.
A fine black powder, like warm ashes.
He went downstairs. The attic was already disappearing behind him.
Each step creaked longer than the last, as if the wood were silently weeping.
Arriving in the living room, he stopped.
The television turned on by itself.
An old black and white program.
A child alone facing an empty classroom.
He was writing a word on the board: "God is absent."
Then he turned around.
And his eyes were Léandre's.
He woke up later, not knowing if he had fallen asleep.
In his personal notebook, lying on the table, a sentence had been added:
"You never had a childhood. You are only the continuation of an uncorrected text."
He wanted to tear out the page.
But his hand could no longer find it.
His fingers passed through the paper as if in a dream.
The following night, he had a dream he immediately recognized.
It wasn't his own.
An antique desk. An oil lamp.
A man, seen from behind, writing with a quill on an infinite parchment.
Each time he finished a sentence, a silhouette fell from the sky.
Anonymous bodies. Children. Old men.
All marked with the same seal on the back of their necks: a spiral of ink.
The man turned around.
He had no face.
But Leander recognized him.
He woke up screaming.
The hallway mirror was covered in condensation.
Yet there was no heat. No steam.
A word was slowly being written on it:
"You're not dreaming. He's the one sleeping."
Then, underneath:
"And when he wakes up, you will cease to exist."
In the attic, the Codex began to tremble again.
Not like a book.
Like a creature fed too slowly.
A page opened. Blank.
It bore a single line, untitled:
"Episode 7 – The Day You Never Wrote to Yourself."
And Leander understood that he would have to read this chapter.
Even if he didn't remember writing it.