The moment Regulus' fingers closed around Nyx's wrist, her muscles tensed like a drawn bowstring. She spun, eyes flashing in the dim tunnel light.
"Let go," she hissed. "We don't have time for—"
"Magic," Regulus interrupted, his grip tightening. "We shake them off now."
Nyx's lips curled. Amusement flickered across her face, sharp as a knife's edge. "Fine. Entertain me."
He released her and snatched the grimoire from the tunnel floor. The moment his fingers touched the blank cover, the air thickened—not just with the weight of gathering Mind, but with something deeper, older. The pages trembled as if eager.
Somewhere behind them, the Altenans' footsteps quickened. They'd sensed it.
Regulus didn't hesitate.
"O Heavens, witness my great undertaking," he began, the chant ripping from his throat like something buried too long.
The walls shuddered. Dust rained from the ceiling. Nyx's shadow coiled around her feet, restless.
"As stars above, so ink now waking."
A pressure built—not just in the air, but in Regulus' skull, behind his eyes. His vision swam. The Altenans were shouting now, their voices warped by the tunnel's curves.
"As above, so below aligned," he forced out. The words burned. "What was once imagined now defined."
Nyx's hand twitched toward her dagger as the first mage rounded the corner behind them.
"From silent pages to shouting steel," Regulus roared.
The grimoire's pages glowed gold.
"Let every inscribed word be made real—"
The lead mage raised his staff. A spell crackled at its tip.
"By quill's command and author's hand," Regulus finished, voice raw, "I rend the veil 'twixt thought and land!"
Light intensifies.
A quill of liquid silver materialized above the grimoire, its tip gleaming like a dagger's point. The blank pages shone, ready.
"Let history bend! Let stories rise!" He shouts.
"Unwritten falsehoods take corporeal guise.
"All fables woven, all legends spun—
For it is, As I've Written!"
Nyx exhaled sharply. "Well. At least you didn't explode."
Regulus didn't answer. His entire being focused on the quill, the page, the single phrase screaming in his mind. He wrote:
"The pursuers' senses betray them."
Ink spread like liquid silver across the parchment. The words shimmered, then dissolved—sinking into the grimoire's fibers.
"Leading their pursuit to the wrong direction."
The moment the final stroke was made, the air itself twisted. A soundless, non-existent pulse rippled outward, and the Altenans—now mere yards away—staggered mid-stride.
The lead mage's eyes shift over. He turned sharply to the left, where the tunnel forked, and shouted: "This way! The trace leads east!"
His companions followed without question, their boots pounding against stone as they charged down the empty passage. Within seconds, the sound of their pursuit faded into echoes, then silence.
Nyx let out a slow breath. "Clever." She eyed the grimoire, then Regulus' shaking hands. "But you're not done yet."
The quill still hovered, waiting. The grimoire's pages pulsed gold, hungry for more.
Regulus' vision blurred at the edges. A hot trickle of blood seeped from his nose—Mind Down. He didn't have much left.
Nyx's fingers curled around his wrist, steadying him. "One more line," she murmured. "Make it count."
The quill dipped toward the page. And he slashed its final command:
"An abnormal wind current blows into the western tunnel."
The ink burned away as soon as it touched parchment. For a heartbeat—nothing.
Then a roar filled the caverns.
A gale howled through the passageways like a living thing, ripping torches from their sconces and sending debris clattering across stone. The wind tore through the fork where the Altenans had vanished, its force unnatural—wrong—as if the tunnels themselves were exhaling.
Nyx's hair whipped across her face. "That's not normal wind," she shouted over the din.
It wasn't. The current carried the scent of old parchment and iron. Worse—it changed direction mid-blow, now rushing toward them before veering sharply east.
The grimoire snapped shut on its own. The quill shattered into starlight.
Regulus collapsed against the wall, his breath ragged. Blood dripped steadily from his nose now—the price of bending reality.
Nyx grabbed his shoulder before he could slide to the ground. "Move. Now." Her eyes darted to the trembling torches. "That wind wasn't just misdirection. It also revealed the exit."
-----
The room smelled of ink and ozone.
Papers covered every surface—pinned to walls, stacked in teetering towers, scattered across the floor like fallen leaves. Strange instruments hummed on cluttered desks: glass tubes filled with swirling smoke, brass devices that clicked and whirred of their own accord, scales that balanced quills against fragments of bone.
At the center of it all, a woman wrote.
Her pen moved without hesitation, etching words onto parchment in precise, looping script:
"As I've Written."
The ink shimmered gold for an instant before settling into black.
"An unprecedented magic."
A tremor passed through the room. One of the glass tubes cracked, its smoke escaping in a thin, sighing wisp. Emanating a foul stench.
The woman did not pause.
"Raise the level of importance of the Nyx Familia."
Somewhere in the pile of papers, something stirred—a presence like folded parchment sliding against itself.
Her pen hovered for only a heartbeat before adding, firm and final:
"Under the orders of Lady Athena."
The moment the last stroke was made, the words burned themselves into the page. The air grew heavy, thick with the weight of divine acknowledgment.
"Signed and recorded by: The Archivist"
Then—silence.
The woman set down her pen. Her eyes, sharp and calculating, lifted to a half-finished report on the edge of her desk.
Its title read: "Subject: Regulus Nihil."
She reached for a fresh sheet of parchment. And another, and another. With more quills, moving and writing without any hands holding them. All of them writing different things at once:
"Response: Evaluation of Thesis 'Mage feces as a viable alternative as ingredients for magic ink'
"Incident Record: List of damages, casualties and lost properties of Familia branch in Silver Hollow Depot"
"Proposal: Transfer of The Mad's disciple"