Books are curious objects. They have the power to trap, transport, and even transform you if you are lucky. But in the end, books—even magic ones—are only objects pieced together from paper and glue and thread. That was the fundamental truth the readers forgot. How vulnerable the book really was.
But not only to fire, or the damp, or the passage of time.
To misinterpretation.
A woman with a burned page assumes that once she gets what she wants, she also gets to keep it.
But she doesn’t understand the story goes on beyond the page, and she doesn’t see it coming when her throat is slit.
A girl with a flicker of magic believes she sees a man’s death—knifed outside of a bar, past midnight with no witnesses—and has the audacity to believe she can change the future.
But she doesn’t understand that a life is more than a few isolated scenes. He’s been a kidnapper, an abuser, and a murderer for much longer than she knows. He’s already been to that bar with the birdcage above its door. He’s already been stabbed between the ribs and left for dead.
If you’re reading this, by now you know you ought to read everything.
By now you know you ought to read deeply.
Because there’s witchery in these words and spellwork in the spine.
And nothing is what it seems.
Which is why, for a long time, Lon and Mareah didn’t know how it would happen. They couldn’t get enough information from the Book or the Illuminated world to give them the answer. Would it be an accident? A fall? An aneurysm, sudden as a summer storm? Maybe the Guard would find them, and Mareah would fight them off, sacrificing herself so Lon and their little girl could escape.
All they knew was that she had five years. Five years after their daughter was born.
And then she would die.
Every week, Lon would study her with the Sight, searching for anomalies, endings, signals in the smoke and secrets in the sea.
Look closer, his Master had told him once.
So he looked closer. He looked deeper. He saw more.
The sickness was in her lungs.
She’d contracted it years ago, on one of her missions, long before they’d even conceived of abandoning the Guard.
She’d dug in the sword, gleaming copper as it entered her target’s chest. The blade had soaked up whatever blood it touched, but it didn’t touch all of it.
She remembered the red liquid seeping through the gaps in his teeth. Then the cough. The spray, warm and wet, speckling her face.
It had taken this long to manifest, but now that it had, she and Lon finally knew. This was how it ended.
Unless Lon could prevent it.
As Apprentice Librarian, he’d used Transformation, the third tier of Illumination, to extract strains of mold from ancient books. He’d made cracked leather covers new again. With Transformation, you could augment and change all sorts of physical objects, from pieces of parchment to weapons.
But you couldn’t change the human body. Only one branch of the Guard had ever had power like that, had had the ability to rewrite the world however they wished.
The Scribes.
So with the Book, he studied them. He learned of all the failed experiments they’d tried at the nascence of their craft—cutting paragraphs from the Book with the point of a knife, burning pages, blacking out whole chapters with the broad strokes of a brush, removing ink from the parchment with solutions of acid and alcohol, leaving behind passages empty as deserts. But you could not change the future by changing the Book.
No, you changed the future by changing the Illuminated world, with the power of the Scribes, a power that had once been called Alteration.
Lon read and studied and realized, to his dismay, that for all the years he’d devoted to mastering Illumination, he was not skilled enough, not powerful enough, to be a Scribe.
He was a mere Librarian, and he struggled to grasp the Scribes’ most basic theories. He had little hope of mastering the full force of their magic.
But he’d always had a healthy dose of arrogance, and he did not give up.
All he had to do was harness the first tier of Alteration, a skill the Scribes had called excision. They’d used it to remove parts of history like organs from a body—he could use it to remove Mareah’s illness, one diseased cell at a time.
He’d eradicate every last trace of her sickness from her past, her present, her future. And it would be as if the disease had never existed in her body at all.