Shardu had seen strange things in his years beneath the earth. Flesh that moved without blood. Fire that whispered. Eyes that remembered lives not their own.
But never this. Not once ...not ever!!!
It began subtly. Just after the third night of Allen's fevered survival, when the boy's breathing steadied and the purple webbing of venom began to recede. Shardu had been charting toxin degradation curves, half-drunk on boiled bark rum, when he noticed it.
At first, he blamed his own exhaustion.
He blinked, rubbed his eyes with stained fingers, and lit a fresh torch.
Torches sputtered.
Not flickered. Not dimmed.
They shivered, as though afraid of what stood among them. Shardu felt it before he saw anything—the creeping cold, not of weather but of something else. It slipped between the stones, coiled around his ankles, settled in his chest like the breath of a grave.
Then he saw the shadow.
Allen's.
It stretched too far. Farther than the light would allow.
The boy hadn't moved. Still unconscious, still stretched out on the stone slab. His chest rose and fell in shallow cadence, breath just strong enough to qualify as living. But the shadow—it twitched. Fluttered at the edges. Shardu blinked, rubbed his eyes. For a moment, it looked ,watching him.
A flicker of light bent around Allen's form—not just physical, but arcane. A shimmer that danced at the corners of perception, like watching a reflection in warped glass.
Shardu's eyes widened.
"No," he breathed. "No, no, no—this isn't the time, you damned fool—"
Allen jerked.
The movement was violent. His back arched off the stone, limbs seizing, fingers clawing at air. Then came the sound—an awful, guttural scream, raw and primal ,tearing through his throat like fire. It echoed through the Bleeding Lab, shaking glassware from shelves.
Shardu scrambled forward, slamming down containment glyphs around the slab, activating stabilizers with trembling hands.
Allen's eyes flew open.
But they weren't focused. The pupils had gone near-black, swimming in the silver sheen of gathering arcana. His lips moved—words without sound—his entire form wracked with tremors.
"Stop. Stop it now—Your body's not ready," Shardu muttered, voice half-panicked. "You've been poisoned, sliced, half-dead for days. You can't handle this. You'll rupture like a goddamned flask "
He turned, nearly tripping over his own coat, and fumbled through the pile of scrolls shoved under his desk.
Awakening.
Shardu knew the signs. He'd seen initiates in his time go through it—one became lightning, another forgot her name forever. The third didn't survive at all. But Allen? Allen wasn't ready. Couldn't be. His body was still mending. His veins still held remnants of the spider venom. Bones barely knit, organs still recovering from chemical fire.
"This wasn't supposed to happen. Not now. Not like this."
Arcane heat began to rise around the slab, warping the air with sudden pulses. Allen's shadow twisted again—splintering into echoes. For a moment, it looked like there were three versions of him lying there. Then they converged.
Shardu stumbled back, then began to pace, stopped ,deep in thought then muttered under his breath...
"Yes ! Only that might give you a chance to survive"
He grabbed for his satchel,rummaging through...throwing out all kinds of scrolls, yanked out an old bundle of scrolls wrapped in singed cloth and tied with copper wire. He hesitated only for a short moment, before ripping them open.
The writing was near-illegible, the ink faded and twitching from unstable enchantment, but he knew these glyphs.
The Brelmurge Consortium.
Before exile, Shardu had studied with them. The Consortium's heretical circles of poison theorists, venom-philosophers, and marrow-practitioners. Most of their work was outlawed, written in a lexicon meant to blur the line between alchemy and sacrilege. Few of their rituals had ever been enacted. Fewer survived.
And this one?
A grafting ritual. Forbidden. Designed to force the body into accepting hostile toxins by repatterning its flow of essence. Dangerous. Painful. Never tested in full.
Because no one had been stupid enough to try.
Except maybe Allen. And maybe Shardu.
He read the runes aloud in a whisper, tracing the catalyst sigils, mapping the body-glyphs across Allen's sternum. His voice shook.
"This is madness," he muttered. "Even if it works, even if the graft binds… it might warp your spirit, your essence—strip something important loose. And if it fails.... You'll beg for death"
Allen thrashed again. A new pulse of magic flared from his chest, carving a brief sigil into the air: a spiral of jagged, intersecting lines. Shardu didn't recognize it. That scared him more than anything else.
He leaned down.
"Allen. Listen to me." His voice was sharp now, cutting through the haze. "You're Awakening. Your body's rejecting the venom, rejecting the cure, rejecting everything because it's trying to Rewrite itself with power it doesn't understand."
Allen's eyes fluttered. His lips parted.
"...burns," he croaked.
"I know. I know it does." Shardu held up the scroll. "This... this might help. But it's not clean. It's not safe. It's not even sane."
Allen's breathing hitched.
"It was scribbled by madmen in tunnels deeper than reason. And I was exiled for even copying it. But it could anchor your resistance. Let you survive the transition."
Allen's fingers moved, barely lifting from the slab.
Shardu took that as consent.
"This is madness...This scroll isn't the ritual—it's the primer. The serum still needs to be made."