Elder Sterling’s thumb hooked beneath the silver corner bracket, flipping the dark leather cover open with a sharp flick of his wrist.
His Golden Core divine sense flared into the rough paper. He prepared to counter blood-oaths, toxic soul-bindings, or demonic ignition arrays.
He found none of those things.
Instead, his sharp eyes locked onto thirty lines of dense, melodramatic prose printed on cheap pulp paper.
Elder Sterling blinked. His brow furrowed in deep, judicial concentration as he scanned the first paragraph, expecting an encrypted acrostic cipher.
“Page one hundred and forty-two,” Sterling read aloud, his gravelly voice echoing across the courtyard like a death sentence.
The twenty disciplinary guards stood at rigid attention, their ears straining to catch the dark demonic secret.
“‘Take me, Lord Valen,’ Lady Seraphina gasped against his rough leather jerkin,” Sterling intoned with deadly seriousness.
