The dark fluid in the crystal well didn’t swirl like normal ink. It moved with a slow, thick, sticky, hungry rhythm, clinging to the faceted glass walls in shimmering films of dark violet and metal bronze.
Ren Prime leaned heavily against the edge of the dark rock reading desk, his breath coming in short, ragged gasps.
The clean cut along his inner forearm burned with a painful chemical heat that reached all the way to his shoulder. Brother Ren stood beside him. He murmured gentle, liturgical prayers as he bound the wound with strips of boiled linen soaked in cold vinegar. The saint’s burlap habit was smudged with dried gall, his own scarred wrists twitching in sympathetic deep ring with the poison coursing through Ren’s marrow.
“The fever is entering the fluid-draining channels, Ren,” Brother Ren whispered softly. “I can draw the heat out, but the iron settled mud has bonded with your hemoglobin. You can’t bleed this medium twice.”
“We only need to bleed it once,” Ren Prime rasped, his voice rough and dry as sandpaper. “Scribe. The text.”
Scribe Ren stood over the ancient dragon-hide scroll of the Solemn Dynastic Promise of Khorat.
The parchment was four hundred years old, two paces wide and three yards long, pegged flat against the black glass altar by four lead weights shaped like coiled serpents. The original text had been penned in ancient Grand Chancery Uncials. Tall, rigid, merciless letters inked in stone-hard dragon bile and gold dust. It was the…
