Discover of the Null Grimoire

The rain had no rhythm and no mercy.

It pelted the whole Ashen District. The kind of storm that felt less like weather and more like punishment, as though the gods, if they still watched this world, had opened the sky in judgment. Water slashed down from above, slicing past rusted gutters and broken eaves, hammering the cobblestones into a slurry of filth and runoff.

Eryk Thorn moved through it like a ghost half-remembered. The hood of his cloak sagged under the weight of the downpour, offering little resistance to the cold fingers of rain that traced his scalp and spine. His breath steamed in the air, a weak protest against the icy wind. Water ran down his face in rivulets, mingling with grime and old blood that hadn't quite washed away. With every step, the muck of the Ashen District clung tighter to his boots, trying to claim him as its own.

He didn't stop.

Behind him, in the echoes of memory, the crackle of fire from the Hollowed Hearth still lingered, the ghost of warmth and company. Narliya's low, steady hum as she polished her knives. Sera's laughter, brittle and too loud, always one sharp edge away from sorrow. They'd shared mugs of steamwine to keep the cold at bay, but the tension had never fully left the room. Not after that night. Not after Mael's scream.

That sound had been human to him. Too human. It had twisted inside Eryk's skull, replaying in the pauses between heartbeats. A cry that didn't end in silence, but in a snap. The kind of sound you don't forget. The kind that hollows you out.

He'd seen a lot of death, but Mael's was different.

Mael had believed.

Eryk stumbled, slipping briefly in the river of mud that used to be a street. He caught himself against a wall, breath hissing through clenched teeth. The storm didn't care. It just kept pushing in the sky relentlessly. It chewed at rooftops and howled through alleyways, as if trying to unmake the district stone by stone.

Here in the Ashen District, everything was broken. Not just in structure, but in spirit.

The walls were cracked like old bones. The roads were patched with whatever rubble hadn't yet sunk. The people walked with heads down and backs bent, always half-expecting the ground to vanish beneath them. This wasn't the part of the city you lived in. It was the part you survived.

Eryk had known it since he was a boy.

He had grown up beneath these bruised skies, learning which shadows held knives and which held hands. He knew which doors were safe to knock on when your ribs ached and your lips bled. He knew which vendors would sell you bread without asking your name, and which ones would sell your name to the Black Tongues.

Nothing grew here.

Everything rotted from dreams, trust, and the bones of those who couldn't run fast enough.

The rain turned the air into smoke and ash, washing soot from the rooftops in greasy rivers. As he passed crooked buildings—some leaning so far they looked like they were whispering secrets to one another—he kept his eyes low. Every door was shut tight. Every window stared like a blind eye, watching nothing, caring even less.

Eryk didn't realize how far he had walked until he saw a door he didn't recognize.

The Ashen District had always disobeyed logic. Its streets wound like tangled veins, impossible to map and easier to get lost in the longer you stayed. Memory was unreliable here. Paths bent, names shifted, and sometimes you could swear the alley you took an hour ago had never existed at all.

The Hollowed Hearth was gone behind him now, swallowed by the storm and distance alike. He'd wandered too far. And now, the cold was a knife in his spine.

The alley before him bent sharply, like a serpent coiled to strike. He hesitated for only a breath before taking it. What choice did he have?

His boots slipped again, splashing into a puddle of black water. And then, he saw a light.

A dim, flickering light.

A lantern behind a cracked window, warped by years of heat and cold.

He paused, looking toward it.

The building it belonged to looked dead. The roof sagged. The stonework had wept black with rot. Its sign had long since burned away or been swallowed by soot. But the light was real.

And Eryk was tired.

Shelter in this district was always a gamble. But he had nothing left to lose.

He stepped inside.

The air changed instantly. Warmer, but not welcoming. Heavy, like walking into a coffin full of dust and dreams.

The smell hit first: old parchment, mold, candlewax, and something older. The scent of time.

Books surrounded him. Floor to ceiling. More than he could count. More than any one person could have collected in a single lifetime. They bulged from shelves that leaned like drunks, stacked upon crates and boxes and even each other. Leather-bound tomes, scrolls tied with fraying string, grimoires sealed in wax and wire.

It felt like a graveyard of knowledge.

Then came the voice.

"You're dripping on my floor!"

Eryk startled.

The speaker emerged from behind a counter that looked like it had been grown from the floor. He was ancient, not in years, but in effect. Skin like parchment stretched too thin over a skeleton that had forgotten what it meant to be alive. His eyes were jaundiced, unfocused but burning. His fingers, long and yellowing, tapped a rhythm against the wood that made Eryk's skin crawl.

"Sorry," Eryk muttered, shaking water from his hood. "Didn't mean to intrude. I just need to wait out the storm."

"Nothing's free here, boy." The old man sneered, revealing teeth like cracked tile.

Eryk's jaw tightened. His hand drifted to the pouch at his hip, brushing against the cool metal tucked within—a pendant. His mother's. The last piece of her he had left.

He couldn't trade it.

Not for this.

"Then earn your keep," the man said, voice like dry leaves. "Dust. Or leave."

Eryk stared at him. Then the shelves. Then the door behind.

He took the rag.

~○~

The cloth was nearly useless. Threadbare, fraying at the edges. He wiped dust from the nearest shelf, sending little whirlwinds of age into the air. Each breath felt like inhaling a hundred forgotten stories.

The books beneath his hands hummed, metaphorically if not literally. They whispered. Not words—but feelings. Echoes of voices long since silenced. He didn't belong among them. These were the books of tower-borns, spellwrights, conjurors who had names that still echoed through marble halls.

And he was just Eryk.

A hollow-born boy.

Unworthy.

But one book took his eyes.

It didn't whisper.

Tucked low, hidden beneath larger volumes like a secret and it bore no title. No glyph. No house mark. Just cracked black leather and a spine warped from age.

His fingers brushed it.

It was subtle like a string tied behind his ribs had just pulled taut.

Not painful. Not sharp. Just… there. A sudden gravity, soft and insistent, like a whispered name only the soul could hear. A shiver passed through Eryk's spine, not from the cold, though the rain still lashed at the building's bones, but from the uncanny awareness that something had shifted. Not around him. But in him.

As if the book hadn't just caught his eye, but had been waiting for his.

The weight of that knowing settled low in his gut, heavy as stone. It wasn't a beckoning. The kind of feeling you don't question, because it doesn't rise from thought. It rises from truth.

He stepped closer, boots squelching against the warped wood of the floor, and crouched before the shelf. The room seemed quieter here, like sound itself leaned in to watch. Dust hung suspended in the air, as though time had chosen this moment to pause.

His fingers brushed the spine.

Warm.

Almost too warm.

Like it had been resting against skin—not wood or a parchment—but something alive.

The leather cracked beneath his grip as he pulled it free. It made no sound. No creak, no sigh of release. Just a muted resistance, like it knew this moment wasn't about drama. It was about intent.

He looked through it, scanning every detail of the whole book before he opened it with a hisitation lurking inside him.

The pages were wrong.

They didn't lie flat. They moved like a shadow dancing on the light. Not visibly, but subtly and eerily, like breath under skin. Like something slumbering and stirring just beneath the surface. The words weren't really words at all. They pulsed like a coiling vines drenched in moonlight, shifting against the lantern glow, rearranging themselves every time he blinked.

Not meant to be read.

Meant to be felt.

A weight of ice and iron sank in his stomach.

His breath hitched.

A pressure, like hands pressing on his chest from the inside. The book recognized the hollow inside of him. Knew him. Knew the hollow place within. The one everyone else ignored, and dismissed.

The ink shimmered. Wet. Fresh. As if it had just been written. For him.

His fingers trembled. Still, he reached out. Touched it.

He noticed a flicker on the ink as he stared at it. A pull. Like a thread of silk sliding beneath his skin, finding its way home. No sting. No heat. Like greeting something that had always lived in the dark corners of his being, unnamed until now.

Then, his mouth moved.

Three words.

"Ignis ex corde"

It left his lips like a breath and a breaking.

And then, the shop exploded like it was bombed by an army.

Light didn't just flash around him but it tore the shop like a thousand lightning. A scream made visible, ripping through the shadows. A pressure wave surged outward like a god exhaling for the first time in centuries. The air snapped. Shelves shattered, slamming against the walls like swatted insects. Ancient tomes disintegrated into ash midair, their secrets extinguished in a burst of unmaking.

The lantern above detonated, shards of glass raining down like frozen lightning.

Eryk didn't move to his stand due to the shock he was encountering. He was processing the actions he made until now.

His body trembled, legs loose beneath him, but not from fear.

The hollow place, the one the Academy called a curse, a failure of talent, a void where power should've been, had thrummed. Not with borrowed magic or with mimicry or chants.

The book remained clutched in his hands, but he no longer felt its weight. It had merged with him—threaded into his core, like a name he'd only just remembered.

Dust rose in lazy spirals, then twisted—deliberately. Symbols formed in the air. Not glyphs he'd learned. Not runes found in spellbooks. But they shimmered like oil on water. Shapes that hinted at meaning so ancient it existed beneath language.

The marrow of the world, drawn in smoke.

Eryk's heart raced, but beneath the panic was a strange harmony. The feeling you get when a song you've never heard somehow matches the rhythm of your soul.

The shopkeeper screamed too loud with ragged and terrified.

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!"

Eryk didn't answer. He just stared at him like he didn't know what happened. Well, what the fuck really happened?

His hands were shaking. His breath came in short bursts. Sweat prickled beneath soaked clothes, and his vision swam with afterimages of impossible things.

"OUT!" the shopkeeper bellowed, backing away, his eyes wide with something between awe and horror. His hand clutched a charm at his throat, fingers pale with pressure. "GET OUT!"

Eryk startled as he turned away. He couldn't even speak to justify himself or look back through him to tell him what the hell happened.

The storm met him like a beast when he was finally outside the exploded shop.

The wind howled its fury—sheets of rain slicing sideways, needles of cold stabbing at his skin. Thunder cracked like stone splitting, and lightning turned the world to bones and fire.

But none of it mattered.

The water couldn't reach where the change had taken root.

The storm couldn't wash it away.

Every step hit the soaked ground with finality. His boots splashed through puddles, mud clung to his legs, and wind screamed in his ears.

The book slammed against his chest with every stride.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

He stumbled through the alleyways, barely noticing the collapsed signs, the skeletal buildings, the trash rivers flowing in the gutters. The Ashen District was the same—but Eryk felt like he wasn't.

The Hollowed Hearth came into view. A crooked structure of warm lights and worn brick. The only place in the district that ever held a whisper of comfort.

Thunder cracked directly overhead as he reached the door, heart hammering, soaked to the bone. He barely raised a hand before it slammed open.

Sera stood in the doorway like a blade.

Barefoot. Arms crossed. Hair a dripping halo around her scowl.

Her voice cut through the storm. "Where the fuck did you go, Stray Dog?"

Eryk stood there, panting, blinking rain from his lashes, the heat of the book radiating through his soaked tunic.

He simply held up the book.

Its cover still steamed slightly, heat meeting storm.

"I found something."