The Key That Bleeds
The Rootbound Tome no longer waited for him to open it.
It called to him.
Each night, its pages flipped of their own accord, revealing symbols that shimmered like heatwaves on stone. Cuco couldn't read the words—
But he understood them.
Or maybe…
They understood him.
---
The first spell was short.
Simple.
A breath.
A gesture.
A drop of blood.
He thought it would summon light.
Instead, it silenced the entire forest.
Two miles of trees, birds, wind—
Gone.
No rustling leaves.
No humming insects.
Not even the whisper of air.
Just nothing.
Cuco dropped the page. His nose bled. His ears rang.
And something beneath the earth—
something ancient—shifted in its sleep.
---
By the third spell, he was losing time.
He'd wake with the Tome open on his lap, fingers crusted black with sap or ash. Strange lines would twist up his arms—not wounds.
Grafts.
Like bark was growing from beneath his skin.
Tariq noticed first.
"You're not sleeping, are you?"
Cuco shook his head, slow.
"I don't think I need to."
Tariq's voice dropped. "What does the book take from you?"
Cuco met his gaze. Eyes too still.
"I don't remember my mother's voice anymore."
The silence that followed didn't just stretch.
It fractured.
---
The fourth spell was a binding.
He didn't mean to cast it.
He dreamt of Hollow Ones clawing through the walls, dragging Nox into darkness—
—and in the nightmare, he screamed.
But his scream became roots.
They burst from his mouth.
Coiled.
Crushed the dream.
Killed it.
When he woke, Nox was standing across the room.
Watching him like he was a weapon no one remembered building.
"I felt that," she said.
Cuco's voice was a whisper. "I was trying to protect you."
Nox didn't move.
"Next time," she said, "don't choke my thoughts."
---
The Tome was winning.
He knew it.
But he couldn't stop.
Not when the next page whispered of something older than the Gate.
Buried beneath the Circle.
A spell with no name.
A cost no one could undo.
This one didn't ask for blood spilled.
It asked for blood…
given.
He read it aloud in the silence.
And something inside him snapped.
Pain hit him like a storm.
His vision shattered—splintered into a hundred versions of reality.
In one, the Circle was burning.
In another—it had never existed.
And in one—
He stood above himself.
One Cuco—kneeling.
The other—standing tall, holding the Tome in one hand, a blade of root and bone in the other.
That Cuco smiled.
> "This is what we are now," he said.
"A lock made of skin. A key made of pain."
---
When Cuco came to—
The spell was complete.
Burned into his flesh, right beside the mark, was a new symbol.
Intricate. Stark. Alive.
The Key.
And beneath it, ink glowing in the Tome like molten truth, was a single line:
> "A key that bleeds… opens both ways."