Chapter 2: The Price of Power

Chapter 2: The Price of Power

The words hung in the air, heavy and sharp as gravestones. A countdown to his death.

My blood ran cold. “No. You’re wrong.” The denial was a flimsy shield against the tidal wave of horror cresting over me. “It’s a protection spell. It’s supposed to save him!”

Sera’s gaze was unyielding, stripping away my pathetic hopes. “You used your soul as the power source, Piper. Not a crystal, not an herb, not some planetary alignment. You. A human body, a mundane soul, was never meant to be a container for that kind of raw power. It’s like trying to run a city’s electrical grid through a single lightbulb.”

She gestured towards the bedroom, to the golden thread that pulsed with a soft, steady light, a beautiful, lethal umbilicus. “Every time you feel a strong emotion, every time you cast a spell, a surge of that power will travel down that line and into him. It will burn him out from the inside. First his energy, then his mind, then his very soul will be… metabolized. Fuel for a fire he can’t contain.”

My stomach heaved. The ink stains on my fingers suddenly felt like blood. The talismans waiting to be shipped felt like mockeries, little tokens of a power I couldn’t hope to control. I had tried to build a shield for Leo and had instead handed him a bomb.

“How long?” I whispered, the words scraping my throat raw.

“Days? Weeks?” Sera shrugged, a gesture of brutal honesty. “It depends on your own power levels. Given your spectacular lack of control? I’d wager on the shorter end of that scale.”

Panic, cold and sharp, pierced through my denial. My knees gave out and I slid to the floor, my head in my hands. The blinking cursor on my essay seemed to mock me. Thaumaturgical Ethics. I was going to fail, in more ways than one.

“Then we have to break it,” I said, looking up at her, my voice shaking with a desperate resolve. “There has to be a way. Old magic, forbidden magic, I don’t care. There has to be a reversal.”

Sera’s expression didn’t soften, but a flicker of something new entered her eyes: purpose. Panic was useless. Action was survival. “There’s one place we might find an answer. But we need to go now.”

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The Umbral Athenaeum looked depressingly normal for a place that taught necromancy and potion-making alongside magical theory. It was a squat, Brutalist building of grey concrete and sad-looking windows, indistinguishable from any other underfunded community college. But as Sera’s sleek black car slid into a deserted faculty spot, I could feel the hum of contained power radiating from it, a low thrum that vibrated in my teeth.

“Professor Albright keeps a master keycard in the loose brick behind the planters,” Sera said, already moving with silent, predatory grace. “He’s a creature of pathetic habit.”

Inside, the halls were sterile and quiet, smelling of floor polish and faint traces of brimstone from the summoning labs. We bypassed the main library, with its well-lit study carrels and neatly organized shelves. Our destination was in the basement, behind a reinforced door marked with a simple placard: Umbral Archive. Level 5 Clearance Required.

Sera didn’t bother with a key. She placed her palm flat against the heavy steel door. A network of faint, silvery cracks spread from her fingertips, and with a soft groan of protesting metal, the mag-lock clicked open.

“Show off,” I muttered, following her into the darkness.

The air that hit me was cold and dry, thick with the scent of ancient paper, dried blood, and something else… something like static and whispers. This wasn’t a library; it was a prison. Books bound in what looked suspiciously like human skin were chained to the shelves. Scrolls were sealed in salt-lined caskets. A low, discordant murmuring seemed to emanate from the volumes themselves, a chorus of trapped spells and forgotten knowledge.

“We’re looking for texts on Anima Vinculum,” Sera instructed, her voice a low command. “Familiar bonds, specifically human-to-witch. They’ll be in the Heretical Rites section.”

Of course they would.

We worked in frantic silence, our phone flashlights cutting narrow beams through the oppressive dark. I ran my fingers over cracked leather spines, titles etched in languages that twisted the tongue. The Codex of Ravaged Souls. On the Unmaking of Flesh. Grimoire of the Void-That-Hungers. This was knowledge that didn't want to be known.

Finally, tucked away on a lower shelf, I found it. A slim, unassuming book bound in dark, scaly hide. It was cold to the touch. The title was a single, stark sigil I recognized from a high-level theory class: The Unbreakable Vow.

My hands trembled as I opened it. The pages were vellum, the ink a rusty brown. The text described the bond with horrifying accuracy, calling it a parasitic symbiosis. And then I saw it—a chapter titled 'On the Severance of the Soul Tether.'

Hope, fragile and desperate, fluttered in my chest. “Sera, I think I’ve got it.”

She was at my side in an instant, her grey eyes scanning the arcane script. I read the words aloud, my voice a shaky whisper. “The bond, once forged in soulfire, cannot be broken by conventional means… It must be transferred. A third-party vessel, an entity of significant power, must be summoned to act as a conduit, to willingly take the tether unto itself…”

My voice faltered. I knew what kind of entities possessed that level of power.

Sera finished the passage for me, her tone flat and cold. “The ritual requires a pact. The entity will name a price for its service. A life. A century of servitude. Your immortal soul. The cost is always absolute.”

A demonic pact. The one line no witch ever crossed. The solution was a trap, a choice between two certain dooms for Leo. He dies by my magic, or he’s saved by a bargain that would damn me for eternity.

As the weight of that impossible choice settled on my shoulders, the temperature in the Archive plummeted. The beams of our flashlights began to flicker wildly. A smell, like freezer burn and freshly turned earth, filled my lungs.

“Sera?” I whispered, my heart seizing in my chest.

The shadows in the corners of the room stopped being mere absences of light. They deepened, thickened, clinging to the shelves like black oil. They began to move, not like normal shadows, but stretching, crawling, coalescing in the center of the aisle before us.

From the shifting darkness, two embers of malevolent red light ignited, fixing on me. A voice slithered into my mind, not through my ears, but directly into my thoughts—a sound of dry leaves skittering over pavement and the faint buzz of dying insects.

Little witch, it hissed, the sound dripping with ancient amusement and spite. Speaking my language. Looking for a deal?

I knew that cold. I knew that presence. It was the same one that had haunted my nightmares for two years.

“Malgorath,” I breathed, the name tasting like ash.

The shadowy form seemed to preen, elongating into a vaguely humanoid shape with too many joints and long, grasping fingers made of pure night.

You shout my name in your nightmares, it whispered in my head, its red eyes boring into me. And now you seek the help of my kind. How deliciously ironic. What is it that has you so… desperate?

Then, the demon’s burning gaze shifted, looking past my shoulder as if it could see all the way back to my apartment. Its presence in my mind sharpened, filled with a sudden, ecstatic discovery.

Ahhh. I see it now. A shiny, golden thread. You’ve anchored yourself to a fragile little mortal. You tried to build a cage for me, and instead, you’ve put your own heart in a leash.

It didn’t need to attack. Its words were daggers of ice in my soul. It knew. It understood the nature of my catastrophe perfectly.

The shadowy form drifted closer, the cold intensifying. Don’t trouble yourselves with dusty old books, Malgorath purred, the sound vibrating through my bones. There will be no deal. There’s no need. This is so much better than simple revenge. I’m going to enjoy watching you tear him apart, piece by piece. Your love will be the weapon. Your magic will be the poison. Your despair… well, that will be my feast.