Chapter 3: Attunement by Iron

Chapter 3: Attunement by Iron

Elara's shock was a crack in her hardened façade. For a breathtaking second, the seasoned peacekeeper was gone, replaced by a woman staring at an impossibility. The Griever's shadowy claws tore through the last of the drywall, but her gaze was locked on Leo.

"Iron?" she repeated, her voice a strained whisper.

"The old, sealed-up fireplace!" Leo yelled, the knowledge from the Codex echoing in his mind with absolute certainty. "There's a poker! Wrought iron, from before the gas conversion!"

He didn't know how he knew that. He'd never paid attention to the bricked-up hearth in the corner of his living room, another useless feature of a cheap apartment. But the Codex knew. It knew every object in the room, its composition, its history, its potential.

The Griever surged forward, its form coalescing fully inside the room. It was bigger now, more defined, fueled by its rage. It towered over them, a vortex of shadow and despair that sucked the very color from the air.

Elara snapped back to the present. "Buy me five seconds!" she yelled, and launched herself at the monster.

It was not a fight; it was a holding action. She moved with a desperate, fluid grace, her silver knife a flashing deterrent. She wasn't trying to wound it anymore, but to herd it, to keep its attention, to deflect its amorphous, swiping limbs. Each parry left sizzling trails of light on the creature's dark hide, but it was like trying to stab the tide. The Griever absorbed the blows, its form wavering and immediately reforming.

Leo scrambled for the fireplace. A discarded pizza box, a pile of unread mail, and a dead houseplant covered the hearth. He swept them aside with a clatter, his fingers searching frantically along the grimy brickwork. There. Tucked into a recess he'd never noticed, covered in a thick coat of dust, was a set of antique fireplace tools. He grabbed the poker. It was heavy, solid, and colder than the Codex. It felt brutally, primordially real.

"Elara!" he shouted, brandishing the iron rod.

She dodged under a sweeping shadow-claw that tore deep gouges in the floor where she'd been standing. "Don't just wave it around, hit it!"

Hit it. Right. Leo, whose only physical exertion involved carrying groceries up three flights of stairs, was supposed to attack a monster from another dimension. His heart hammered in his ears. The whispers from the creature intensified, no longer sorrowful but full of menace. Insolence… pretender… the prison will be reclaimed…

He took a hesitant step forward. The Griever seemed to sense the iron in his hand. Its featureless head swiveled, its gaping maw of splintered energy fixing on him. It dismissed Elara as a nuisance and surged toward Leo, the true threat.

There was no time for finesse. No time for courage. There was only raw, instinctual terror. As the wave of chilling despair washed over him, Leo shut his eyes and swung the heavy iron poker with all the panicked strength he possessed.

The impact was jarring. It was nothing like hitting something solid. There was a hideous, resonant CLANG that was both sound and sensation, a psychic bell tolling inside his skull. The Griever shrieked, a sound of pure, unadulterated agony that shattered the last of his windows. Where the cold iron made contact, its shadowy form didn't just sizzle; it violently unraveled. It was like dousing a fire with a bucket of water, a sudden, catastrophic dissolution.

But the real shock came through the poker.

A jolt of energy, cold and electric, shot up the iron rod and slammed into Leo's body. It wasn't painful. It was… connecting. The charge flowed through his hands, up his arms, and straight to the Umbral Codex, which he still had tucked under one arm.

The obsidian block flared with an inner, violet light.

And the floodgates opened.

It wasn't just knowledge anymore. It was understanding. A torrent of data, emotions, and memories poured into him, not from an external source, but as if unlocked from within his own DNA. He felt the weight of centuries, the quiet resolve of dozens of his ancestors. He saw flashes of other times, other places—a Warden standing on a rain-lashed Victorian rooftop, a Warden in a dusty library in Alexandria, a Warden facing down a different horror in a neon-drenched alley in Neo-Tokyo. They were all his family. They had all held this burden.

He understood now. The Umbral Codex wasn't a cursed object. It was a tool, a weapon, a key, and above all, a prison of unimaginable importance. His great-uncle Arthur hadn't been an eccentric historian; he'd been the Warden. And upon his death, the duty, the attunement, had passed to the next in the bloodline. To him. It wasn't a choice. It was an inheritance of cosmic scale.

The Griever recoiled, its form flickering, a huge chunk of its shoulder simply gone. It stared at Leo with a new kind of intensity. Not just hunger, but fear.

"Again!" Elara yelled, seeing the effect.

Leo's fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach, but it was now overlaid with a strange, burgeoning sense of purpose. He wasn't just a victim anymore. He was the Warden. He took a firmer grip on the poker, his knuckles brushing against the cold surface of the Codex. He could feel its quiet approval. It was helping him, guiding his hand.

He charged forward, his movement clumsy but driven. The Griever swiped at him, but its attack was slower, its form less stable. Leo ducked under the blow and thrust the iron poker deep into the creature's chest.

Another psychic CLANG echoed through the room. The Griever screamed and imploded, collapsing in on itself in a violent vortex of shadow and whispering grief. For a moment, the room was a whirlwind of black smoke, and then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. The smoke dissipated into nothingness, leaving behind only the cold, the smell of ozone, and a profound silence.

Leo stood panting in the wreckage of his life, the iron poker hanging limp in his hand. He looked at the spot where the monster had been, then at the Codex, then at Elara.

She was staring at him, her expression a mixture of awe and profound alarm. "The Codex," she said, her voice low. "It bonded with you. The attunement… it’s complete."

Leo nodded, his mind still reeling from the influx of ancestral memory. "It's a duty," he whispered, finally understanding. "My job is to be its Warden."

A grim look crossed Elara's face. She retrieved a small, metallic device from her coat pocket and glanced at its blank screen. "You did it, kid. You fought back, and you won."

A tiny spark of pride flickered in Leo's chest. He'd done it. He'd actually done it.

"But," she continued, her voice shattering the moment, "there's bad news." She gestured to the destroyed room, the shattered windows, the hole in the wall. "This much raw power, the discharge from the Griever's unmaking, the flare from the Codex's attunement… it's not quiet. It's the supernatural equivalent of a bomb going off."

She met his gaze, her weary eyes holding no comfort.

"You didn't just banish a monster. You broadcasted your exact location and the signature of an unbound Codex to every faction, every scavenger, and every predator in this city. The Griever was just the warden's dog. Now, the whole underworld knows the prison is open for business. We have to go. Right now."