The Elder Stag inclined its head, its form shimmering with a soft radiance, its antlers casting faint flecks of light across the clearing like stars fallen to earth. "Your reluctance is understood, young one," it intoned, its voice a soothing balm, yet unyielding in its authority, a melody of ancient wisdom that seemed to cradle her fears. "To awaken the Vyrthangrim, you must bind it to you fully. Cut your finger once more, as you did before, and inscribe your name upon the first page of the tome."
It paused, and when it spoke again its voice had softened further still, low and unhurried, the way a grandfather might speak to a child frightened of the dark. "The words that follow, you need not fear. They are old, but they are kind to the tongue. Speak them as you would speak to someone you trusted completely, and they will carry you the rest of the way."
The stag's voice rose in a slow, rhythmic chant, plain and rustic as a rhyme scratched into a church pew, the kind of thing a grandmother might mutter over a cradle or a churn of butter:
"Blood I give, and word I say — wake now, walk with me this day."
It repeated the lines twice more, patient, unbothered by how long it took her to hold them, until they sat comfortably in Petunia's mind, simple enough that she could have recited them half-asleep.
Petunia nodded, her hands trembling. She had no knife on her — had never carried one, had never once in twelve years had cause to — so she cast about the frost-hard ground instead, her fingers closing at last around a stone near the clearing's edge, its edge cracked sharp where it had split from some larger rock a winter or two ago. It would have to do. She set the Vyrthangrim on the ground, its leather cover catching the fading light, and pressed the stone's edge to her fingertip, wincing as a small bead of blood welled up, the sting sharp but familiar. She opened the tome to its first page, the paper yellowed and rough under her touch, and whispered the rhyme, her voice shaky but steady enough.
"Blood I give, and word I say — wake now, walk with me this day."
The words felt small in her mouth, almost silly, nothing like the grand incantations she'd have expected from a book this old — and somehow that made it worse, because the air around her hummed anyway, a faint echo of the pulse she'd felt before, as though the simplicity had never been the point.
With her bleeding finger, she wrote her name on the page — Petunia — the blood smearing slightly as she traced the letters, her hand trembling with each stroke. The moment she finished, the pages of the book began to flutter open on their own, a soft wind rising from nowhere, the air shimmering with a golden light. Petunia gasped, her hands jerking back as the light enveloped her, and a vision erupted — not a slideshow, not a catalogue, but something closer to being told a very long story by someone who had lived every page of it.
It began, as all things must, at the beginning — though the beginning didn't feel like a scene so much as a sensation, a woman's hands and a woman's blood, on a green hillside in a world too old to have names yet. She crouched at the mouth of a cave, the first scattered huts of something that would one day be called a village leaning against the slope behind her — mud brick, thin smoke, the very first place people had chosen to stay instead of wander. She drew a flint blade across her own arm and let the blood fall into spirals already carved deep into the cave's stone altar, and the spirals began to glow, and somewhere underneath the vision, underneath everything, Petunia felt the unmistakable, dizzying certainty that this was the true beginning. Not a beginning. The one.
From there the story simply carried on, the way a river carries on past wherever you happened to start watching it. The book didn't stay with that first woman's line forever — it moved the way everything moved in that age, on foot, hand to hand, along the slow river-roads that already, even then, connected one settlement to the next, drifting east over more generations than Petunia could begin to count, until the cave and the hillside gave way to sun-baked brick and a sky the color of dust: a city laid out in a perfect grid, streets impossibly straight, granaries stocked, people building instead of destroying. A man in a quiet courtyard poured water over a small stone seal carved with a horned, unicorn-like beast, the script beneath it unreadable even to Petunia's borrowed eyes, and a small crowd gathered around him, hushed and reverent, as the water shimmered where it touched the stone. Threshold and boundary, something in her supplied, unbidden, though she couldn't have said how she knew. This is where the doors were first drawn.
The book didn't linger there either. It followed the old inland roads east and south, deeper into the subcontinent, riding in the packs of traders who had no idea what they carried, only that it was old and clearly worth something — until it found a wandering ascetic sitting cross-legged beneath a broad-leafed tree on the banks of a wide, slow river, his begging bowl empty beside him, his eyes closed, utterly unmoved by the press of pilgrims coming and going around him. He never once opened his eyes to look at the spirits gathering at the water's edge — small, watchful, curious things — and yet he spoke to them anyway, low and even, as though carrying on a conversation that had never actually paused.
From the river plains it traveled on again, this time along the great trading roads that had only just begun to stitch the world together — merchant caravans, incense and silk and rumor, moving slowly north and east into a country of terraced hills and walled cities, until it came to rest in a cramped, ink-stained study, brushes and scrolls stacked in careful towers. A young man in scholar's robes copied characters by lamplight late into the night, the Vyrthangrim propped open beside him like any ordinary text he was memorizing for an exam. No one who saw him at his desk would have guessed he spoke to something that spoke back. Wen Zhi, the name arrived in her mind the way a word arrives when you already half-know it. He hid you as scholarship. Called it study, so no one asked why he never seemed to look anything up twice.
The roads that had carried the book east now carried it west again, back along the same caravan routes, deep into the heart of an empire of fire-temples and silk markets, to a woman with dark, sharp eyes haggling in a crowded market beneath a domed sky, gesturing over bolts of dyed cloth, her voice quick and clever, drawing a laughing crowd. Only Petunia, watching from wherever she was watching from, could see that the deal the woman was truly striking wasn't for silk at all — it was murmured under her breath to something unseen, something that flickered at the edge of her stall like heat off a summer road. Farah-Dukht. She called her bargains trade. No one questioned a shrewd merchant.
From Persia the roads bent further still, following trade routes that had grown, over centuries, long enough to reach lands of grey skies and colder stone, to a woman alone in a low stone cottage in a green, rain-soaked country, her hearth-fire the only warmth in the room, her hands folded around the same worn leather cover Petunia now held. She never looked up, never looked at the door, as though she had trained herself, over years, not to notice things — not the flicker at her window, not the villagers who crossed themselves when she passed on the road. She lived and died utterly alone, and something in the vision ached at the particular weight of that choice, offered up as much a warning as a memory.
The book didn't stay in that quiet green country for long. It was swept up again, this time by the vast, sudden roads that opened when half the known world came briefly, violently, under a single rule — roads that made it possible, for the first time in history, to travel from one end of the earth to the other and back within a single lifetime — carried by a merchant-scholar wrapped against a bitter wind, hunched over a lap-desk in the back of a swaying wagon somewhere on the endless grass of the steppe, recording the book's newest lessons in careful, cramped script by the light of a single lamp. He spoke to it the way a man speaks to an old travelling companion, familiar, unbothered, utterly unafraid, and when the wagon finally rolled to a stop somewhere near a walled city with sloped, tiled roofs, he handed the Vyrthangrim onward without ceremony, the way one hands over a well-worn tool.
From there it crossed a narrow strip of sea to an island kingdom of mist and pine, and found a young man in flowing robes sitting very still in a moonlit clearing not unlike the one Petunia knelt in now, while a nine-tailed fox with fur like white flame circled him at a wary distance, sniffing the air, amber eyes glinting with something between mischief and curiosity. He didn't reach for it. He simply waited, patient as stone, until at last the creature came close enough to press its nose to the back of his hand. Trust, Petunia understood, without being told. He didn't bargain for that one. He earned it.
The book crossed the water one final time, returning to the same wide, ancient country it had passed through so long before — older now, its walled cities grander, its winters longer. And the last vision came slower than all the rest, as though the book itself were reluctant to let it go: a young woman, no older than someone Petunia might have passed on the street and thought nothing of, dressed in fine silk robes, standing on the frozen bank of a river, watching a qilin dissolve into mist before her, its antlers glowing faint gold, its eyes full of a sorrow too old for words. She had a young face, unlined, but her eyes carried something much older than the rest of her — the particular stillness of someone who already understood things she shouldn't have, not yet, not at her age. She reached out one hand, as if to stop the creature leaving, and didn't. She only watched it go, and something in that stillness told Petunia, more clearly than anything else in the whole long unspooling story, that this young woman already knew she was the last. That there would be no keeper after her for a very long time.
The vision lingered there — her face, the falling snow, the empty space where the qilin had been — and then it stretched and thinned, the way the last image before sleep sometimes did, and what came after wasn't a person at all. It was the book itself: wrapped in oiled cloth, stowed in the dark hold of a ship bound west, crossing an ocean it had never once crossed before. Passed from hand to hand not as a chosen keeper's charge now but as a curiosity, a foreign oddity nobody troubled to open. Catalogued. Shelved. Forgotten. Shelved again, in smaller and smaller rooms, until at last it came to rest — dusty, silent, utterly unremarkable — between two larger books in a small library, in a small town, that hadn't existed yet when that young woman on the riverbank had watched her qilin disappear.
And then, a final flicker — her own face, pale and wide-eyed in that same small library, her finger bleeding from the cut, her breath hitching as the Vyrthangrim's power surged through her for the first time.
Vyrthangrim, a voice roared, ancient and endless, the name a thunderclap that shook her to her core, a declaration of its existence, its power, its eternity.
Petunia jolted back to the clearing, her body sprawling on the cold ground, the Vyrthangrim in her lap as she gasped for air. The sky above was now a deep, inky black, the stars scattered like pinpricks of light, the moon a faint crescent casting a pale glow over the clearing. The late afternoon had given way to late night, the vision so long, so vast, that hours had slipped away unnoticed, leaving her alone in the darkness of the forest. The air was colder now, the frost beneath her biting into her palms, the silence of the night broken only by the faint rustle of leaves in the wind.
The Elder Stag loomed above her, its glow steady, its eyes unblinking as it watched her struggle to sit up. Her chest heaved, her hands clutching the Vyrthangrim, the vision's vastness humbling her to her core. Nine lives, she realized slowly, counting back through what she'd just seen — nine keepers scattered across thousands of years and half the world, each one holding the exact weight she now held in her own two hands — and then five hundred years of nothing at all, until her. She saw herself as a dot in forever, a fleeting moment in the endless tapestry of the Vyrthangrim's existence, and the sheer scale of it left her speechless, her mouth opening and closing as she tried to find words, her eyes wide with awe behind the dark sunglasses.
Before she could speak, a voice rumbled from the Vyrthangrim, deep and dry, with a hint of impatience that made her flinch. "You are a sloth, Petunia," it said, its tone sharp, like a grumpy old man who'd been waiting too long, a hint of mockery in its words.