Chapter 142 Nothing is Harmless Part 2
It looked harmless, at first: leather, cracked and black, the edges scorched as if someone had tried, and failed, to burn it. No marks on the spine. Fern set it down and pushed it toward Daisy.
“Veilseeker’s Grimoire,” she said. “Written in blood by the first to touch the chain.”
Xeris exhaled, the sound more of a hiss than a breath. Daisy noticed the room temperature had gone up by at least 10 degrees.
Fern rested her hand on the book. “You open it, it’s yours. The chain in you will make it speak. You sure you want this?”
Daisy stared at the book, thinking of the visions: the throne, kneeling dead, the sense of being watched by something ancient and bored. She reached out.
Her fingers brushed the cover. At once, the binding writhed—as if every scar on its surface was a living vein. The book opened itself. Pages fluttered. The text on the first page crawled across the surface. Words shifted between languages until they settled on a script Daisy had never studied. Yet, as her eyes moved over the shapes, she found herself whispering a translation before she realized she knew it: “Bound in flesh, fed by memory.” Each character sharpened in her mind. The meaning landed with quiet violence.
She read.
She saw in diagrams and nightmares how the chain worked: every link a life, every life consumed to power the next. She saw flashes of the chain’s beginnings—mist-shrouded night, hands bleeding as they locked the first links together, born from desperation to bind a curse that preyed on their own children. The chain’s first victims were a village chosen to hold back something in the river; their stories were scorched out, but their pain was preserved in cold iron. The sickness that followed wore many faces, and as centuries passed, others were fastened to it, willingly and not, each new life burned away to keep the valley safe. Daisy saw cities flattened by the chain’s hunger, not armies. The daisies weren’t flowers, but keys: each petal a power point, each heart a trap.
Most of all, she saw the ritual.
The diagram took up two pages, rendered in ink strokes that looked suspiciously like dried blood. There were steps, circles, the binding of life to life. And at the center, always, a person. The text called it a “conduit.” Daisy recognized herself in every description. For a moment, her mind recoiled, tumbling with questions she could not avoid. Was one life worth the freedom of many? Would she save the world if it meant destroying everyone she loved? Or was it cowardice to hesitate? Which was worse: to choose sacrifice, or to know the price would one day be demanded by someone else? The ache in her chest grew sharp. She forced her eyes back to the page, searching for any escape from the balance between need and ruin.
She read on. There was a way to break the chain, to snap the world back—but it required sacrifice: not just power, but people bound to the conduit. As Daisy absorbed these words, a chill swept through her, the enormity of the cost pressing down on her chest. The prospect of their pain, their deaths, wrenching the chain apart filled her with a hollow dread, as if the very possibility of freedom was inseparable from overwhelming personal loss.
Daisy felt her stomach roll. She looked up at Fern.
“The ritual,” Daisy said, voice ragged. “It kills everyone close to me.”
Fern nodded, face blank. “It’s why the chain chooses the lonely, the desperate. Fewer links to cut.” For an instant, something flickered in her expression—a small tremor in her hand, her eyes lowering from Daisy’s. Fern’s next words came quieter, almost lost in the cold air. “That is how the world endures.”
Daisy slammed the book shut. The veins in her arms burned, and for a moment she saw a corona of blue fire around her own fingers. But as the heat flared, she felt something else gather inside her, cool and insistent—a shiver rising from deep within her bones, like water seeping through cracks in old stone. The pulse of blue fire danced above her knuckles, sharp as thunder, yet beneath it there was a steady, earthen surge—a memory of roots and rivers—the promise that whatever flames threatened, the earth and water in her might still bear her through. The elements warred beneath her skin, signaling not just destruction, but the uneasy possibility of renewal.
Xeris moved in, hand on her shoulder, the touch grounding her. “You don’t have to do it,” he murmured. “There are other ways.” His voice carried a fragile certainty, as if he had already imagined paths Daisy could not see—paths threaded with cunning, resistance, or the possibility of finding an old loophole buried beneath the curse. For a split second, she felt his hope fighting to reach her, stubborn and quietly fierce.
Fern shook her head. “No. There aren’t. Not unless you want to become the next root, as the Emperor did.” Her eyes slid away for a heartbeat, and in a voice lower than before, she added, “There was once one who chose otherwise, but no one remembers what became of them. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe that is a different kind of ending.”
Daisy set her jaw. “So every story ends the same way.”
Fern smiled, but it was the smile of a butcher for a lamb. “Only if you let it.”
Daisy stared at the book. She could feel it breathing now. The chain in her blood sang in perfect harmony with the curse bound inside the pages.
She looked at Xeris, saw the worry in his eyes, the feral tension in his grip.
She looked at her own hands, the darkness creeping ever upward.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
Fern gathered the book, slipped it back into the chest, and wiped the blood from the table with her sleeve. Her eyes lingered briefly on the stain. “We’ll talk again before you go,” she said, her voice almost wary. “You’ll want to see what became of those who tried to cheat the chain.” A shadow flickered across her features, and in the ensuing silence, Daisy sensed the presence of past failures—histories that served as warnings more than promises.
Daisy nodded. She turned, feeling every ounce of her own weight. Xeris stayed close, but didn’t speak.
The path back to the cottage was the same, but now the tunnels felt like arteries, every step a throb of possibility and doom.
By the time she emerged into daylight, Daisy’s head pounded with knowledge. She blinked against the brightness, then saw Oliver waiting for her, boots planted in the dirt, eyes bloodshot.
“Good talk?” he asked, casually.
Daisy managed a laugh, but it came out hollow. “You could say that.”
He saw her arm, the new constellation of black veins. He didn’t flinch. Instead, he put his hand over hers, warm and solid.
“We’re still with you,” he said.
She squeezed his hand, trying to believe it.
Behind her, Xeris stood in the sun, the heat rolling off his body in waves, eyes fixed on Daisy like she was the only star in his universe.
The chain hummed inside her, quiet as breath, its pulse threading through her veins. For a moment, beneath the surface of her skin, she felt the faint ticking of unseen links, each soft click echoing in the hollow between heartbeats.
She wasn’t sure she could break it.
But she would try.