Albus potter's Arc

Chapter 5 of 9

Albus spread the stolen book on his desk and lit a second candle. Days had passed since he fled the vault. He had copied every symbol he knew onto scrap paper and pinned the sheets to the wall. Now he worked line by line, matching the marks in the book to his notes. The sprite perched on the inkwell, wings still. Slowly the symbols began to speak. He learned the rite named a price. He learned each name in the margins belonged to someone who had paid it. But the sense broke off at the torn edge. The last page held the cost, and the last page was gone. "I can read the rest," Albus told the sprite. "I cannot finish it without the page." The tiny creature lifted from the inkwell and hovered near his face. It had spied for him before. He wrote a short message on a fresh strip of paper. He did not send it. He knew where the page was, and no messenger could steal it back. He went to the vault gate himself. The Warden waited inside, calm as a still pond, a thin scar under one eye where the sprite had raked her. She did not reach for a knife this time. "You understand now," she said. It was not a question. "I understand most of it," Albus said. "Give me the last page." She drew a weathered sheet from her sleeve. Faint symbols glowed along its edge. She held it out, then paused. "Read it here. If you still want the page after, you may keep it." Albus took the sheet. His hands shook. He read the torn page against the book's final broken lines. The two fit like a wound closing. The rite worked. Immortality was real. And the last page named its price in plain script. The rite did not stop death. It moved death. Each year the caster lived, another life ended in his place. The margins were not a list of the immortal. They were a list of the dead. Albus looked up. The Warden watched his face change. "Now you know why I removed it," she said. "Some doors should be read all the way through before they open." He could have dropped the page. He did not. He folded it and slid it into his coat beside the book. "I keep it," he said. "You gave your word." She let him pass. At the gate she called after him. "You have the whole rite now. But knowing the cost is not the same as choosing to pay it, or to stop the ones who will." Albus walked out with the page whole in his pocket and the truth heavy in his chest. He had chased immortality for years. He had never once asked who died so a man could live. Now he knew. And now he had to decide what to do with it.