Albus potter's Arc

Chapter 6 of 9

The book lay open on the desk, its final page joined at last. Albus had read the rite a hundred times since the vault. Every year of his life would cost another life. He hunted the words for a gap, a hidden clause, some way to pay the price without a stranger dying. He found none. The sprite watched from the rim of the inkwell, her wings catching the candlelight. She had flown for him past the Warden's guards. She had raked a scar under the Warden's eye to free him. He had traded a relic to buy her back. Now he looked at her small bright face and knew the thing he had been hiding from himself. He loved her. He had loved her for weeks and had called it something safer. "If I cast this," he said, "someone dies each year so I can keep breathing." She lifted off the inkwell and hovered close, her feet brushing his knuckle. "And I would watch you grow old and die while I lived on. Bought with strangers' blood." He understood then why the rite disgusted him. It was not only the dead. It was the future it forced on him. Endless years. Her gone. Faces on a list he would never stop adding to. Albus carried the book outside. A cherry tree stood in bloom, its branches heavy with pink flowers. He had sat under it many nights, reading by candle, dreaming of forever. He knelt in the fallen petals and set the book on the ground. He did not burn it. Burning felt too easy, and the knowledge would still live in his head. Instead he tore the final page free. Without it the rite could not be cast. Anyone who stole the book again would find only a broken thing, the same trap the Warden had once set. He folded the page small. The sprite landed on his shoulder. "I could hide this where no one finds it," he said. "Or I could keep it, and be tempted every night for the rest of my life." He held the page to the candle. The old paper caught. The luminous symbols flared blue, then curled to ash. He watched the last mark die. The price could not be paid now. Not by him. Not by anyone reading this book. What remained was the truth he had chased for years. Immortality was real. He had touched it and let it go. But he still did not know why the rite worked, or whether another path existed that took no life at all. The Warden knew more than the book held. She always had. The sprite pressed against his cheek. Albus closed the ruined book. "There is another way," he told her. "There has to be. And she is the only one who knows it." He stood, ash on his fingers, and turned toward the vault gate.