Chaos Chronomancer's Arc

Chapter 9 of 9

The Chronomancer left the altar with the grimoire under one arm and the disc untouched behind them. Their own written line still held the last page. Past it, the book was blank. They needed instructions the grimoire no longer gave. They walked the root paths back to the clock-faced tower they kept at the forest's edge, unlocked the iron door, and climbed to the upper stacks where the oldest books were kept behind glass. They pulled a book they had not opened in two hundred years. It was bound in cured skin, and the face on its cover moved when they set it down. Its teeth grinned. Its red eyes tracked their hand. This was not a timeline book. It was older than seams, older than splits. It taught summoning, not division. If the grimoire would not tell them what came next, they would ask something that predated the grimoire. They set both books side by side on the reading slab, the encrypted one open to their defiant line, the flesh-bound one closed and watching. They read for three hours. The summoning the Necronomicon offered was simple in shape and ugly in cost. Call a witness from outside time. Bind it to a small shape so it could not eat the room. Ask one question. Pay in memory. The Chronomancer thought about the disc on the altar and almost laughed. Everything today wanted their memory. They chose the smallest shape the book allowed: a cat. They drew the circle in salt and iron filings on the slab floor, cut their palm, and spoke the six words. The air in the circle folded. A green cat sat inside it, chartreuse fur standing in wet spikes, yellow eyes too round. Tentacles grew from its jaw where whiskers should have been, and more curled from its shoulders and flanks. It looked at the Chronomancer with the patience of something that had been waiting a long time to be asked. "One question," it said. The voice came from under the floor. The Chronomancer set the encrypted grimoire in front of the cat and pointed at the blank page after their line. "What does rewriting history actually require?" The cat leaned forward and licked the page. Where its tongue passed, ink rose out of the paper as if it had always been there. Not future instructions. A list of ingredients. Seven names. The seventh was their own. The cat sat back. The Chronomancer read the list twice, then closed the book. The price came due at once — a clean strip of memory pulled out of them, and they knew only that something was gone by the shape of the hole. They did not know what they had lost. They knew what they had gained. To rewrite history, they would have to spend six other lives and then themselves. The grimoire was full again, and every page after this one had their name at the bottom.