Venomcodex's Arc

Chapter 1 of 4

The pits started at the tree line and pointed straight at the library door. Venomcodex counted them from the high window: seven holes, each one wider than the last, each rimmed with green rot. Something was digging its way toward the vaults, and the vaults held the knowledge that had leaked out of Venomcodex once before, a long time ago, and killed things that should not have died. It could not happen twice. Venomcodex uncoiled from the reading dais and slid down the stairs, scales clicking against the stone. The cipher hummed in the deep hall. When it worked, it made a low, steady sound, like a held breath. Every glyph on the shelves was a load-bearing piece of the lock. Venomcodex had built the whole system after the leak, filter by filter, from nothing. A worthy reader could decode it. Anything else would find only noise. That was the point. The hum broke. A tremor came up through the floor. Green light flared at the far end of the hall, and the ebony body of the hunger entity pushed through the wall, scales dragging, eyes like two lit lamps. It was a serpent shape, but wrong, cobbled from something older. It had been feeding on its way here. It wanted the raw files under the vaults. "Move," said a voice behind Venomcodex. Void stood in the archway with his sword low. Mary was a step behind him, knife loose in her hand, crown catching the green light. Chao DeVoid leaned in the doorframe past them, arms crossed. "We tracked it from the pits," Void said. "It slipped us twice." "Then hold the door," Venomcodex said. "I need one minute at the console." Venomcodex coiled toward the black altar in the center of the hall. The clean encryption would not hold; the entity already knew the shape of the lock. So Venomcodex did the thing it had sworn never to do again. It cut a flaw into the cipher on purpose. A glitch key, buried inside the code as a broken tooth, unreadable to anything that read the code correctly. Only a mind that noticed the wrongness and asked why could turn it. "You are damaging your own filter," Chao DeVoid said from the door. He did not sound impressed. "That is what filters cost," Venomcodex said, and pushed the key in. The files folded in on themselves. The hum returned, lower now, off by one note. The hunger entity struck the vault door, bit down, and got nothing. It screamed once and collapsed into wet ash. Mary looked at the ash and said, "It will come back hungrier." Venomcodex knew she was right. The vault was safe. The cipher was not clean anymore. Somewhere in the code was a small, deliberate wound, and Venomcodex would have to decide, soon, who in this room was worthy enough to be told where.