(Updates everyday)
Power demands what it's owed, and souls are its favorite currency.
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When museum curator, Lena Goodwin, receives an anonymous package containing damning evidence of a mistake she thought she buried years ago, her carefully built...
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Lena sat at her work desk, her head bowed over a mess of notes, books, and old papers. Amongst them, in the upper right, a solarae lamp casted a small pool of light. Barely enough to make out all the words on every page, as if struggling to keep the darkness of the night at bay.
The shadows of the room wisped in and out, like it could detect what she was trying to do with such little light. Not that it was a secret, but it was late. She should really be in bed, sleeping, but her mind was heavy with unknowns.
She exhaled slowly and ran her fingers through her hair. None of it - what she had read and written - made much sense. She had hoped something would jump out at her, that with a clearer head she would be able to understand the nonsense she wrote years ago, but nothing came, just like back then.
She had spent the last few hours since returning from that sham of a deal, which infuriated her to a million degrees, going over old notebooks. She had glared at Hugh with that fiery intensity, but he was as expressionless as ever.
That was the least of her concerns now though. Her notebook, one of several that she had filled out years ago when the Codex first came into the museum's possession, was at the forefront. All she had jotted were fragmented ideas, scattered theories, and vague references about the artifact she had briefly looked into. Positive that she hadn't even scratched the surface of what it was. She only grazed the top of an iceberg miles deep in water.
She read over the words again, repeating them softly to herself.
"Alchemical involvement is implied but not verified. Possible link to ritual sacrifice."
Now, with the help of Hugh, she knew she had been correct on all three of those things. The ritual sacrifice was a gruesome process to unlock the book, to be able to read it and possess the power within.
Hugh had said Bradley had the eighth symbol etched into his chest over his heart, but as far as Lena had heard, he was only the seventh body to recently be found in the past few months.
Meaning whoever had been the first was a mystery. Who knew when they had died? Could have been a year ago, five years, maybe more? There was no way of knowing when without in-depth research and hacking into the homicide database construed by a faction of the Nightguard that looked into mysterious deaths.
But, doing that would make Lena a criminal. Then again, she was well on her way to becoming one being around Hugh every so often. He was right on that end.
She sighed, flipping a page in her notebook to a section full of disjointed symbols and half-drawn diagrams. Her attempt at translating the symbols.
On the Codex, they were all jumbled together. She had been in such a rush back then to get rid of it, she never gave what was on the cover the proper detail and attention it needed to untangle the shapes and transcribe them into what they actually were.
