The Summoner's Bargain

The Blackwood University library closed at midnight, but the restricted archives in the sub-basement never truly slept. Dust motes danced in the amber glow of my desk lamp, caught like spirits in the stale air that hadn't been disturbed in decades. I shouldn't have been there—not at two in the morning, not with the stolen master key burning like a brand in my pocket, and certainly not with the ancient tome spread before me like a wound in reality itself.

Codex Tenebris. The Book of Shadows.

My dissertation advisor, Professor Ashford, had mentioned it only once, his voice dropping to a whisper in the Gothic reading room upstairs. "Some knowledge is forbidden for good reason, Miss Thorne," he'd said, his pale fingers trembling as they traced the air where the book's title would have been. "The Codex Tenebris was sealed away in 1887 after three students vanished. The fourth went mad, speaking only of doors that should never be opened and debts that could never be repaid."

I should have heeded his warning. But curiosity had always been my fatal flaw, and the promise of occult knowledge for my thesis on Victorian supernatural practicesI had proven too intoxicating to resist.

The leather binding was the color of dried blood, its surface ridged with symbols that seemed to shift when I wasn't looking directly at them. The pages whispered as I turned them, revealing illuminations painted in inks that couldn't possibly exist—colors that hurt to perceive, that reached past my eyes and caressed something deeper, something hungry in my chest.

I found the ritual on page 237.

A Summoning Most Profane, the Gothic script announced. To call forth that which dwells Beyond, to bind a servant of the Infernal Courts, to trade flesh for knowledge, blood for power, and in the final accounting, one's very soul for pleasures that transcend mortality.

My academic training screamed at me to close the book, to return it to its locked vault, to flee this place and never return. But my fingers—those traitors—traced the words of the incantation, feeling the syllables pulse beneath my touch like a heartbeat.

What harm could it do to simply read it? The skeptic in me didn't truly believe in demons or summoning circles or any of it. This was research, nothing more. A historical curiosity, a relic of superstitious times when people believed words held power and blood could open doors.

How magnificently, catastrophically wrong I was.

I cleared a space on the marble floor between the towering shelves. The pattern in the Codex was intricate—a seven-pointed star contained within three concentric circles, with sigils at each intersection that looked less like writing and more like screams given form. I drew them in chalk stolen from the Philosophy department, my hand steady despite the cold that seemed to emanate from the stone itself.