Caldreth stepped forward to finish them, but Krim barred his path.

  "Wait," he ordered, his voice low and sharp.

  "It's wounded," Caldreth said, gripping his sword. "Move."

  "Whatever this is, it's spreading to him," Krim snapped, eyes gleaming with morbid curiosity. "This is important to witness, now wait."

  A guttural sound tore from its throat as black veins knotted beneath gray skin, spreading up the arm and around its neck like burrowing worms.

  The surviving grunt stepped toward his larger kin, reaching a talon out. It tucked its ears with a whine, concerned for the warrior. Thick, green froth bubbled between the warrior's teeth, dripping onto the ash. It lunged, ignoring a defensive swipe to its ribs, and bore the grunt to the ground. There was no hesitation. No recognition. Silence claimed the cavern as the grunt's throat was torn apart in a flash of fangs.

  "Bloodborne," Krim muttered. "Fast."

  The warrior rose from the mangled corpse. He turned, the grunt's blood dripping from his chin, and locked a mindless gaze onto Caldreth and Krim.

  Krim nodded, satisfied with his new information.

  "Alright," the necromancer said, stepping back. "Now you can kill it."

  Caldreth tightened his grip, accounting for the sudden clamminess across his fingers. His vision tunneled, the rest of the cavern blurring into a grey haze until only the arc of the enemy's blade remained. The cleaver's crushing weight descended in a silver blur.

  But his body lagged.

  He caught the blow late, his wrist rolling and flicking to guide the massive steel wide rather than stopping it cold. The impact sent a bone-deep shock through his heavy arms, yet as the blades slid apart, the vibration began to hum with a familiar rhythm.

  A fierce howl from the warrior gave way to a frenzied assault: a downward chop, a desperate backhand, and a final lunging thrust.

  Caldreth moved his body as fast as it would allow, the initial stiffness of resurrection burning away in the heat of the exchange. His prowess outpaced the threat within moments. The warrior's aggression was raw and unstructured, the combat equivalent of a man screaming into a gale. Caldreth read every strike before it arrived and answered each one with a calculated rebuttal.

  He should have ended it then.

  Instead, something stopped him. Not hesitation, something older than that. A heat that rose not from grief or memory but from somewhere deeper and prior, a bedrock warmth that had been there long before anyone had taught him what to do with it. He didn't know what it was. He only knew that the moment steel rang against steel, it grew brighter, and the moment he stepped back from the fight, it dimmed.

  So he didn't step back.

  An overextension left the warrior's chest wide open. Caldreth's blade was already halfway there, a strike destined for the heart, and he pulled it. Not out of mercy. Out of a need he couldn't name, a pull toward the next impact, and the one after that. The trading of blows sent a resonance through his bones that felt like recognition.

  He stepped inside a clumsy overhead bash, the whip of the enemy's steel whispering past his ear.

  Sloppy.

  But he let the next one come close too. Closer than he needed to.

  He sidestepped the following strike and drove his sword upward. The blade punched through the warrior's sternum and severed the spine with a wet crunch.

  The ember went out.

  Caldreth stood in the sudden, burning silence as the warrior collapsed in a heap of limbs and black gore. The resonance in his bones faded to nothing. His fingers tingled, a phantom buzzing that had nowhere left to go.

  He frowned at the ruined body at his feet.

  "Not enough," he whispered. The words surprised him. He wasn't talking about the warrior's skill.

  Krim shook his head. He crouched beside the corpse, a scalpel appearing in his hand as if by magic. With a practiced flick, he opened the warrior's skin, holding a glass phial under the wound.

  Thick, black gore oozed into the glass, shot through with threads of pulsing green. Caldreth swiped his blade down, causing the black ichor to slide free and splatter to the ground.

  "This appears to be an infection," Krim said. "Viral. Bloodborne. No doubt." He corked the phial, tucking it away with reverent care. "It moves like fire through dry wood. Bodily fluids spread it into the blood, and the blood into the marrow. This doesn't appear in nature without a hand to craft it."

  A sudden, agonizing hunger tore open in the center of his chest. It sat deep in his marrow, a heat radiating from the warrior's remains that demanded to be answered. At his side, the tome heaved in a low, expectant beat that matched the thudding of his own heart. The blood on the floor was tainted, twisted by a hand of malice, but to him, it was vital.

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  His knee hit the stone before he told it to. Caldreth looked down at his own leg, confused, then at his arm as it swung forward from his side. He tried to pull it back. It kept moving. Not against resistance, worse than that. As if the signal from his mind simply wasn't arriving. His sword slipped from his fingers, hitting the stone floor with a discordant clatter.

  The sound cut through Krim's monologue, snapping his attention to the sharp noise. Caldreth watched his own fingers spread above the black-green pool, his face close enough to the sludge to smell it, feeling the particular horror of a man trapped in a body that had stopped consulting him.

  "Caldreth. Don't touch that. It's-"

  His palms hit the sludge.

  Krim lunged, hand outstretched. "Caldreth, stop!"

  A pulse of force rippled from the tome, silent, but crushing in its immediacy. The air in the cavern thickened into a crushing weight that anchored Krim where he stood.

  For the first time, the necromancer's clinical mask shattered. His pupils needle-thin, a dry rattling gasp escaping his throat as his violet gaze fixed on the shivering leather of the book. Who made you?

  The message was unmistakable: Do not interfere.

  Heat crawled through Caldreth's veins, sharp and wrong, spreading from his arms into his chest. He stood up, the last of the black ichor vanishing into his skin as the warrior's flesh withered into a grey, papery husk. Warm blight swirled within him, a chaotic current of green and black racing through his veins. He waited for the tome to rip the stolen essence from his marrow and feed as it had done before.

  Instead, his body began to burn.

  The tome released him. He glared at the floating grimoire, his fingers curling into fists as his veins began to sear.

  "What are you waiting for?" Caldreth spat through gritted teeth, his voice a rasp of pain. "Remove this filth from me!"

  The pressure within him was agonizing. Caldreth's muscles locked in a silent scream, his vision blurring as his body began to reject the blight. Black and green fluid began to leak from his pores, bubbling and hissing as it made contact with his skin. Caldreth turned his head toward the necromancer, his eyes wide and frantic.

  "Krim... what is... what's happening?"

  Krim didn't answer; he was already backing away, eyes fixed on the shimmering, corrosive heat radiating from Caldreth's skin

  "I... I don't..." Krim stammered, his usual composure dissolving into a stutter. He didn't finish the thought. As the bubbling bile grew louder, the necromancer turned and scrambled behind a thick spire of rock, pressing his back against the cold stone to put a physical barrier between himself and whatever Caldreth was becoming.

  The pressure broke. Corrupted blood burst from his skin in a fine spray, hissing as it struck the stone.

  Krim waited a beat, then another. His fear had already begun to sour into a cold, prickly irritation. He cursed his negligence; he knew better. A living Sangrathi within his grasp, reduced to a pile of slop. He should have watched his prize more closely. At the very least, he still had the vials of Morvain's blood tucked into his belt, a consolation prize to take back to the Necropolis.

  He rounded the corner fully, expecting to find nothing more than a localized disaster of gore and black sludge smeared across the sand.

  Instead, he found Caldreth lying on his side. A slow, ragged cough sputtered from the boy's mouth, sending a final puff of steam into the air.

  Krim stopped dead, his eyes widening in genuine surprise.

  "You lived?" Krim asked, his voice a mix of disbelief and begrudging awe. He stepped closer, looking down at the ashen youth who should have been nothing more than slop. "That's surprising. I was certain you were about to explode."

  Caldreth remained curled on the stone, his fingers twitching to find purchase on the floor and haul himself upwards.

  "I am..." Caldreth rasped, his grey eyes sharpening as they locked onto the necromancer. "Whole."

  The tome drifted in front of Caldreth until it hung suspended in front of his face. With a crack, the leather cover snapped open.

  The blight is denied.

  Tainted blood is rejected.

  The words drove into his skull as much as the parchment. His breath came in gasps, teeth still bared from the unexpected reaction.

  More lines followed, slower.

  The lesson requires a toll: Half of the current harvest.

  Caldreth froze, his eyes scanning the red script in his mind.

  "What are you on about?" he rasped, his voice thick with confusion. Caldreth narrowed his eyes, staring up at the floating artifact. Twice now, he had touched the blood only to be swept away by a trance.

  The tome pulsed once, a slow, patient garnet light. New ink began to coil across the page, forming words that resonated with a cold, transactional clarity.

  The vessel and the pages are one.

  Feed me or suffer.

  "Vessel? Is this why you've been following me?"

  Krim scoffed. "You're just now questioning why this grimoire has been following you? Of course you're its vessel, you fool. You owe it a debt. It brought you back from the dead."

  The harvest is yours to spend.

  Siphon. Feed. Ascend.

  Caldreth pushed himself into a sitting position, his boots scraping against the stone as he found his balance. He stared at the floating artifact.

  "You require blood, and I get power in return?" Caldreth asked.

  The tome let out a low, vibrating rumble that made the air in the cavern shimmer.

  "And what about the blight?" Caldreth gestured to the sizzling mess on the floor. "I am not keen on repeating that experience."

  For half of the current harvest, I will show you how to strip the rot.

  Caldreth narrowed his eyes. "You specified that only this harvest costs half. What happens after?"

  The tome rumbled again, the sound more predatory this time.

  A tithe of ten percent on all future harvests.

  Krim, who had been crouching just over Caldreth's shoulder, finally spoke up, his voice hushed and hurried.

  "Boy, I wouldn't try to barter with that thing. You're debating terms with a sentient grimoire that dragged you back from the aether. Neither of us knows its true capacity, and frankly, you have no leverage here but the air in your lungs, and even that might be a loan. You are a dead man walking on a debt you cannot settle. Take the deal while your skin still fits."

  Caldreth pursed his lips, his gaze shifting from the necromancer's frantic shadow to the garnet pulse of the tome. The weight of the debt Krim described pressed against his ribs, heavier than the steel he'd just battled against.

  "Ten percent," Caldreth muttered, the words tasting of iron and ash. "A fair price for not exploding, I suppose. Let's begin."