Ink and Ashes

A Hell's Broker Bonus Story

Seven years before the Codex found me, I thought I understood what burned meant.

I was twenty-one and stupid enough to believe that knowledge could save people. That if I just learned enough, accumulated enough power, I could fix the broken machinery of the world one contract at a time. The idealism hadn't been beaten out of me yet. I still thought the system could be reformed instead of razed.

The client was a mortal academic named Dr. Elisabeth Thorne, a linguistics professor at Miskatonic who specialized in dead languages and dying civilizations. She'd inherited a manuscript from her great-aunt's estate, bound in what looked like human skin and written in script that hurt to look at directly. The words crawled across the pages like living things, rearranging themselves when she wasn't watching.

"It's driving me insane," she confessed during our meeting at a coffee shop in Salem, otherwise known as Arkham in the Broker community. Her hands shook as she slid a photograph of the first page across the table. "I can almost read it, but every time I think I understand, the meaning slips away. I've started having dreams about burning libraries and women screaming in languages I don't recognize."

The photograph made my teeth ache. The script was pre-Codex, but older than anything I'd seen in Eizek's archives. Symbols that looked like they'd been burned into the page rather than written, leaving char marks that seemed to breathe when I stared too long.

"This isn't a translation job," I told her. "This is an exorcism. Maybe an execution. That manuscript isn't just written in a dead language. It's written in a dying one. The words are still actively dying, and they're taking pieces of reality with them."

Her face went pale, but she didn't back down. "Can you help me?"

I should have said no. Should have told her to burn the thing and salt the ashes. But the symbols were beautiful in their wrongness, and I was young enough to mistake curiosity for courage.

"I'll need to read it in its native environment," I said. "The Burnt Archive. It's a fragmented realm where destroyed knowledge goes to die. If this manuscript exists there, I can decode it without the words killing us both."

What I didn't tell her was that the Burnt Archive was Council territory, monitored and patrolled by their enforcers. What I didn't know was that someone had already reported my interest in the manuscript to the appropriate authorities.

The crossing point was in the basement of the Widener Library at Harvard, behind a door marked "Authorized Personnel Only" that opened onto seventeen different realities depending on who turned the handle. I used a bone key Eizek had given me for emergencies, and stepped through into the sound of screaming paper.

The Burnt Archive stretched in all directions, a infinite city of charred libraries and smoldering universities. Books flew through the air like dying birds, their pages falling like black snow. The sky was the color of ash, and the air tasted of knowledge dying on thousands of tongues.

I'd been walking for maybe twenty minutes, following the manuscript's psychic signature through the maze of burned shelves, when she appeared.

Lilith dropped from a fire escape three stories above, landing in a crouch that should have shattered her knees. Instead, she unfolded like liquid shadow, all black leather and predatory grace. Dark hair fell across shoulders that could have been carved from marble, and when she looked up at me, her eyes were the color of winter storms.

"Larissa Sabine Osborn," she said, and my name sounded like a weapon in her mouth. "You're trespassing in Council territory."

I kept my hands visible but ready. The ink under my skin hummed with potential violence, and the knife in my boot was blessed with enough iron to cut through most supernatural armor. "I'm here on legitimate business. Academic research."

"You're here hunting a manuscript that the Council has classified as existentially dangerous." She moved like a dancer, circling me with predatory patience. "My orders are to eliminate you before you can complete the translation."

"Your orders can kiss my ass."

She smiled then, quick and sharp as a blade. "I was hoping you'd say something like that."

The first exchange lasted maybe thirty seconds. She was faster than anything human had a right to be, but I'd been raised by imps who considered violence a form of poetry. Her first strike would have taken my head off if I hadn't ducked and rolled, coming up with the iron knife in my hand and a burning glyph already bleeding through my shirt.

She caught my wrist before the blade could connect, her grip like a steel vise. Up close, I could smell leather and gunpowder and something wilder underneath. Something that made the predator in my blood sit up and take notice.

"You're good," she said, her breath warm against my ear. "But I'm better."

Then the library around us erupted into flame.

The books had been watching our fight, and violence in the Archive was like blood in shark-infested waters. They tore free from the shelves like dying birds taking flight, but these birds were made of leather and rage. They ignited midair and fell like meteors, each impact spraying embers and razor-sharp pages that cut like shrapnel.

A flaming codex slammed into my shoulder, burning through my jacket and searing the skin beneath. I rolled away cursing as Lilith shot a tumbling grimoire mid-fall, scattering it in a shower of sparks that lit up her predatory smile.

But the books weren't done with us.

A massive figure began forming from stacked encyclopedias and bound volumes, stitched together with torn parchment sinew that writhed like living muscle. It rose twenty feet tall, a humanoid construct of pure bibliographic fury. When it opened what might have been a mouth, it vomited gouts of black ink that sizzled like acid where they hit the ground.

My tattoos flared as I threw up a protective ward, the burning glyph on my shoulder channeling power through my entire ink network. Lilith took a glancing hit from the ink spray, the liquid fire eating through her jacket sleeve and staining her arm with burns that looked like text written in pain.

"Back to back!" she shouted, and I didn't argue.

We fought like we'd trained together for years instead of minutes. I channeled burning glyphs through my hands, blasting holes through the construct's torso while Lilith emptied her clip into its head. Pages exploded in wet ink shrapnel, each shot sending torrents of dying words cascading around us like black rain.

When the construct finally collapsed, we were both breathing hard and covered in literary gore.

"Truce?" I called over the sound of burning knowledge.

"Temporary," she called back, reloading with supernatural speed. "We get out of this alive, then I kill you."

"Fair enough."

We ran through the burning stacks like the world was ending, which it basically was. The Archive was collapsing around us, reality buckling under the weight of too much dying knowledge. Ancient texts turned to ash and blew away in hurricane winds that smelled like the last words of dead civilizations.

I followed the manuscript's call through the chaos, Lilith covering our retreat with supernatural accuracy. She moved like she'd been born to this kind of violence, every shot calculated, every step part of a larger dance. When a sentient atlas tried to wrap itself around my throat, she put a bullet through its spine without breaking stride.

"There," I gasped, pointing at a building that looked like it had been constructed entirely from charred card catalogs. "The manuscript's in there. I can feel it."

"We need to get out of here," Lilith said, her eyes scanning the collapsing Archive around us. "This whole realm is coming apart. That building won't be standing much longer."

"I'm not leaving without that manuscript," I shot back, wiping ink-blood from a cut on my cheek. "Dr. Thorne is counting on me, and I don't abandon contracts."

"Your client will be dead if you are. We leave. Now."

"No." I started toward the building, my boots crunching on scattered pages. "I came here to do a job, and I'm going to finish it."

Lilith grabbed my arm, her grip like steel. "You stubborn witch. Do you have any idea what that building contains? What it could do to you?"

I turned to face her, seeing something shift in her winter-storm eyes. "Then come with me. Make sure I don't do anything too stupid."

For a moment, she just stared at me. Then something cracked in her expression, like ice breaking over deep water.

"I should put a bullet in your head right now," she said quietly. "That's what my orders say."

"But?"

"But I'm tired of following orders that make me burn things I want to understand." She released my arm and checked her weapon. "If we're doing this, we do it fast. And if you get us both killed, I'm haunting you."

The building was dying more slowly than the rest of the Archive, which meant it was probably the most dangerous thing for miles. We approached it like defusing a bomb, every step measured, every breath calculated.

Inside, the manuscript waited in a reading room that existed in seventeen different states simultaneously. I could see all the versions layered over each other like double-exposed photographs: the same room in the Library of Alexandria as the flames took it, in the University of Córdoba when the Christians burned eight centuries of Islamic scholarship, in Nalanda when the armies came and turned wisdom into ash.

In each version, the manuscript told the same story with different words. In each version, two women chose love over loyalty and burned the world to save each other.

"It's a love story," I whispered, my hands shaking as I reached for the nearest version. "All of it. Every apocalypse, every burned library, every civilization that chose ignorance over truth. But it wasn't just love that ended their worlds. It was love that made them refuse loyalty, refuse tradition. They chose each other instead of obedience. And the world burned for it."

Lilith had gone very still beside me. "That's why they sent me. They're afraid I'd see myself in this story."

I read the words that burned themselves into my vision, understanding flooding through me like revelation. "They don't have names anymore. They gave them up. Became something new together, something that existed between the spaces where loyalty ends and love begins."

The room shuddered around us, reality stabilizing as the manuscript's message finally found its audience. The seventeen versions collapsed into one, leaving us alone in a simple reading room that smelled of old paper and possibilities.

"Every page I burned for them was a piece of myself," Lilith said quietly, sinking into a cushioned couch along the wall. "Watching you read, watching you claim those words... I realized I didn't want to be their weapon anymore."

I sat next to her, the quiet settling around us like fallen snow. The manuscript's pages had scattered across the floor, their burning words finally at peace.

"I don't remember the last time I touched someone without orders telling me why," she admitted, and there was something raw in her voice that made my chest tight.

"Then don't think about orders," I said gently. "Think about what you want."

She looked at me then, really looked, and I saw something crack open in her carefully constructed armor. "I want to stop being what other people made me."

"What do you want to be instead?"

"Yours," she whispered, and then her mouth was on mine.

She kissed like she fought, with total commitment and devastating precision. Her hands fisted in my jacket, pulling me closer as I forced her against the back of the couch.

"Are you sure?" I asked against her throat, tasting salt and desperation.

"I've never been sure of anything in my life," she said, her hands already working at the buckles of my jacket. "But I know I don't want to wake up tomorrow wondering what this would have felt like."

I helped her strip away the layers of leather and kevlar and pretense until she was naked in the Archive's dying light. She was beautiful in the way that dangerous things are beautiful, all lean muscle and hidden softness. Her body told stories in scars and shadows, each mark a choice she'd made to survive in a world that demanded perfection.

When I kissed the hollow of her throat, she made a sound like breaking glass. When I traced the line of her collarbone with my tongue, her hands tangled in my hair hard enough to hurt. She tasted like smoke and promises, like the space between lightning and thunder.

Around us, pages continued to fall like black snow, and I could swear the Archive itself was listening to every gasp, every whispered word. The dying knowledge seemed to hush in reverence, as if it recognized something being born in the space between our bodies.

"Tell me what you want," I murmured against her ear, and she shivered.

"Everything," she breathed. "I want everything with you."

So I gave it to her. My hands mapped the geography of her desire, learning the places that made her arch and gasp and beg. I traced patterns on her skin that had nothing to do with ink or magic and everything to do with the ancient art of making another person come apart in your arms.

She kissed me like she was erasing orders carved into her bones, each touch a small rebellion against everything she'd been trained to be. When I slipped my fingers between her legs, she was already wet, already ready. She rocked against my hand with desperate hunger, her nails digging crescents into my shoulders as I worked her higher.

"Please," she whispered, and I'd never heard anything more honest. Every gasp felt like a contract tearing loose, like chains snapping one by one.

I replaced my fingers with my mouth, tasting her desire on my tongue. She cried out, one hand fisted in my hair, the other gripping the edge of the couch like an anchor. The words dimming on the scattered pages around us seemed to pulse in rhythm with her breathing, as if the Archive was synchronizing itself to her pleasure.

I took my time, learning the rhythm that made her thighs shake, the pressure that made her back bow like a drawn string. When she came, it was with my name on her lips and my heart racing in time with hers. I held her through the aftershocks, pressing kisses to the inside of her thighs as she trembled back to earth.

"My turn," she said when she could speak again, and there was something predatory in her smile that made heat pool low in my belly.

She rose, graceful as a cat and with casual strength, lifted me onto the table like I weighed nothing. Her mouth found mine in a kiss that tasted like gratitude and hunger, her hands already exploring the ink-marked landscape of my body.

"These are beautiful," she murmured, tracing the spiral sigils that wound around my ribs. "Do they hurt?"

"Not anymore," I said, and it was true. Her touch transformed the old pain into something else, something that felt like possibility.

She took her time undressing me, each revealed piece of skin treated like a gift. When she finally had me naked and spread beneath her on the reading table, she looked at me like I was something precious and dangerous.

"You're perfect," she said, and I almost laughed.

"I'm a walking disaster with trust issues and a tendency toward self-destruction."

"Perfect," she repeated, and then her mouth was on my breast and I forgot how to form coherent thoughts.

She worshipped my body with religious intensity, learning every sensitive spot, every place that made me gasp and writhe. The scattered pages whispered around us like fallen leaves, their dying words creating a strange chorus to our lovemaking.

When she finally settled between my legs, I was already beyond desperate, beyond anything but the need for her touch. She took me apart with surgical precision, her tongue and fingers working in harmony to build pleasure so intense it bordered on pain.

I came twice under her ministrations, each orgasm crashing through me like a storm surge, leaving me gasping and shaking in its wake. Around us, the last of the manuscript's words faded to silence, as if our union had given them permission to finally rest.

Afterward, we lay tangled together on the reading table, skin cooling in the Archive's artificial twilight. The manuscript's pages had settled around us like fallen leaves, their burning words finally quiet.

"The Council will know you touched that manuscript," Lilith said eventually, her head pillowed on my shoulder. "They'll hunt you harder now. They'll send worse than me."

"Then let them," I said, tracing the line of her cheekbone. "I've already decided which stories I want to live."

She lifted her head to look at me, winter-storm eyes serious in the lamplight. "That sounds like the most dangerous thing you could possibly say."

"Good," I replied. "I don’t do safe."

She smiled then, quick and fierce and beautiful. "That sounds perfect."

We dressed slowly, reluctantly returning to the roles the world expected us to play. But something had changed between us in that reading room, something that couldn't be undone by duty or distance or the weight of old loyalties.

As we prepared to leave the Archive, Lilith caught my hand.

"This isn't over," she said, and it sounded like a promise.

"No," I agreed, squeezing her fingers. "It's just beginning."

We left the Burnt Archive through different exits, returning to our separate lives and conflicting loyalties. But we carried pieces of each other with us, burned into memory like words on parchment.

I would remember that some stories are worth burning the world to tell.

But that night in the Archive, drunk on possibility and each other's skin, we were just two women who'd found something worth fighting for in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

The manuscript's words had finally gone quiet, their message delivered. Love was the only fire worth starting. The rest was just ashes.