The Heart's Dark Bidding

Story So Far

In a crowded mildew-smelling auction house, a figure with only fifteen silver and a forbidden tome hidden under their coat watched the auctioneer open bidding on Lot forty-seven, a heart preserved in amber resin with six curved hornlike protrusions sealed in a glass case, as wealthy bidders drove the price past ninety silver. The figure cut their left palm, pressed blood to the tome's page, and spoke softly, and the bidding stopped as every person in the room went slack and motionless. With the room stilled, the figure crossed the floor, cracked the glass case's seal with a dagger heel, took the warm resin-coated heart, wrapped it in herb cloth, tucked it into a hip pouch, and walked out the front doors into the cold night, leaving the auctioneer, bidders, and door attendant motionless behind them.

Three flights up in a one-room apartment rented under a false name as a botanist, the figure had prepared a nine-foot circle of ash and powdered bone marked with twelve symbols and dried herbs. They set the heart on the circle's center stone, opened the tome to the final passage, lit the last candle, and read aloud, then pressed their cut palm to the heart and spoke the final lines until the cold ritual settled their body and quieted its long wrongness and tremors. Afterward, an old woman stood in the dim room with the tome in hand and the cool herb-wrapped heart tucked into her coat, the ash lines and twelve symbols still intact.

By pale morning light the transformed figure stood at a mirror, asked the ritual-made body to shift, and it settled without pain into the form of an unremarkable dark-eyed boy of about eleven or twelve. The tome was hidden beneath a loosened floorboard, the wrapped heart remained in the stacked furniture, and four silver coins went into the boy's pocket before he entered the city. On rain-slick cobblestones he tested the body by running, cutting through crowds, and clearing a low wall by a draper's shop, but when he attempted to lift a heavyset man's purse the man turned, his elbow knocked the boy's wrist aside, and the boy stumbled into a pie stall post as the vendor shouted and nearby people looked, drawing a small circle of attention.