OBS Chapter 186: A Call For The Witches!
Chapter 186: A Call For The Witches!
Chapter 186: A Call For The Witches!Damon nodded, eyes
He held her hand and pulled her out of the room.
"Come with me, i have a place for you."
The corridor behind the library’s west wall was narrow and smelled faintly of old parchment and cedar oil. Damon lit a lantern and handed it to her, then pushed open a tall wooden door she hadn’t even noticed was there.
"This section is off-record. My father kept it sealed. I found it by accident... years ago."
The room beyond was cold and silent. Rows of dark shelves held scrolls and worn tomes, some with cracked leather bindings, others bound in cloth faded by time. Dust motes floated in the lantern light.
Olivia turned to him, eyebrows raised. "Why have you brought me here?"
Damon looked at her for a long moment.
"Because if you’re going to be hunted for what you know... then you should know everything."
Before she could speak, he turned and left, the door clicking shut behind him. She stood there stunned for a long moment! Hunted? What did it mean?
She walked the narrow aisle, trailing her fingers across the bindings. There were no titles on most. The ones that did bear names were in languages she couldn’t read—at least, not immediately. But somehow, some of the symbols tugged at something distant in her mind. A memory that wasn’t hers. Or perhaps it was.
She picked books at random at first. One was on tinctures used in ancient battlefield care. Another on the humors of the body. One thick, velvet-covered volume recorded diseases lost to time and the plants once used to treat them.
Then her hand stopped. The book was tucked into a corner, wrapped in faded crimson cloth and sealed with a wax symbol she recognized but didn’t know how.
The moment she touched it, something inside her chest pulsed—like a heartbeat that wasn’t her own.
She broke the seal and opened it. The script inside was neater than the others. Elegant and Precise. She did nto know who wrote it, yet she knew she knew the person closely. The title page read:
"The Doctrine of Sanguilore: A Study of the Blood Witches"
She went still. Each page was filled with accounts, some academic, some clearly paranoid or fearful. Diagrams of symbols etched into flesh. Lists of herbs that "respond to blood-touched hands." Descriptions of women who healed fatal wounds, who could draw poison through skin, who bled not when cut.
And then halfway through the book she saw something that made her chest seize.
A sigil.
One she had drawn once as a child, without knowing why. A shape she’d doodled in the dirt, in the corner of her notes, that Oriana once told her looked "pretty but strange."
"Witches born again will carry old marks in new bodies," the caption read.
"Some will awaken slowly. Others all at once. But all remember... eventually."
Olivia slammed the book shut, her breathing unsteady.
This isn’t possible, she told herself.
It’s just a story. Just a name they gave to women who frightened them.
And yet...
Her hands were trembling.