The Crypt of Browerwood

Envy is a bewitching intoxicant. It invades the mind through fleeting thoughts of want and desire and gradually builds itself into an obsession. For those strong in will, envy may even manifest itself as ambition. In the end, however, envy always rots. The tethers tying you to your own reality will fall away, your sense of self-worth will crumble beneath you, and envy will almost certainly turn you to desperation.

Under the darkness of night, a student was meeting the price for unchecked and incautious want. Clawing along the grubby stone floor of the Crypt and wheezing through rattled breaths, Maya was desperate. Her envy was gluttonous on this night.

…

Maya was worn thin from toiling in the shadow of Callum Montrell, the best mage of their class, and quite possibly the greatest mage to have walked the halls of Browerwood Academy in recent memory. He was a generational talent, eclipsing even the rare and formidable skill that Maya herself possessed. For the last four years, she had been his second in every measurable way.

Those who didn’t find themselves dwelling too close to the top of the class or on the wrong end of his spellwork tended to gravitate toward Callum, and he’d collected a number of fans through his years at school: insecure students clinging to the idea of him, lovers entranced by his devilish good looks, and professors jumping at the opportunity to provide influence to such a raw power.

The affection of the professors was the worst bit. They were completely enamored with him, and his knowing, shit-eating grin was wholly insufferable as they laid on their praises. Callum was great, and he was a terror for it.

Throughout her years of following him up, Maya had been the first to catch his sprays of verbal abuse and gloating as he punched down at her. She was keenly aware that being the closest to the sun also meant being the most vulnerable to its searing heat. Still, Maya pushed upward, feeling a rising pressure to best him as the years passed. By their senior year, the pressure itself remained at a constant simmer, bubbling maddeningly just below her eye sockets. She’d yet to come away with a win, and with the months fading into summer, she was down to her last opportunity to dethrone him; the Senior Trials were now just three days away.

…

Each academic year culminated with the Trials, allowing every student and professor to take part in the spectacle as the senior class pit their magics against whatever challenges the faculty had created. Every competitor knew the crowd and faculty favorites tended to be the mages with the most extravagant spellwork, and favorites routinely won top spots in the games. Knowing this, the seniors spent their last weeks prior to the Trials stowed away in the library. There they busied themselves with polishing up on basic magics and trying out new tricks to embellish their arsenals.

The spell work honed by mages could be likened to fine art. Most successes rooted themselves in fundamental techniques done well, while flourishes propped up by a good foundation were necessary to stand out. By intentionally linking together these elements, a mage was effectively weaving together notions of reality to create something yet unseen.

Aspiring greats often spent hours poring over texts, chipping away at their new opus, and shaping the body of their creations. Spell work often took months of research and shambling together parts of the whole before each element of an enchantment could stand to its full height. These complex compositions tended to culminate in summoning interesting feats of magic, such as an orb of light to follow its user around at will or producing an ever-refilling flask of wine – a sophomore tradition.

Maya had practically lived in the archives for her tenure at the academy, creating a myriad of her own spells to show for it. The likes of Callum and herself had learned long ago what many of the senior class was now just struggling to comprehend, and Maya knew the key to besting Callum in the Trials wouldn’t lie in those well-worn tomes of spellcrafting basics they’d both had memorized. Instead, she let her desire to win push her to find something more exclusive and more daring. She was going to steal away to The Crypt in search of magics not even Callum the Great would be privy to.

…

The Crypt was rumored to be a cache of uncirculated texts secreted away below the abandoned south tower on campus. The tower had always been off-limits to students, and administrators cited reasons of safety to justify its exclusivity. Maya hadn’t been convinced of the faculty’s explanations, and she was determined to find out if the rumors held their weight. It was risky, she knew, and being caught would mean certain expulsion. But after a short bit of thought, she’d decided losing a final time to Callum would be a worse fate.

Given its remote location, standing tall against the bare pasture surrounding it, Maya had to wait until nightfall to scurry across the grounds and land on the tower’s doorstep. She easily disposed of the lock barring its door with a hushed incantation and slid into the darkness of the within.

A staircase of stone filled most of the space inside, spiraling upwards to the lookout platform above. Maya squatted down near the steps, pulled the faux lantern from her satchel, and plinked the glass to create a small orange sphere of light. The tower hummed with an alchemical glow, giving Maya a better view of the structure.

Among the monotonous stonework, the light revealed one point of interest. A grate covered a square in the middle of the floor allowing slivers of light pass through it, faintly painting wooden tables and shelving beneath it. Maya crouched to the floor and immediately began working at the rusty iron, prying the heavy grate upwards on its hinges with a metallic groan. She gathered up her bag and lantern and slipped off the edge of the floor into the room below.

As Maya thudded onto the stone pavers, she instantly felt an oppressive weight pushing on her. The air hung thick in the room, and the smell of decaying leaves permeated the cellar. She reasoned that this decidedly felt like a tomb. This was it—The Crypt.

The room cut a space roughly ten meters square and was filled with shelves lined with uniquely crafted books. There had to be hundreds of them, and knowing she only had tonight, she began to pull them from the shelves and thumb through the pages.

Maya immediately knew these books held power. With only a cursory glance through a few volumes, she had come away with notions of theories on immortality, summoning devils to do your bidding, bending the will of others, and even an economics book of spells named the Infinite Gold Glitch. She was sure that among the many books beginning to pile up beside her, a few would contain some invaluable advantages for the Trials.

Hell, she thought, the potential power these books held could very well change my life.

Her scholar’s brain ached to read each book cover-to-cover, but being short on time, she turned away from her stack of gems and continued searching the haul.

The Crypt held its fair share of oddities as well. Some manuscripts meandered poetically about nothing noteworthy at all, while others were fashioned in ways that rendered them completely unreadable, if not pretty to look at. One, however, caught her eye as particularly strange. And no, it wasn’t the face carved rough into its wooden spine that seemed to gaze into her eyes. It was the way that book continued reappearing on different shelves in the spaces she was searching. It was moving.

Curious, Maya slid the tome out from the shelf by its knotted nose and creaked open the cover to flip through its yellowed pages. They were thoroughly blank, front to back, and Maya concluded it was a curiously moving block of bound parchment – nothing more.

As she moved to shut the book and return it to the shelf, she noticed a frantic scrawling of uneven letters scattered across the page. “Leave,” was written along the top of the page, then further down, “He consumes.”

Maya promptly shut the cover and, with mild unrest, jammed it back into its slot. She wanted absolutely nothing to do with that. She hurried on to finish her cursory pass of the miniature library when a scratch of a voice broke in, “Please.”

Maya startled at the break in silence. She snapped her head around, searching the space for the old, croaky voice she’d heard. To her discomfort, the room remained completely empty excepting herself. In the quite of her stillness the voice spoke up again, this time with fervor.

"Please leave. He will return.” then after a pause, “He consumes.”

This warning lasted quite a bit longer than the first whisper, and Maya had time to locate where it originated from. That damn book. It had moved directly behind her on the shelf, and as it finished speaking, Maya saw the lips of the face morphing back to the face’s natural resting place of an eternal scowl.

“What are – What do you mean?” asked Maya, her squinting gaze moving closer to the face in the spine. The book’s face took on a melancholic look, its eyes sullen and its speaking mouth turned down in a deep frown. The mouth opened to speak again, holding an edge of worry to its voice.

“Please. You must lea –“

“It means me,” said a familiar voice, cutting in from the hole in the ceiling. A shadowed figure stood tall in the tower room above her, but even in the gloom, Maya could pick out that smirk.

“Callum,” she asked, nerves rising to stiffen her voice. “What are you doing here?” Maya knew Callum to be cunning, but she’d never told a soul about her plan here. How did he happen to catch her on the very night she was planning to break into the Crypt?

Her rival dropped down through the hole, pulling the grate closed with a loud clang, and swinging down from it to the dusty floor. Maya felt a hollow pit in her stomach where her excitement and wonder had been just moments ago.

“I’m here every night, Maya,” he said, stepping closer. “And quite honestly, I’m sorry it had to be you.”

Maya backed away, thudding into the shelves. “What are you talking about? I – “ she hesitated, “Look, I’m sorry. I can leave.” She held up her hands in surrender, “Don’t worry about the professors. I won’t say a word.”

“I won’t have need for worry, Maya,” he said, still grinning boyishly at her. “I can’t allow you to leave here. Everything that sets cover or foot in the Crypt must stay.”

He spread his arms wide and turned about the room slowly.

“I am their keeper. The secrets held here. The power,” he paused. “Imagine if that fell into the wrong hands. Nothing in this space can be allowed to reach the surface, and you have seen far too much.” Callum gestured to the stack of books Maya had next to her.

Maya was frightened stiff, and all thoughts turned to escape. Sure, she thought she could best Callum in a contest, but she knew he was far too dangerous to take a chance at him in the open. She darted her eyes around to the corners and then back to the grate at the center of the room. Perhaps a levitation charm could carry her to the ceiling quickly enough. And just as she processed her last methodical thought, all reason left her body and was replaced by primal fear.

Callum’s body contorted and cracked in front of her, his skin burning to an ashen black laced with molten veins. Maya watched with eyes wide, craning her head as Callum’s form grew to tower over her. He was a monster. A demon of incomprehensible horror, tracing its long tongue over spiked teeth and flashing golden, slitted eyes down at her.

“He Consumesss,” The book repeated, its voice now bellowing through the Crypt.

Maya fell to the floor, shaking out rattled breaths as she scrambled on all fours to escape the beast that stood over her. Flames licked out from its outstretched claws and snatched at her ankles as she crawled away into a corner, turning her head to look back at the creature that was Callum. She managed the feeble beginnings of a shriek before the demon’s maw closed over her head and silenced her muffled screams with a sickening crunch.