Chapter 1: Awakening the Sleeping Sorcerer
The air in the temple didn’t stir. It hung, thick and cold, tasting of wet stone and dormant earth. Nevada’s flashlight beam cut a wobbly path across the cracked floor, illuminating the furious scrawl of her own chalk circle. The symbols were from a pdf she’d found buried deep in a forum, their meanings half-guessed, their pronunciation a nightmare.
“Okay,” she whispered, her voice swallowed by the enormity of the jagged arches overhead. “Let’s just… try this.”
She read the words. They felt like gravel in her mouth. The first time, nothing. The second time, with more force, a leaf skittered over the blackened altar. On the third recitation, a wrong syllable slipped out. She felt it the moment she said it—a hiccup in the rhythm, a catch in the world’s breath.The circle ignited.
Not with the soft, Instagram-witch glow she’d half-expected, but with a concussion of raw force that threw her back against the plinth of a weeping statue. The chalk lines burned white-hot. The air screamed, vibrating in her teeth and bones. From the center of the circle, where she’d placed her grandmother’s locket as a focus, a darkness deeper than the moonless night began to unspool.
It coalesced. It pulled the light and sound into itself, and then it pushed back.
A man was standing in the circle.
He was tall, wearing a tunic of darkened leather and wool that looked brutally practical. His hair was jet black, cropped short against a sharp, commanding skull. He had the high cheekbones and severe line of jaw that statues were made from. And his eyes, when they opened, were a piercing, impossible blue—the blue of a gas flame, of a depthless glacier. They fixed on her immediately.
Nevada’s breath hitched. The spellbook trembled violently in her numb hands.
He took one step, his sandal crushing the smoking chalk line as if it were dust. The enchantment binding the circle snapped with a sound like a breaking spine. He looked at his hands, turning them over slowly. He looked at the shattered statues, the moss-slick marble, the ivy clutching at the arches. Finally, those glacial eyes returned to her.
“This,” he said, his voice a dry rasp, as if from disuse, “is not the Capitoline.”
“Uh,” Nevada said intelligently.
He took a step toward her. The air moved with him, carrying a scent of sun-baked rock, cold metal, and something else… myrrh, and age. “Who are you? What dominion is this?”
“Nevada. My name’s Nevada. This is… um… Upstate New York?”
He processed this. His gaze was unnervingly thorough, cataloging her jeans, her puffy jacket, the smartphone glowing in her grass-stained hand. “A woman. A provincia. You performed the invocation.”
“It was a love spell,” she blurted out, the words leaving her in a mortified rush.
A profound, echoing silence followed. Somewhere in the woods, an owl hooted.
One of his dark eyebrows lifted, a fraction of an inch. “A love spell.” He repeated it flatly. “You tore a hole in the fabric of the Unseen, bypassed wards that have held for seventeen hundred years, and dragged me from a slumber I had earned, for… a love spell.”
“It was a bad week,” she muttered, her face burning.
He moved then, not with a rush of magic, but with a predator’s casual grace. In two strides he was before her, looking down. She could see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, the stark reality of him. This was no apparition. “The parameters were flawed. The third verb was in the conditional, not the imperative. You used a personal token as a general focus. It was… shoddy work.”
“The internet is full of misinformation,” she squeaked, pressing back against the cold stone.
“Indeed.” He reached out. She flinched, but his hand only went to the locket, still on the ground. He did not touch it. He stared at it, and it rose into the air, the silver tarnishing and brightening in rapid cycles as if flying through time. “A sentimental anchor. It diluted the intent. Instead of drawing a generalized compatible essence, it perforated a specific seal. Mine.”
He let the locket fall. It hit the stone with a dull, final clink.
“So you’re not… my soulmate.” It sounded so stupid saying it out loud.
The ghost of a smile, utterly humorless, touched his lips. “I am Mordecai Romulus. The last time a woman summoned me, it was to curse a city. Its ruins are probably a tourist spa by now.” He looked around again, his nostrils flaring as he took in the scent of pine and damp earth. “The world feels… thin. Quiet.”
“It’s 2024.”
He went very still. “How many years?”
“Since… Rome? A lot. Like, a thousand-five-hundred-plus, a lot.”
He closed those piercing eyes for a long moment. A muscle feathered in his jaw. When he opened them, his expression was carved from stone. “Show me.”
“Show you what?”
“This.” He gestured vaguely, a flick of his wrist that encompassed the temple, the woods, the entire silent, waiting world beyond. “Everything.”
Nevada’s mind blanked. What was the protocol here? Apologize? Offer him a ride? Her brain stuttered to the most mundane of conclusions. “I, uh, I have a car. It’s down the trail.”
“A car.” He tasted the word. “Lead the way, Nevada of Upstate New York.”
He followed her as she picked up her bag, her flashlight beam shaking. He didn’t walk like a man from another age; he walked like a king crossing a familiar, if now degraded, hall. He paused at the temple entrance, his hand resting on the crumbling arch. She heard him whisper something, a liquid, forgotten word. The ivy shuddered, and for a second, the moonless night seemed to grow darker around him.
The trail back was a nightmare. He asked no questions, simply observed. The rustle of nylon from her jacket, the plastic buckle on her bag, the distant hum of electricity from a power line—his eyes tracked it all. She felt like a museum guide from hell.
They reached her beat-up Honda Civic. She fumbled with the key fob, the beep-beep of the unlock signal absurdly loud.
Mordecai stared at the car. “A chariot. Without horses.”
“Sort of. Get in.”
He handled the door mechanism with detached interest, folded his long frame into the passenger seat. The interior light illuminated his stark profile against the window. He ran a finger over the dashboard plastic, the fabric of the seat. She started the engine.
The roar was mechanical, alien. Mordecai’s hand shot out, bracing against the dashboard, his knuckles white. But he did not panic. His eyes, wide in the dim light, scanned the dials, the glowing blue screen of her stereo. As she pulled onto the asphalt road, pressing the accelerator, his head snapped back against the headrest.Speed. Light streaming past. The yellow lines devoured by the machine.
He said nothing for a full minute, just watched the forest blur into a wall of darkness. Then, softly, he spoke.
“The roads are very smooth.”
Nevada let out a slightly hysterical laugh. “Yeah. They’re okay.”
“And the lamps. No flame.” He watched a sodium streetlight whip past. “You have tamed light. Captured it in glass.”
“We’ve figured some stuff out.”
He fell silent again, absorbing the onslaught of a world rebuilt. She snuck glances at him. His awe was not childlike; it was analytical, intense, a profound recalibration of all known truths. He was a supercomputer downloading seventeen centuries of data at a glance.
She turned onto the main road leading toward town. The glow of Main Street appeared ahead—a diner, a gas station, a digital bank sign flashing the time and temperature.
Mordecai leaned forward, his breath fogging the glass. His eyes reflected the neon sign for Joe’s Diner, the fluorescent blaze of the Quick-Mart, the sleek, silent slide of a late-model SUV passing them in the opposite lane.
His earlier dryness, his aloof shock, was gone. In its place was something hungrier, sharper.
“Faster,” he said, his voice low.
“What?”
“Drive faster. I need to see more.”
She pressed the gas, her heart hammering against her ribs. The town unfurled before them—a mundane tapestry of the modern world he was now violently, irrevocably part of. A world he had not been asked to re-enter. A world she had, with a shoddy spell and a bad week, thrown him into.
He did not look at her. His gaze was fixed on the sprawling, electric mystery ahead, his ancient face lit by the cool, artificial glow of a world he no longer understood. The momentum of his waking, of his displacement, was now a physical force in the car with them, pressing them both forward into the unknown night.
The momentum of his waking, of his displacement, was now a physical force in the car with them, pressing them both forward into the unknown night.
Nevada’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. The familiar streets of her town looked different now, edged in a sinister, documentary clarity. The stoplights were too bright. The pavement too black. It was like seeing the world through his eyes for the first time, and it was terrifying.
In the passenger seat, Mordecai was a statue coming to life. His head turned, tracking a teenager on a glowing skateboard. His nostrils flared as they passed a burger joint, the greasy scent flooding the air vents.
“The abundance,” he murmured, not to her, but to the window. “The noise of it.”
A memory, sharp and unwelcome, pierced Nevada’s panic. It wasn’t of the temple. It was of an hour before, in a different circle.
“AMOR, VENI AD ME. COR MEUM TIBI DO.”
The candles around her had wavered as she sat in the center, well hidden in a dark forest. She knew better than to do magic in her own home.
She’d stuck out her tongue, licking the corner of her mouth as she focused heavily on the Latin words. “AMOR…”
Love, come to me. I give my heart unto thee.
Those were the words she’d had a hard time pronouncing. She was pretty sure she was saying the right words… she thought. Being born from Spain and understanding a little Spanish, how hard could it be to understand Latin?
“AMOR, VENI AD ME. COR… COR—”
She exhaled in frustration.
“—MEUM TIBI DO!”
That’ll do, she thought.
She closed the ancient, dusty journal and hugged it close to her chest. Her head fell backwards to the night sky, her midnight long curls spilling down her back. “I sure hope you send me an angel, Grandma,” she whispered.
She glanced once more at the journal she’d inherited, her fingers tracing the worn pages. This was no ordinary journal. This was her grandmother’s spellbook, written in only Latin. It contained healing incantations, quick love spells, and white magic.
Before she passed, Nevada got to inherit what no one in the family wanted nor understood the importance of. That’s because her grandmother did white magic behind closed doors, and Nevada was the little VIP who got to see it.
She blew out the white candles and stood, her nostrils filling with the burnt, woody smell and the faint smell of moss.
She stood up leaving the chalked circle, but her head turned slowly, finding that all the candles were relit.
Her brows furrowed. The forest cooled so fast her skin prickled, goosebumps racing up her arms.The air thickened. Not smoke… presence. Heavy and intimate, like someone standing far too close behind you. The shadows along the trees stretched, dragging themselves across the ground in long, trembling fingers.
Her grandmother’s journal flew from her hands and hit the ground with a hollow thud.
She gulped, her eyes wide.
The candles bled red.
“Oh,” she feebly choked. “That’s… definitely not white magic.”
A crack split the earth where she had sat centered, straight down the middle, heat rushing upward as if the ground itself had exhaled. The scent of burning resin and iron filled her lungs. The candles flared violently, flames turning dark at their cores.
Then—
“Then?” Mordecai’s voice was a blade, cutting through the memory.
Nevada jerked, swerving the car slightly. She hadn’t realized she’d spoken the last word aloud. Her throat was tight. “Then nothing.I passed out. I woke up in my bed. I thought I’d dreamt it, or screwed it up so bad it just… fizzled.”
He was looking at her now, that full, piercing attention like a weight. “You did not dream it. You issued an invitation. A sloppy, shrieking broadcast into places you do not comprehend. You said ‘Love, come to me.’ You offered your heart. A potent symbolic sacrifice, even in ignorance.” A slow, cold smile touched his lips. “The things that listen… they are not sentimental. They are lawyers of the literal. You are fortunate it was my seal your clumsy yearning cracked open, and not some hungrier, less particular void.”
“Your seal?” The words were ice in her stomach.
“A binding. A deep sleep.Not death. A vault.” His gaze returned to the flashing world outside. “Your… spell… was a key. A misshapen, pathetic key, but it turned the lock.”
“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered, the child’s defense sounding absurd even to her.
“Intention is the engine. Precision is the steering. You built an engine of desperate longing and pointed it at a cliff.” He said it without malice, a simple statement of fact. “The journal. Describe it.”
“Old. Leather. Her writing was… loopy. In Latin.”
“The binding. The clasp.”
She fumbled in her memory, driving on autopilot. “It had a… a circle. With a line through it. Like a sundial, or a coin.”
Mordecai went utterly still. The hum of the tires on the road seemed to grow louder. When he spoke, his voice was different.Flatter. Deadlier.
“A phi symbol. Crossed by a spear.” It wasn’t a question.“Yes. How did you—”
“That journal,” he interrupted, the words precise and cold, “belonged to the Collegium Cantorum. The Singing College. Roman-era bureaucrats of the arcane. Meticulous, tedious men. They recorded everything. They bound things into books for study. For later use.” He turned his head, and the passing streetlights etched the planes of his face in stark, alternating bars of light and shadow. “They were my jailers.”
Nevada’s foot slipped off the gas for a second. The car lurched. “What?”
“The last thing I knew before the dark was their chamber.Their chalk. Their binding words.” He leaned closer, and the scent of ancient stone and old power filled the car. “Your grandmother did not do white magic, little VIP. She contained it. That book is a prison ledger. And you just opened a cell.”
The truth landed, heavy and final. It wasn’t a spellbook. It was a manifest. Her sweet, lavender-scented grandmother had been a warden.
“Pull over,” Mordecai said.“What? Why?”
“Now.”
The command in his voice was iron. She swerved into the empty parking lot of a shuttered hardware store, gravel crunching under the tires. She threw the car into park, her heart hammering against her ribs.
He was out of the car before the engine finished rocking on its springs. He walked into the center of the empty lot, a dark figure under the buzzing halogen light. He lifted his face to the sky, to the washed-out orange glow of light pollution, to the single blinking star that fought to be seen.
He stretched out his hands, palms down, toward the asphalt.
Nothing happened for a long moment. Then, a vibration started in the soles of Nevada’s feet, transmitted up through the car frame. A low, sub-audible hum. The puddles from an earlier rain began to shiver, concentric rings spreading out from nowhere. The halogens above them flickered, then brightened to a painful, blinding intensity before snapping back to normal.
Mordecai dropped his hands. He looked back at her, his expression unreadable.
“The world is thin,” he repeated, walking back to the car. He slid into the seat, bringing the cold night air with him. “The leys are faint, choked with this… this noise of wires and burning rock. But the power is still there. Deeper. Dirtier.”
“What are you going to do?” The question was a breath.
He looked at her, his blue eyes reflecting the dashboard lights like twin, frozen lakes. “You offered your heart. A promise was made in the casting. Not to me. To the mechanism of the magic itself.” He leaned back, a king considering a strangely barren kingdom. “The spell must be satisfied, or it will unravel. And unravelling, where we are connected, will tear your mind apart. And possibly this entire… township.”
He said it so casually. Township.
“Satisfied? How?” Her voice was barely audible.
“That is the question.” A slow, predatory curiosity finally ignited in his gaze as he looked at her, truly looked at her, not as a nuisance but as a component. “You wanted love. A singular, consuming force. You may yet get a version of it. But first, we find who else your grandmother saw fit to put in her book. Before someone less patient than I am finds them first.”
He nodded toward the road. “Drive. To your home. I need to see this ledger.”
Nevada’s hands were numb. She put the car in drive. The headlights cut a path through the familiar dark, leading back to her apartment, her normal life, which was already gone. She had wanted an angel. She had gotten a consequence.
And he was sitting right beside her, smelling of storms and history, waiting to see what other doors she had left unlocked.
And he was sitting right beside her, smelling of storms and history, waiting to see what other doors she had left unlocked.
The ten-minute drive to her apartment stretched into a silent, pressurized eternity. Every stoplight was an interrogation. She could feel him absorbing it all—the glowing phone in her cup holder, the synthetic voice of her GPS, the sheer, constant barrage of illuminated signs. He didn’t ask. He just… ingested. It was more unnerving than if he’d panicked.
She pulled into her designated spot behind the bland, brick complex.Killed the engine. The sudden quiet was a physical relief.
“This is it,” she said, her voice too loud in the confines of the car.
He got out, his movements fluid and soundless. He didn’t wait for her, simply turned in a slow circle, taking in the dumpsters, the flickering security light, the satellite dishes clustered on the roof like metallic fungi.
“A vertical insulae,” he murmured. “With better plumbing, one hopes.”
“The plumbing’s fine.” She fumbled with her keys, leading him to the back stairwell. The smell of old carpet and microwave meals hung in the air. She was intensely, suddenly aware of how shabby her home was.How ordinary. A place for takeout and streaming services, not for ancient, displaced sorcerers.
Her door opened with a familiar creak. She flicked the switch. Her living room was illuminated in the warm glow of a cheap floor lamp, revealing a sagging sofa, a crowded bookshelf, a TV on a stand. Mundanity, weaponized.
Mordecai stepped across the threshold and stopped as if he’d hit a wall. His sharp eyes scanned the room, not with judgment, but with a clinical, devastating precision. He noted the electrical outlets, the blinking router, the fantasy novel splayed on the couch. His gaze lingered on a framed photo of her and her grandmother on the lakeshore.
“The ledger,” he said, his voice pulling her back from the edge of a pointless apology.
“Right.” She dropped her bag by the door and went to the bookshelf. Her hands were shaking. She pulled the old journal from between a cookbook and a volume of poetry. The leather was cool, the phi symbol and spear clasp dull under her touch. It felt different now. Not a treasure, but a contaminated object.
She held it out to him.
He did not take it immediately. He approached, and the air in the room seemed to grow denser, heavier. He held his hand over the cover, palm down, his fingers barely trembling. A low thrum, like a struck cable, vibrated through Nevada’s teeth.
“Yes,” he breathed. “It sings a very quiet song.” He took it. The journal looked small and fragile in his broad, capable hands. He didn’t open it. He pressed it between his palms and closed his eyes.
A current moved through the room. The floor lamp dimmed. The hum of her refrigerator died abruptly, then kicked back on with a sluggish groan. Shadows in the corners of the room deepened, pooling and stretching beyond their natural reach.
Nevada’s skin prickled. The hair on her arms stood up.
Mordecai’s eyes flew open. They weren’t just blue now; they were lit from within, casting faint, aquatic ghosts of light across his cheekbones. “It’s not just names,” he said, his voice layered, echoing slightly. “It’s locations. Bindings tied to places.To things. Your grandmother… she was a keeper. A silent guardian.” He looked at her, and the pity in his gaze was colder than contempt. “She left you the keys to the cages, child. Without the warnings.”
He tossed the journal onto her sofa. It landed with a soft thump. “We need to go. Now.”
“Go?Go where? It’s the middle of the night!”
“The resonance is fresh. My waking was a… loud event. It will have created ripples. Others who listen for such things will have felt it. They will be curious.” He walked to her window, peeled back the blind with a finger, and stared into the dark parking lot. “And there are older things than me in that book. Things that do not sleep as lightly, or think as… rationally.”
A bolt of pure fear, sharp and clean, shot through her. “What are you talking about?”
“The spell you cast was a beacon. A flawed, shrieking beacon, but a beacon nonetheless. It didn’t just open my cage. It sent out a pulse. It announced that this place,” he tapped the journal, “is active again. We must go to a place of older power. A crossroads. To muddle the scent.”
“A crossroads. Like… a highway junction?”
“Like a locus. A place where the veil is thin without being torn.” He let the blind snap back. “The forest where you performed the idiocy will do. We need to go back.”
“No.No way. That place is… it’s wrong now. I felt it.”
“It is wrong because you cracked it open. Leaving it gaping is an invitation.We go. We seal it. Then we decide what to do.” His tone brooked no argument. It was the voice of a man used to legions listening.
Trembling, powered by a terror greater than her fear of him, Nevada grabbed her coat. She snatched the journal from the couch, its leather now feeling unnaturally warm.
They drove back in a deeper silence. The night seemed darker, the woods along the roadside pressing in like a wall. She parked in the same dirt pull-off. The path into the trees was a mouth of blackness.
“Stay close,” he said, and stepped into the dark. She followed, the beam of her phone flashlight bouncing wildly. The familiar trail was now a foreign, menacing tunnel. Every rustle was a pursuer. Every snapped twig was a footstep.
They reached the clearing. Her crude chalk circle was still visible, a ghostly scar on the ground. The air was frozen here, several degrees colder than the surrounding woods. The silence was absolute—no crickets, no wind.
Mordecai walked to the center of the space. He knelt, placing his hands flat on the earth. He began to speak, not in Latin, but in something older, guttural. The words were stones dropped into a still pool. The ground itself seemed to resonate.
Nevada watched, clutching the journal to her chest. She saw his back tense under the leather tunic. Saw the muscles in his forearms cord. This wasn’t just sealing; this was a struggle. A negotiation with an invisible force.
The temperature dropped further. Her breath plumed in the flashlight beam. A deep, subsonic vibration began to rise through the soles of her feet, up her legs, into her core. It was the feeling of the temple, amplified—a wrongness, a pressure.
Mordecai’s chanting grew sharper, more forceful. A thin line of sweat traced a path down his temple despite the cold.
And then, it broke.
A wave of force erupted from him, visible only in its effect—a ring of fallen leaves exploded outward in a perfect circle. The oppressive cold shattered, replaced by the normal, damp chill of the forest night. The sounds rushed back in—the distant hoot of an owl, the sigh of wind in the pines.
He sagged forward, bracing himself on his hands, head hanging. His breathing was ragged.
“It is done,” he gasped. “The rift is closed. For now.”
Nevada took a step toward him. “Are you okay?”
He lifted his head. In the weak light, his face was drawn, pale. But his eyes burned. The power he had expended wasn’t gone; it was swirling around him, into him, a feedback loop of raw, unleashed energy. He looked at her, and the connection from the spell—the stupid, yearning promise of it—snapped taut between them.
It was a physical thing. A wire pulled tight in her stomach, her chest. The journal fell from her numb fingers.
He saw it.He felt it too. His gaze dropped to her mouth. The intellectual curiosity, the annoyance, the cold calculation—it all melted away, replaced by something far more ancient and imperative. The magic had a demand. The spell required satisfaction. And the energy saturating the clearing, saturating him, was a roaring fire seeking fuel.
“The backlash…” he said, his voice rough. “The energy must be grounded. Given form. Or it will… corrupt this place.”
This wasn’t love. This wasn’t even desire, not really. It was alchemy. It was consequence.He stood. He was before her in one fluid motion. He didn’t ask. His hand came up, fingers brushing her jaw. His touch was electric, a live wire against her skin. It wasn’t gentle. It was possessive. Inevitable.
A sane part of her mind screamed. The larger part was drowned out by the thrumming in her blood, a harmonic resonance with the power bleeding off him. The promise she had chanted into the dark was here to collect.
He kissed her. It was nothing like she had ever known. It was not soft, not exploratory. It was a claiming. A channeling. She tasted old wine and lightning. Her body arched against his, not in passion, but in a kind of terrifying, reflexive surrender. The energy in the clearing funneled into that point of contact, a dizzying, terrifying transfer.
Her back met the rough bark of an old oak. The cold air hit her skin as clothes became obstacles, rough hands and fumbling fingers pushing fabric aside. There was no tenderness, only a desperate, driven urgency. It was harsh, and fast, and real. The ground was hard, roots digging into her back. His weight pinned her, a solid, unyielding anchor in the maelstrom.
She cried out, but the sound was swallowed by his mouth, by the deafening rush in her own ears. It was not pleasure, but a brutal catharsis—a screaming circuit being completed. The wild, unstable magic in the air seemed to pour into her, through her, finding its earth in the frantic, grinding rhythm of their bodies.
It was over quickly. A final, shuddering convulsion that felt less like release and more like a violent equilibrium being achieved.
The silence that followed was absolute.Profound.
He collapsed beside her, breathing harshly into the leaf litter. The unnatural heat was gone from his skin. The glowing ember in his eyes had banked. He just looked spent.Human.
Nevada stared up at the black branches scratching at the sky. Her body felt used, scraped raw. Alive in a way that terrified her. The compulsion was gone. The wire was cut. What remained was a hollow, aching clarity and the cold, damp earth beneath her.
He spoke first, his voice flat, stripped of all its earlier power. “The debt is paid. The spell is satisfied.”
She turned her head. He was already sitting up, pulling his tunic straight, not looking at her. It was a transaction. A magical stabilizer. She felt a sob build in her throat, but she choked it down. She would not cry here.
She pulled her clothes on with numb, shaking hands. The physical ache was deep, a brand. She stood, legs unsteady. The journal lay in the leaves where she’d dropped it. She picked it up. It felt inert now. Just an old book.
Mordecai rose. He looked at the clearing, at the sealed rift, then finally at her. There was no warmth in his gaze, but the outright hostility was gone. Replaced by a grim, shared understanding. They were bound now, not by magic, but by this act. By this secret in the dark woods.
“The ledger,” he said, his tone returning to that of a commander. “We must study it.Properly. Others will come. They will have felt the closure, too. They will know a warden is active again.”
He started back toward the path, not waiting to see if she followed.
Nevada looked at the torn earth, the scattered leaves, the imprint of her body in the damp soil. A moment of stupid yearning had led to this: a cold, sore walk back to a car, following a man from a dead empire, holding a book of terrible secrets.
She took a shaky breath. The night air smelled of pine, and soil, and something faintly metallic.
She followed him.