The dor­mi­to­ry door opened. Stock­ing feet pat­tered in the dark. A rustling of flan­nel paja­mas. A shad­ow crossed the moon­lit win­dow, clutch­ing some­thing heavy in both hands.

“Thilde?” said a whis­per.

Mathilde popped an eye­lid. A snub-nosed girl with pig­tails sat at the foot of her bed. She clutched a hefty book, peer­ing at Mathilde with excit­ed blue eyes.

“Maisie?” mum­bled Mathilde, pluck­ing hair from her eyes. She blinked, focused on the book. “Woah.”

“Yeh,” said Maisie. She grinned, hugged the book tight. “Just nicked it.” The tome thumped to the check­ered bed­spread.

“Qui­et!” said Mathilde, scrab­bling upright. She crossed her legs and bent to con­sid­er the cov­er. It was a soft grey embossed with swirling fil­i­gree raised like veins, with aei­ther a title nor a date. Mathilde hes­i­tat­ed, mut­tered. “We’re gonna get in so much trou­ble.”

“Nah,” said Maisie, toss­ing her head. “I’ll put it back before Pro­fes­sor Mon­tle wakes. He’s all drunk.”

“Well, if you’re sure,” said Mathilde. She peered around the dor­mi­to­ry, at the half dozen rows of breath­ing, cur­tained beds. Not a stir. Not a sound save a girl snor­ing two beds over.

The girls met eyes. They nod­ded. Maisie grinned. Crooked teeth bright in the moon­light. Care­ful­ly, she turned the tome on its side. A hinged iron clasp cov­ered the text block. She pro­duced a lit­tle key from a paja­ma pock­et and turned it in the clasp’s key­hole. There was a clunk, low and pro­found. The clasp slid away.

The tome split open in her hands. Rustling, soft, like fin­gers drawn over dry skin. Maisie flipped a few pages, squint­ing in the low light. A scent of fur and cloy­ing taxi­dermy float­ed from the old leaves. They were thick, leath­ery, and crabbed with fad­ed, brown script.

Maisie frowned, turned the book about. “Can’t read it,” she said. “It’s too fad­ed.”

Mathilde touched a cold page and pressed her nose close to see in the moon­light. Tight lines of ghost­ly, tea-brown script float­ed in the parch­ment, too light to be deci­phered. Fad­ed forms of tables and for­mu­lae crouched in the mar­gins, unread­able.

She flipped to the last pages, found them emp­ty. Blank, light­ly mar­bled parch­ment, lumi­nous in the pale light. She turned the pages back­wards. Leaves rus­tled, crin­kled, stopped.

“It’s blank, from here,” said Mathilde, point­ing. Maisie craned her neck. Text, scratched in spi­dery lines, filled half the page. Only the last, a sin­gle word, could be dis­cerned.

“ ‘Don’t,’ ” read Mathilde, whis­per­ing.

A moment of still­ness. Near­by, anoth­er child mum­bled and turned in her sleep. Maisie glanced about, spoke in a qua­ver. “Maybe I should put it back.”

Mathilde scowled. “Come on, don’t quit now. This was your idea.” She leaned over, pluck­ing a pock­etknife and an inkpen from the side table.

The blade flicked open. Maisie watched her friend set the point against the pad of her left thumb, hes­i­tant. “Tilde,” she whis­pered, then gasped. A dark bead bloomed under the steel. Maisie shuf­fled back, ner­vous­ly wring­ing her braids.

Mathilde put her pen to the welling wound. Dark liq­uid leeched into the nib. Pen meet parch­ment, pulling crim­son lines over the leath­ery page. A thin scratch­ing. When the girl lift­ed her pen, a short phrase gleamed red in child­ish print.

My name is Mathilde.

The girls stared as those gory words dried onto the parch­ment. Mathilde put her cut thumb in her mouth and sucked it. With her right, she moved to turn the page. “Maybe it’s dea—” Maisie whis­pered, then gulped.

On the next page was a new line: Crabbed cur­sive strokes. Small and red as cap­il­lar­ies on an eye­lid.

Hel­lo, Mathilde. Do you know who I am?

Mathilde gazed at the words through frizzy hair. Slow­ly, she lift­ed the quill to her thumb, scooped a new bead of red from the cut and bent to write:

You are Gauge of Blaod­wash. The last war­lock of Mar­mo­ny Dale.

Maisie crept from the foot of the bed and watched rapt­ly as her friend turned a page. New words had appeared.

What can the war­lock of Mar­mo­ny do for Mathilde?

Maisie spoke, blink­ing at the tome. “Maybe no one will notice if we don’t put it back?”

“We are not putting him back,” said Mathilde, scrap­ing her thumb for ink. She scrib­bled anoth­er line.

My friend and I are stu­dents at a school. They don’t teach us what we want to know.

Mathilde turned the page. Her eyes went wide. The next, once blank, was filled to the mar­gins: Sym­bols and for­mu­lae, text and dia­grams; all bright red, as if just penned. On the top mar­gin gleamed an invit­ing head­ing:

I will teach you what they will not.

Incunbula

The sor­cer­ers of old are extinct. Ask any­one. No longer does a con­jur­er lurk in that high tow­er. No longer do crooked fin­gers stir caul­drons of gore and liq­uid spite. No longer do chimeras creep down from the hills to gob­ble chil­dren in their beds. The sor­cer­ers are gone. Only in folk­loric tales do they still appear. * In tales, and in libraries. 

In the rare and clois­tered stacks of acad­e­mia lie curi­ous tomes. They are thick, leath­ery things. Their cov­ers waxy and porous, gird­ed with iron and locks. Their pages veined and weird­ly mar­bled. They smell of skin oil and pre­served hide.

The best are eccen­tric, filled with his­to­ries that change with every read­ing. The worst are unread­able, filled with dis­gust­ing non­sense and ram­bling obscen­i­ty. Oth­ers are sim­ply odd, filled with naught but tables and graphs with­out ref­er­ence. All appear hand-writ­ten. All are writ in blood.

If a read­er hap­pens to scratch some script in their own blood, the tomes may write back. One must sim­ply turn a page and see.

These tomes are all what remain of many a deceased magi­cian. They are known as incunab­u­la. ** They are brains. Brains bound into books.

When a sor­cer­er dies, a pecu­liar rit­u­al known as absu­tu­ra­tion may be enact­ed upon their corpse. With care and grue­some pre­ci­sion, the cadav­er is dis­sect­ed and stripped for mate­ri­als. The skin is flayed, flensed, laid out in sheets. The nerves are extract­ed, treat­ed, wound like twine. The bones are ground, mac­er­at­ed, re-con­cret­ed into pan­els. The brain is cut from the skull, fil­let­ed, pressed into pre­pared sheets of neur­al vel­lum. 

A skilled sor­cer­er may assem­ble these mate­ri­als into a gory tome. An occult surgery more than a book­bind­ing. Nee­dles stitch gris­ly leaves with neu­ronal twine. For­ceps stretch flesh to frock bone book­boards carved with charms. The result­ing block of bound tis­sue must heal for a year and a day before gain­ing sen­tience. 

The fin­ished incun­able is a mar­velous thing; a dead mind restitched and made alive by sor­cery. A thing at once immor­tal and un-dead. A true book of mag­ic.

Incunab­u­la are among the most prized arti­facts of sor­cery.

They are the means by which the old prac­ti­tion­ers pass on their arts—willingly or not. With­out these books, many secrets would be lost to time—and should have been. †

A magi­cian’s library would be incom­plete with­out at least one incun­able. No sim­ple text or life­less gri­moire would com­pare, nor hold quite such detail and exper­tise than an old mas­ter in the flesh, so to speak. 

Inter­ac­tion with an incun­able is a rite. A rit­u­al blood­let­ting, for mes­sages can only be writ­ten on the tome’s pages in your own blood—no oth­er ink nor ichor may suffice—paired with a test of will, for you write to a crea­ture strange, patho­log­i­cal; rich in the amoral­i­ty of a dark age of sor­cery and steeped in the insan­i­ty born of mil­len­ni­um’s silent hate­ful thought between bone book­boards. ††

You must write care­ful­ly, address­ing the dead mind with an equal mea­sure of respect and cau­tion. Cau­tion is nec­es­sary, for feed­ing it your blood and words is a grave dan­ger: You feed it secrets in your blood unknown to yourself—the cel­lu­lar signs of your life and soul. You feed it the details of your upbring­ing, your health, your state of mind. And like­ly, you feed it your trep­i­da­tion. Or your greed. Or ambi­tion. All hooks and knives, equal­ly keen, for it to set into you or cut you down with its first response.

You write and bare your­self. And if the tome is will­ing, a mes­sage will appear on the fol­low­ing page—likely the direst intro­duc­tion you will ever read.

Of course, not all incunab­u­la may be will­ing to speak. Not all of them wished for absu­tu­ra­tion. While many prac­ti­tion­ers of occult arts kept a stand­ing will to be absu­tu­rat­ed after death, oth­er bind­ings were not so con­sen­su­al. Many a sor­cer­er felled by com­bat or assas­si­na­tion was spite­ful­ly trans­formed into a book by their rival. Into a ret­i­cent book unwill­ing to give the sat­is­fac­tion of cor­re­spon­dence; though, many of these may be keen­er for con­ver­sa­tion after a thou­sand years or more bereft of men­tal stim­u­la­tion; of time spent locked insen­sate between their cov­ers.

Some mod­ern schol­ars believe that sor­cery, now large­ly ban­ished, could only return to the world by the teach­ings of incunab­u­la. In an effort to pre­vent this, many incunab­u­la have been chained up, hid­den, in scholas­tic libraries and schol­ar­ly col­lec­tions. Many hun­dreds of clever minds are left to rot on dusty shelves. They are read rarely, if at all. When they are, it is with great care (for books can be high­ly per­sua­sive.) 

There exist some who would free these sti­fled tomes. Rogue magi­cians, dis­dain­ful of the clos­et­ed, con­ser­v­a­tive ways of the estab­lish­ment, seek to crack the chained shelves. No knowl­edge, they say, should be for­bid­den, even that which is most dread­ful.