Palimpsest

The ink isn't fading. It's moving. Mercer Cole is a master of silence and restoration. As the lead conservator at St. Jude's Scriptorium, he has spent his life coaxing secrets from the past, specializing in "Palimpsests"—ancient manuscripts where the original text was scraped away to make room for the new. When he receives a blind commission to restore the Codex Corium, a volume found in a flooded Prague cellar, he views it as the pinnacle of his career. But the Codex is different. Bound in a leather that is disturbingly warm to the touch and smells of copper and musk, the book defies chemical analysis. As Mercer applies his reagents to reveal the erased under-text, he discovers that the letters are not fixed. They are migrating across the page like colonies of bacteria. The ink is pure melanin and iron, produced by the binding itself. The book is not just a record; it is an organism. And the text Mercer recovers isn't a prayer or a spell—it's a log of names and dates. The most recent entry is from yesterday. As patches of his own skin begin to turn dry and papery, Mercer realizes the terrifying truth. The Codex Corium is writing itself, and it requires a living binder to complete the next volume.