Colson

The Thing I Wasn’t Supposed to Hear

Colson POV

I wasn’t meant to hear it.

That realization settled into me slowly, like poison that waited until it was sure you’d swallowed enough before it started working.

I had stopped on the ridge for no noble reason. No prophecy. No instinctual pull. I’d paused because the road curved strangely there, because the land ahead felt older, heavier—because after years of moving through cities that screamed their intentions at you, the quiet beyond the boundaries felt… suspicious.

So I watched.

From a distance.

Like I always did.

The valley below stretched wide and dark, cradled by trees that had been standing long before the first coven ever learned how to draw a circle properly. Firelight flickered near the treeline—steady, disciplined, wrong in a way only magic could be. Not campfires. Not wanderers.

Work.

I crouched low, letting my presence dissolve.

Shadows didn’t resist me. They never had. They folded around my form like recognition, like memory. Ezra once told me that was my greatest talent—not speed, not strength, but my ability to not exist when it mattered most.

I’d taken it as a compliment.

Now I wondered how many years of my life that skill had cost me.

Below, the witches’ encampment revealed itself in pieces. Stones arranged with deliberate asymmetry. Candles burning without flicker despite the breeze. Sigils etched so finely into the ground that they hummed rather than glowed.

Old magic.

Careful magic.

Magic that didn’t want to be found.

I focused, letting my senses stretch beyond their usual limits. Sound bent, warped, slid into place. Voices reached me not as noise but as shape, as pressure against the air.

“…I’m telling you, it’s real,” a woman said, her frustration edged with something close to fear. “Original script. Not copied. Not translated. The book.”

I went very still.

Book.

I’d heard whispers before, of course. Everyone had. Grimoires, codices, artifacts that promised too much and delivered worse. Most of them were exaggerations—power inflated by desperation, myth recycled until it felt real.

This didn’t sound like that.

“That’s a myth,” another witch replied, sharp and dismissive. “If it existed, it would’ve surfaced by now. Everything always does.”

A third voice snapped back, low and furious. “That’s what they said about the bloodline.”

Silence followed.

Heavy.

“Look how that turned out.”

I exhaled slowly through my nose.

Yes.

Look how that turned out.

Ezra wanted an original blood witch because blood stabilized spells. Anchored them. Gave them weight in the world. But no spell—no matter how powerful—was born from blood alone.

Spells lived in words.

And words lived longer than anything else.

“…buried,” the first witch continued. “That’s the rumor. Hidden where no coven would claim it. Where no vampire would think to look.”

“Buried where?” another asked.

There it was.

The question everyone wanted answered.

The pause that followed wasn’t hesitation—it was reverence.

“Not where,” she said quietly. “When.”

I had to press my lips together to keep from laughing.

Of course it was time.

It was always time.

“Well,” I muttered silently, “that’s going to be a headache.”

Another witch scoffed. “You think Ezra hasn’t been hunting it?”

That name carried even here. Even whispered, it shifted the air, pulled fear like gravity.

“He doesn’t know the location,” came the reply. “And even if he did, he couldn’t retrieve it without the witch. The spell requires original blood to activate—but the book itself rejects vampires.”

I grinned despite the chill creeping up my spine.

“Oh, I like you,” I whispered to the invisible, ancient thing buried somewhere in history. “Spite is a lovely defense mechanism.”

But the amusement didn’t last.

“Which is why it’s still safe,” the witch continued. “Buried. Sealed. Warded against creatures of the night. It waits for someone who can read it without corruption.”

“And if Ezra finds the witch first?” someone asked.

This time, the silence stretched longer.

Then, softly, with no drama at all: “Then the world changes.”

I felt that sentence like a blade sliding between my ribs.

“For many,” the witch went on, “horribly. For vampires… beautifully.”

There it was.

The shape of the future.

Not domination through force—but through design. A world rewritten so that vampires didn’t have to conquer it.

They would simply belong.

Ezra hadn’t just wanted power.

He’d wanted inevitability.

My jaw clenched as Amaris’s face surfaced unbidden in my mind— Free. Brilliant. Already burdened with knowledge no one should have to carry alone.

She wasn’t the spell.

She was the lock.

And the book?

The book was the key Ezra didn’t even realize mattered more.

I stayed crouched far longer than was safe, letting the conversation unfold, committing everything to memory. Names half-spoken. References to timelines. Mentions of failures that sounded suspiciously like futures Amaris had already seen and rejected.

One thing became painfully clear.

She hadn’t been there.

Amaris had never been part of this meeting.

They spoke around her. About her absence. About the necessity of someone like her.

That meant this moment—this knowledge—had never belonged to me before.

I pulled back slowly, carefully, retreating until the encampment vanished behind trees and stone. Only then did I straighten, the weight of revelation settling into my bones.

“Well,” I said aloud to the empty road, “that explains a lot.”

Ezra wanted the witch.

But the book?

The book was the fulcrum.

Without it, he had blood and no words. Power with no shape. A ritual doomed to collapse under its own ambition.

If I could find it first—

If I could keep it buried somewhere Ezra would never reach—

Then maybe the future Amaris had sacrificed herself to prevent wouldn’t exist at all.

The warmth in my chest pulsed again, steady now, like a reminder.

“I hear you,” I murmured. “I’m paying attention.”

My mind raced ahead, spinning possibilities. Time-buried artifacts didn’t stay lost by accident. They hid according to rules—patterns. If the book moved when threatened, then it chose where to rest.

Which meant it could be predicted.

Which meant it could be guarded.

Or misdirected.

A slow smile tugged at my mouth.

Ezra thought he was playing a long game.

He had no idea how much longer mine could be.

I turned back toward the road, already planning detours, false trails, futures Ezra would never see coming.

I’d changed one choice.

Then I’d uncovered another.

Now I carried a truth that could unmake everything Ezra was building.

The world wasn’t going to end because of a witch.

It was going to end because of a book.

And I had made a career out of making sure dangerous things stayed exactly where they belonged.

Lost.

Forgotten.

And buried so deep even history forgot their names.

Time to do it again.

Whatever it cost.