Charles sat hunched at his mahogany desk, the soft ticking of the grandfather clock slicing through the silence like a metronome of doom.
His fingers massaged his temples, the skin pale from how tightly they pressed. Dozens of scrolls and ancient looking journals and diaries lay scattered across the tabletop…some half burnt,some leather bound tomes, and one obsidian pendant still humming faintly with residual power.
"Damn that boy," he muttered, voice like gravel dragged across glass. “Always the heart, never the head.”
His mind raced, calculating the fallout. The ritual had been timed with the convergence…blood moon, the equinox, and the rare alignment of the stars. A window like this wouldn’t open again for another hundred years.
They had the perfect vessel and the perfect alignmen
