A human who dared hope against such a toxin—who thought they could fight against its creeping death—would find none.
They would succumb.
They would die.
My grip tightened on the book as my gaze fell upon another list—a litany of impossibilities, of forbidden flora not meant for this world.
Frost Bloom.
Sunspire Root.
Time Weaver’s Root.
Each name burned into my mind.
These were plants from Solaris.
A realm thought lost, unreachable to those who dwelt in shadowed secrecy.
Yet—here the Noctyss flower was.
How had it been procured?
Who had crossed the boundary between worlds?
Who wielded the power to bridge realms, to steal from Solaris itself?
The answer hung in the air, unseen.
Waiting.
And I had every intention of finding it.
I turned the page.
The Noctyss flower
Mind corruption.Soul devourer.Magic suppression.Deformity.
A death sentence—not just for the body, but for the very essence of a being.
My fingers trembled as I read the warning, scrawled in jagged red ink across the margins?—
To tamper with the Noctyss is to gamble with fate itself.Only the foolish or the damned would seek its full potential.
The ingredients were listed with the cold exactitude of an execution order:
—One petal of the Noctyss flower
—Five drops of darkness blood
—10 mL of charcoal-distilled plant extract
—A dried sprig of mugwort
Beneath them, the instructions were laid out in careful, meticulous detail—each step a pathway to something far beyond a mere poison.
The warnings were more harrowing:
