Many apologies. I intended to have this chapter submitted by Friday, but then I realized that Sherlock exists and my weekend productivity dropped to 0 because I was busy feeling clever by association and molesting British men with my eyeballs.

11

It hadn't been intentional, but somewhere between the countless hours of reading Victor had fallen asleep on a book and was now having a most enjoyable dream. For once, it wasn't prophetic or a look into the dark rooms between life and death, but rather a charmingly clear view of a pebbled riverbed, where small fish rested between the rocks with sunlight playing off of their backs. When he turned the page in his mind, all of the water poured out of the book and flooded the room where Victoria was sitting in a high armchair before him, smiling and clearly in good health. He had never been so glad to see her; river water lapped at her ankles, and the world was simple and bright. He'd rarely felt so at peace.

All dreams do end, though, and this one was interrupted with the sensation of a small sharp jawbone scraping along his fingers. Victor lifted his head from his knees blearily to see a tiny white shape leaping away from him. When it saw that he was awake, it gave an eager yip.

"Scraps?" Victor murmured, not entirely sure he wasn't still dreaming. The dog wiggled happily and tucked himself in between his master and the large stack of volumes at his side, which ranged through the titular letter S on all topics relating to sigils, stones, and scapulimancy. After the first hour, Victor had begun to realize that he was simply not going to make any progress without some sense of where to go. From there on, it had been a simple matter of organizing books by subject as he came across them – or simple in theory, anyway. Some titles had proven difficult to categorize. On the Undulating Oneness of the Primordial Scolex and Forgiving Sodom: A Love Story still lay off in their own little corner of the room entirely. The tall young man laid his face atop his knees and thought how nice it would be to fall back asleep.

No time for that, though. With a sigh, he sat up and blinked at the tome open on the ground next to him, a dense volume with even denser content. There was a lot of talk of hellfire involved. Hauling it into his lap as Scraps nuzzled his elbow, he looked up only briefly as he heard the light shuffling of bony feet on the ground around the corner, and the Elder Gutknecht manifested around a knee-high stack of books.

"Ah, not a bad job," the old skeleton said, adjusting his glasses as he scanned the newly-organized books. "When you do die, I might have work for you here!" He gave a small sigh when the young man didn't respond. "I wanted to apologize, my boy," he said. "What I said earlier was… well, it was cruel. I remember being young. There's nothing worse than seeing those you love go before their time."

Victor didn't look up from the book in his lap. Already the text was beginning to swim before his eyes, exhausting him with its mere appearance.

"It's no use," he heard himself say, hollowly. Scraps whimpered. "I'm never going to find anything here. It's been hours, and I can't – see -" He rubbed furiously at his eyes. "You were right. What can I do?" He was so tired that it hurt. "It's been hours. I've looked at hundreds of books, and not one of them with a positive thing to say. It's all how to poison your enemies or, or evoke the Worm of Time and Dust." He shook his head. "You'd think that there's no way to… stop death when it's coming."

"You'll forgive me for saying so," the Elder said, "but I think most dead men would be insulted that it was such a preoccupation for you in the first place."

Victor didn't know what to say to that, so he stared down at the tome in his lap, a wicked-looking thing bound in red leather. He re-opened it miserably to one of the pages he'd not yet seen, replete with occultic symbols and several inky skulls in each page's corner.

"So withine the circle shall there be laid the chaines of bondage of the Dead; and betwixte them opened that most gaping Hellish path, the echoing tunnel of the Screaming Damned -"

"What is this?" he asked without thinking.

"Hmm?" the Elder said, turning up the cover to see it. "Ah, that's just Berival. Don't read it, he's quite insane." He flipped the book closed with a little puff of dust. "Now, this might be a little more to your liking…"

The book he brandished from almost nowhere was quite a bit smaller. The words embossed in flaking gold on its cover read Þe Byrðenaf Inníwian Lífes. Victor took it from the old skeleton's hands and opened the cracked leather. Inside there was no title page, but an ink drawing of a lit candle. One page further, and he was greeted with line after line of what looked like Old English, with handwritten annotations scribbled tightly in the margins.

"This…?" he asked again, looking up.

"'The Charge of Renewed Life,'" the Elder said, patting the little book. "Very rare volume. I wasn't sure owning it hadn't been a dream, but here I've managed to find it again." He fixed Victor with a sad, fatherly look. "It's not precisely what you were hoping for, but I think you'll find it interesting.''

Victor squinted at the page. The annotations were tiny and extraordinarily dense, but they were English. Scraps gave a small whine at his side and the young man absently scratched the little dog on the skull as he began to read.

"Translation recorded 1789 by the late Sir Engelbert Hottensworth, formerly of Pearshire. Original text attributed to Aldercy, d. 1345.

"Know ye spirit is but a candle's flame, born of existence and burning long after death. We Old Dead do crave the Heavenly light oft elusive in dreams, tho few understand the divine release from existence that might be found in the fire, which when shared shows the path into the deep places between our Life and Death."

"I have heard a woman's tale, trifling tho they oft are, as she joined me in my tower in this our prisonous Purgatory. It was of great interest to me that she told her most recent death had not been her first. Once in life hers had been a love shone brighter than the sun, a man of virtue we in our weary antiquity would call a creature of legend. They two lived their lives in the sole service of one another until the day that their Cruel Lord came from his hilltop to quench the life from the bride, jealous for their Blessed happiness.

"Her moral husband wept whilst she found herself woken in the most curious of places, she said: a corridor the likes of which she had rarely known in life but which brought her great comfort in death. She had nearly crossed through the door at the end when her lover did speak a Word to her, heard from beyond the grave, and she turned and left the hall. When she woke again, it was in her lover's arms, to embrace him one last time before he left this world for another, transformed into a great hart. For the rest of her long days she mourned, but in dreams, oft she found herself walking hand-in-hand through long corridors with her worthy husband, he who sacrificed Heaven to rekindle the flame of Life in one he loved more than Death could contain."

"Sounds familiar, doesn't it?" the Elder said. Victor stood up slowly. He hadn't realized that his hand had drifted slowly over his chest, which was throbbing with dull discomfort. It did indeed sound very familiar, though he'd never told anyone about his dreams – well, no one but Victoria, now. He wondered suddenly whether she'd come across the note he'd left her. Perhaps he ought to have left it on her bedside instead.

Scraps barked sharply as a very hard pain hit Victor in the chest where the throbbing sensation had originated. He gritted his teeth with a small noise as he waited for it to pass. It was surely just exhaustion.

"Are you alright, son?" the Elder asked him.

"I'm fine," he said, shrugging off the pain. He straightened up slowly, still holding the ancient book. "Elder Gutknecht, you've read this?"

"I've been looking for it since the night your wedding was called off because the groom was risen and the bride was made of insects," said the old skeleton with uncharacteristic dryness. "Rather odd day, that one."

"This is…" He flipped through the half-translated book. "This is what happened."

"Is it?"

"Yes! This is exactly, with – with the dreams…" He trailed off with his eyes on the last line of the page. 'He who sacrificed Heaven to rekindle the flame of Life in one he loved more than Death could contain.' The twisting in his chest seemed suddenly to double as he read the words over and over again. He closed his eyes and the Elder regarded him with a penetrating expression on his bleached face.

"I never did ask how you managed to find your way down here on your own," he said.

The young man took a deep breath. Plainly, he said, "It was poison." The Elder tilted his head upward but said nothing in response.

"Perhaps you should rest," he suggested.

"I slept some," Victor said distractedly. He leaned against one of the high pillars of books and then quickly stepped away when he felt it shift behind him. "What time is it?"

"Time?" the Elder asked bemusedly. "No such thing here. Upstairs, though…" He craned his stooped head upward to peer across the city of books. Victor had a rather better view; on one of the far walls, he noticed for the first time, there sat an assortment of clocks whirring quietly to themselves. "Noon, or thereabouts. There's no direct conversion, and I don't keep the clocks as well-winded as I ought to." Victor almost immediately wished that he hadn't asked. His new knowledge of just how little he had slept made his eyes begin to ache again and brought out a soreness in his neck he'd managed not to notice before now. Scraps leapt up to nuzzle his palm, offering a sympathetic whimper.

"A bite to eat?" the Elder said.

Now, that was hard to object to. Victor hadn't eaten in longer than he could remember. "It w-would be appreciated," he said, feeling that same sallow awkwardness that always manifested in him at the idea of accepting another's favors. Even when they were offered freely, he could not kill his crippling fear of imposing on another person. The Elder either did not register the sudden fault in the young man's composure or did not care. He waved Victor around the corner and led him out of the literary labyrinth toward the podium atop which he often stood.

Behind it and beneath several scattered books lay, curiously, a trap door. The old skeleton beckoned Victor down a long, gently-inclined staircase which ended on a wooden landing that creaked beneath their feet. The area beneath the tower library was surprisingly cozy. A hearth crackled with cheerful green flame and two windows set on either side of it showed a dim view of the cityscape and the faint-lit horizon. There were fewer books here than upstairs, but still enough to give the area an air of antique respectability.

"Sit down, sit down," the Elder said as he hobbled toward a closed bookshelf. There were two armchairs before the fire, both winged and very stiff-looking. Victor seated himself in one and thought that the library floor had been more comfortable. The gold embossing on the book in his hands was glinting green in the firelight. He eyed the unreadable title with a weary eye.

To rekindle the flame of Life in one he loved more than Death could contain.

Victor flipped the book open again to scan the pages as the Elder came shuffling back with a tin of biscuits in his bony hand. Only about a third of the book had been translated, and much of that smeared or damaged by water. He reached absently for the tin as it was offered to him and took a small bite of a biscuit that, as it turned out, may have been a few decades old, turning immediately to dust in his mouth. He coughed horribly at the taste and looked at the gray wafer in the firelight for a moment before slipping it down next to the armchair while the Elder's back was turned. The small crunching noise from the floor a few seconds later told him that Scraps had not forgotten their old dinnertime ritual.

He stared at the fire while the Elder pulled down books from their shelves, talking happily about their histories. Victor's mind was far away, deep within the pages of the unreadable little book in his hands while the fire played with the shadows on his lap. He could see, in his mind's eye, the last sight of Emily that he'd ever caught – just the little shine of her, disappearing towards the moon while he lifted himself from the ground.

He who sacrificed Heaven…

Oh, God.

It all made sense. He understood the story perfectly. If there was fire in life and dark in death, certainly there was only so much light to go around. If the spark was given away to another, there was nothing left to move on to Paradise or – or whatever else might be out there. The only part of a person left to live on must remain in he who had been brought back. It was a – it was a very troubling thought, actually. To think that there was anyone in his life who would have done such an intimately sacrificial thing for his sake was surprisingly distressing, and he wasn't sure why. He'd loved Emily, after all – he was sure he had – but the idea of having been loved by her in return, well and truly loved, was making him feel ill, and he was sure he was an absolute bastard for it.

Victor stood up slowly, staring at his hands while the firelight drew smoky shapes across his knuckles. It didn't look right; the skin was too dark, too easily accepting of the fire's green light. He drew his hands close to his face – and there it was. Just the slightest tinge of blue within his pale skin, like water inside a vase.

"I'm… dying," he said quietly.

The Elder looked up from his piled books and reached out slowly to take Victor's hand without comment, almost as if he'd been expecting to hear such a thing. "Mm," he said, adjusting his wire glasses. "Oh, dear." Truth be told, Victor wasn't sure he hadn't been expecting it himself. Was there ever a chance that drinking deadly poison was going to be a consequence-free exercise?

Victor looked blankly down at his dog, who was still flexing his jaw in the manner he would have if he'd still had a tongue with which to lick crumbs from his muzzle. He pulled away from the Elder without much of a thought. "Come here, Scraps. Elder," he said, looking at the skeleton again, "how long do you think I have?" That was all he wanted to know – just a timeline.

The Elder Gutknecht said, "That rather depends on the poison."

"The Wine of Ages. Old, dried, d-diluted in water."

"Ah." The Elder sounded almost impressed. "Give yourself twelve hours on the outside. Dare I ask where you came upon it?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Victor said, tired beyond all description and feeling very unlike himself. He wasn't even as upset as he'd expected to be. There was a sort of gentle numbness in all his extremities that bade him to focus. He set down the Old English book and reached out to shake the Elder's hand, saying, "Thank you for having me. I think I'll be back. I just need to go – out – for a bit. A bit of fresh air. If that's alright."

The old skeleton returned the shake with gravity. "The books will be here when you get back, my boy. I'll do a bit of reading while you're out. Here's hoping the fresh air does you well."

"Thank you," he said absently, returning to the stairs and ascending them to the open trap door in just a few long strides. Scraps trotted along behind, clearly intuiting that something was wrong but unable to understand what. The young man had very nearly exited the room when he heard a voice call from behind.

"Victor?"

He turned around to see the decrepit skeleton looking up at him from next to the fire. It was the first time he thought he'd ever heard the Elder call him by his name. "I am sorry this is happening," he said, and he looked it. "Sometimes it's hard to remember what it's like to have so much potential. Things don't change in the Land of the Dead. They only fall apart." He paused a moment to cough. "That's the difference between life and death, you know. Life gets to grow. Everyone needs that chance before they pass. You and yours deserve better."

Victor tried to say thank you, but he had no words left. He offered the Elder a nod that he may not have even been able to see in the darkness, and turned abruptly to leave. He craned his neck upward as he rose into the library. A raven crawwed at him from atop the podium as he turned to view the high domed ceiling, behind which the sky sat as heavy as the earth.

Things only fall apart. That they did.

"Come on, Scraps," he said gently to his loyal little dog, happy to see him even when the world was ending. "Let's go for a walk."

Holy hell was this a hard chapter to write, and I'm still not very happy with it. If anyone has criticism on how it can be improved, I would be deeply grateful to hear it. I think I have just saddled myself with way too much plot and backstory in this fic, all for the sake of justifying a stupid change to the movie's end that I just *had* to make because I'm a sucker for a heroic sacrifice. In related news, keep an eye out for this becoming a running theme throughout this story - and the next. Everybody dies. This is going to be fun!