💰 Gold Coin Chronicle: The Haruspex’s Coin

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📚 From the Library of Borrowed Worlds  

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🕯️ Prologue: The Coin That Called My Name

Tonight, the Library found me before I found it.  

I felt it first in my ribs — a sharp, echoing pulse that did not belong to me.  
A second heartbeat.  
Faint. Insistent.  
Tapping like an impatient finger against bone.  

At first, I thought it was exhaustion.  
Or a subtle aneurysm.  
But it traveled — moving from my ribs to the hollow behind my sternum, and then, impossibly, down my arm.  

It followed me through the rain.  
Through the dark.  
Through the hollow quiet of my room.  

By the time I stepped into the Library of Borrowed Worlds, the lamps were already dimming.  
Not failing — reacting.  

The air thickened.  
It didn’t feel like air; it felt like breathing through heavy, damp wool.  

Shadows sharpened as if waking up.  
The corners of the shelves warped.  
The darkness wasn’t absence — it was presence.  
Black. Oily. Watching.  

And something in the stacks whispered along my spine:  

“Something has been flipped.”  

Then the sound came — a single, perfect clink from deep within the History Wing.  

Not a drop.  
Not an accident.  
A summons.  

A gold coin calling for a witness.  

The copper scent rose almost immediately, seeping from the stone floor.  
Old blood. Iron-heavy. Warm.  
The smell pressed behind my eyes.  

The Library breathed in.  
I followed.  

---

🩸 The Coin Reveals Itself

I walked toward the sound, each step sinking into warmth beneath my boots.  
The marble tiles pulsed faintly, like stone holding an infected fever.  

At the end of the aisle lay a gold coin, face-down.  

The dust parted in a clean ring around it —  
repelled,  
rejected,  
as though the coin refused all contact with anything ordinary.  

I knelt.  
The wrong heartbeat surged, vibrating violently in the palm of my reaching hand.  

I touched the coin.  

The moment my fingers closed around it, the metal felt oily — sticky like dried sap — and disturbingly warm.  
It adhered to my skin as though it had been waiting specifically for me.  

Then it pulsed.  
Once.  
Twice.  
Again.  

A slow, organic contraction in my palm.  

And with the second pulse, synchronized brutally with my own heart, a thought scraped the inside of my skull like grinding teeth:  

“Ex visceribus veritas.”  
(From entrails, truth.)  

The coin knew me.  
It knew what I feared.  
It knew what I wanted.  
It knew the humiliating need that had driven me here tonight.  

I flipped it.  

---

🦅 The Haruspex Arrives

Blood sprayed upward.  
Silent.  
Viscous.  
Nearly black, as if crude oil and rusting iron had learned to flow together.  

The arc was impossibly precise — ritual geometry obeyed without hesitation.  

The blood landed in coiling streams that hissed against the stone.  
The sound resembled skin being peeled from old bone.  

The Library held its breath so completely I could hear the microscopic clicks of blood drying on marble.  

It spread into runes — not letters, but anatomical diagrams.  
Maps of hidden pathways.  
Maps of decay.  

The air dropped twenty degrees.  
Cold smoke rose from the runes, carrying the smell of ammonia and burnt fat.  

From the smoke, feathers gathered.  
Obsidian. Matted. Rigid.  

And from the feathers, a shape stepped forth.  

A towering figure in funeral red — not cloth, but skin-like folds resembling tanned muscle.  
Its head was that of a crow, beak jagged and stained, feathers clotted dark with ancient blood.  

Eyes of molten gold burned from sockets too deep to be natural.  
They didn’t just see me.  
They cataloged me.  
Failings. Hopes. Ruin.  

When it spoke, the voice rasped like talons dragging across bone.  
But the words bloomed inside my skull instead of in the air:  

“Ego sum Haruspex.  
Ex sanguine fatum legam.  
Flip the coin again.  
Feed me entrails, and I shall speak your fate.”  

(I am the Haruspex. In blood, I read fate.)  

Its golden eyes locked onto me.  
Not the coin.  
Me.  

The coin pulsed in my hand — a heart demanding sacrifice.  

---

⚖️ The Choice

I clutched the coin.  
Warm.  
Wet.  
Alive.  

It no longer felt like metal — it felt like an organ, struggling against my grip.  
Each pulse squeezed into my wrist, syncing my body with its hunger.  

The Haruspex waited.  
Perfectly still.  
Predatory still.  

Its attention fixed on the soft place beneath my ribs.  

The Library trembled.  
Shelves groaned.  
Lamps flickered in violent waves of darkness and sickly yellow glow.  

The Haruspex tilted its head — a gesture of immense boredom.  
Its voice scraped in my skull once more, cold and absolute:  

“Refuse, and the prophecy will remain unwritten.  
But the rot I have read will begin tonight, exactly where the copper scent is thickest.”  

It wanted an offering.  
It wanted truth.  
It wanted me.  

I inhaled.  
The air burned my lungs, tasting like dried blood and old regret.  

My fingers tightened, squeezing the coin until the gold bit into my palm.  
The second heartbeat thundered.  
Once.  
Twice.  
Again.  

Every muscle screamed to run.  
But my mind was locked — frozen between fear and the blinding desire for truth.  

And I made my choice.  

---

📜 Ledger Fragment

The Haruspex’s Coin has been added to the Gold Ledger.  

Its prophecy remains unwritten.  
The Ledger waits for blood to ink the augury.  

“Ex visceribus veritas. In sanguine fatum.”  
(From entrails, truth. In blood, fate.)  

The Library is holding its breath.  
The Ledger will not close until your offering is named.  

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Email. thenightlystorytellerblog@gmail.com
  

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