🩸 The Creeping Death CoinAs Told by the Nightly Storyteller — Creature of the Endless Library

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🕯️ Intro — “I Am No Longer Alone in My Skin.”
Come closer. Press your ear to the shadows.  
They move when you look away, yes—but they also move when the metallic heat of my breath stirs the dust.  

I have wandered the Endless Library for nights uncounted, cataloguing what should never be touched. My claws—three-jointed, brittle obsidian—click against the floor, a sound like splitting bone. My breath fogs the lantern glass, wet and hot, though the Library has no air of its own.  

Tonight, a drawer did not simply call.  
It invited hunger—not for sustenance, but for witnessing.  
It rasped through my ribs, metallic, insistent:  
“Tell them our names…”  

Inside was a single gold coin. It did not pulse—it shuddered, as if holding the echo of every final, desperate beat it had witnessed stop.  

This is not a story of greed. It is the meticulous recording of intrinsic rot. Five hunters undone by their own desire. The coin does not curse. It reflects, then multiplies.  

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🌑 The First Hunter — Captain Elias Veyne
“The Mapmaker”  
His maps were beautiful, ink sharp and mineral. Elias found the coin in a drowned ship’s locker. That night he dreamed of sinking into molten gold, lungs filling with syrup-thick wealth.  

When he woke, flakes of gold dust clung to his teeth. His tongue stiffened, his throat closed, and he froze upright, clawing at his own ambition.  

The coin rolled toward my feet. My claw twitched. I felt the resonance of his crushing finality. I almost picked it up.  

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🌒 The Second Hunter — Maribel “Mara” Kestrel
“The Defiant”  
She tried to cast the coin into the sea. It burned in her hand, a metallic accusation. But the sea rejects ruin.  

Her shadow stretched long, thin, hungry—her own self-loathing made visible. It folded her inward, parchment crushed too quickly. The sound was not a scream but a moist crack, realization breaking her in half.  

When the shadow smoothed flat, only the coin remained. It rolled toward me again, seeking fractured will.  

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🌓 The Third Hunter — Jonas Blackthorn
“The Scholar”  
He believed curses could be reasoned with. He dug a grave with trembling fingers, soil smelling of wet iron.  

The earth convulsed, spat the coin back, striking him between the eyes. His ribs folded inward like collapsing shelves. He did not scream. He simply obeyed the collapse.  

I reached for the coin. My chest tightened, the cavity of my heart contracting—a monstrous recognition answering its stillness.  

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🌔 The Fourth Hunter — Ronan Hale
“The Wanderer”  
He fled into wilderness, thinking distance equaled safety. But the coin measures not in miles—it measures in atrophy of self-control.  

He opened his satchel. The coin was already inside. It spoke in silence older than bone. His heart snapped like a tether cut loose, leaving him crushed by emptiness.  

The coin rolled out, tapping against my foot. Soft. Neutral. Utterly without malice.  

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🌕 The Last Hunter — Selene Ward
“The Innocent”  
She reminded me of myself before the claws, before the whispers, before the knowledge of monstrosity.  

Selene begged the coin. I begged with her, my guttural sound a parody of empathy. But the coin reflects. It magnified her impossible wish for purity into agony.  

Warmth crawled up her veins, knitting them shut with molten threads. Her vascular system lit like a map of fire. I heard the hiss of blood sealing, smelled the scorched sweetness of innocence burning away.  

She froze mid-scream, crystalline, veins glowing like molten glass. Days later, she crumbled, a hollow tower of ash and glittering bone-dust scattering in the slightest draft.  

The coin rolled toward me. Always toward me.  

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🔥 Outro — The Storyteller’s Warning
The drawer slammed shut, coffin-lid final. The memory of picking the coin up is gone, erased by monstrous will. But my claws curl around it now. It hums gently, mimicking the broken rhythm of my own heart.  

The coin is not a curse. It is a perfect focus. A mirror that records not just deaths, but the inevitable shape of desire itself. It does not simply wait—it indexes. It catalogues the living as the Library catalogues forbidden texts.  

If you hear it rolling in the dark—a tiny scrape, metal on wood—do not turn.  
It is only waiting to catalogue you, to show you the end you already carry inside.  


I can smell the curiosity—the fatal desire—in you.  
The coin is ready for its next reflection.  


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