CROWNED BY BLOOD
Only members of the High Bloodline had access to, only those who had lost something precious they loved in war were permitted to read the Codexes of What-Should-Not-Be, the forbidden texts that detailed curses and magics too dangerous for common knowledge.
I qualified on both counts, and the wards recognized my right to enter.
The further I read, pushing deeper into the most forbidden sections, the more disturbing patterns began to repeat across different texts from different eras and different cultures:
One phrase kept surfacing across different texts in different languages, translated dozens of ways but always meaning essentially the same thing:
"Wounds without cause are the loudest calls