"The Stiff Upper Libram."

16:35 Sunny Day Mall Ye Old Book Shop

An hour or more had bled past in the sepulchral silence of the bookshop.

The front section was a carefully curated museum of leather-bound history and literary classics which Mara had glossed over. her fingers tracing the spines, her senses extended for any residual magic clinging to the mundane volumes.

The shop owner, the General Practitioner of the Arcane Arts, whoever they were, was a master of layered deception. A casual browser would see nothing but a charmingly expensive collection of antique books. But beyond the words of Pindar, Homer, Heywood and Boucher there was veritable web of passive wards, tripwires of alarm magic woven into the very fabric of the shelves, and a subtle, ever-present hum of surveillance.

She had to bypass three triggered pressure plates and a hex-spell that would have turned her lungs to glass if she'd inhaled it, each disarmed with a precise, counter-curse spoken in the sibilant, dead language of entropy.

Beyond a beaded curtain, disguised as a simple divider between genres, the true nature of the shop began to reveal itself. Antique occult books and genuine albeit worthless grimoires written by charlatans and madmen. Nonetheless in mundane monetary terms some of these volumes were worth thousands, tens of thousands even. Mara threw an appraising glance at a first edition copy of 'Clavicules de Salomon.' Still, she wasn’t here for common thievery but for the good stuff. Ahead of her aisle narrowed, a dividing wall and a doorway leading into pure blackness. Mara’s magical senses saw, or rather felt the ward ‘Crummlarch’s Dividing Barrier.’

“So the old bastard knows a bit of ****-Miasma himself’ she thought. 'Crummlarch’s Dividing Barrier' was an honest spell. It would divide any intruder in two who passed through it. The 'Hellish Crone Finger' was starting to wear off but it still had enough charge for one last application. Mara drew a sigil in the air in front of the doorway and channelled the **** magic through it. There was a hissing and the hint of a guttering flame and the barrier ward was dissolved. Mara stepped through even as her finger returned to normal.

The air grew colder, smelling of dust, decay, and old paper steeped in forbidden knowledge. She fumbled with the light switch on the other side of the doorway and smiled at what she saw.

Here, the books were not for sale; they were prisoners. Tomes bound in flayed human skin rested next to codices chained to lecterns, their pages filled with diagrams of impossible geometries and scrawled pacts with things that should not be named.

Mara’s lips twisted into a wry, appreciative sneer. Touching the cover of one particularly hefty tome bound in a pale, supple leather, she found it was disturbingly soft to the touch. The title, embossed in faded gold leaf, read "The Sodomancer's Compendium." Next to it, a slender volume with intricate knot-work on its cover was titled "The Sutra of One Thousand Orgasmic Enchantments, while a third chained to a heavy iron stand, promised revelations in "Coital Curses and Primal Pacts."

It was a collection of high-grade magical smut, a library in large part dedicated solely to the carnal application of the arcane arts.

The owner, this powerful Wizard, wasn't just a freak; he was a connoisseur. This was the life's work of a man who had clearly spent more time studying the intersection of flesh and magic than he had practicing anything so pedestrian as turning lead into gold. For a practitioner of **** Miasma, it was almost comical.

All this ****, flailing energy to prolong life, to enhance sensation, to bind one being to another through pleasure. It was the very antithesis of her own cold, elegant philosophy. Any amusement Mara might have felt curdled into a professional focus.

Sex might be a vulgar, messy Primordial magical ****, but it was a potent one, often intertwined with Life and **** in ways that lesser mages failed to grasp. She didn’t give a flying fuck about the Wizard's proclivities, but she was interested in looting a very specific book. She scanned the shelves with a new intensity, her gaze passing over "The Lickerish Libram" and "Rituals of the Rutting Rod."

Her eyes scanned the shelves, dismissing the lurid titles with a practiced contempt. She was looking for something specific, a foundational, a cornerstone text rather than a simple manual of carnal cantrips.

And there tucked unassumingly in a dark corner it lay. Its spine a plain, unadorned black leather that seemed to drink the faint light of the room. There was no gilded title, no ornate sigil. Instead, a single, faded word was tooled into the spine in a plain, utilitarian script: "The Stiff Upper Libram."

Mara pulled the heavy book from the shelf with a slight grunt. It was substantial, weighing at least fifteen pounds, its cover not leather but a strange, cool, bone-like material that was unnervingly smooth to the touch.

She opened it, and the scent that rose from the pages was of salt and bleach, a clean almost antiseptic tang. If she was being polite she’d say it had the scent of the pyrus calleryana tree. If she was being honest she’d say it smelt overwhelmingly of cum.

The text was a dense, sprawling tapestry of arcane formulae, anatomical diagrams of impossible precision, and rituals so elaborate and depraved they made the "Sodomancer's Compendium" look like a children's picture

Just then she heard a noise from the front of the shop.