A scholar found a leather tome one autumn afternoon,
Its pages gilt with curses old beneath October’s moon.
He bore it home with eager hands, convinced he’d found his prize—
A gateway into secret arts, forbidden, dark, and wise.

The grimoire promised mastery o’er death and fleeting time,
With incantations etched in blood, inscribed in cursive serpentine.
“Three wishes shall be granted thee,” the cryptic letters bled,
“But hearken, fool: thy final cost is better left unread.”

His first wish was for wealth untold, for gold beyond compare,
And soon his chamber brimmed with spoil from shadows unaware.
Yet every coin was stamped with grief, each jewel a frozen tear—
Now plunder of a thousand graves festered through his haunted lair.

He asked for one to hold him fast, a heart that would not stray,
Yet soon her touch was everywhere—she would not fade away.
Her pallid arms enclosed his life—an ever-gnarling briar,
Smothering every waking thought in obsession’s strangling mire.

The scholar wept and cursed the book, its promises were lies,
Each blessing dripped with grief’s reprise and seeped into his night.
He begged to use his final wish to set the wrongs to right,
To banish all the grimoire’s gifts and flee its wicked blight.

“I wish I’d never found this tome!” he screamed into the dark,
The pages fluttered like dying moths, each word a crimson mark.
The grimoire closed with hollow laugh, its binding cracked and worn—
And time rewound to autumn’s eve, the day before that morn.

The scholar walked the forest path beneath October’s sky,
When something caught his searching gaze where fallen branches lie.
A leather tome with pages gilt, shrouded in leaf and moss—
He reached for it with eager hands, oblivious to the cost.

For grimoires do not grant escape, nor mercy, nor reprieve—
They only spin the web again for those who still believe.
The scholar’s fate was sealed anew, to live this curse’s truth:
Forever finding, wishing, losing, trapped in time’s eternal loop.