It was not particularly rare for items and artefacts lost throughout time would appear in the Sanctum Sanctorum, if anything it was the safest place for them to be and it would seem that every other day a new mystic weapon would appear. Strange was no stranger to such profoundly dangerous items and knew how to handle them, and as his apprentice soon you too would have a certain expertise researching and handling these potentially world ending items. Luckily for the two of you, it was a relatively quiet day, a mere day of refining some spell wielding and doing some heavy research on a few items to see if any of New York's finest could benefit from the backlog of the mystic paraphernalia that the rest of the Sanctum had amassed. At the moment however, the long table in front of you and Stephen was solely a pile of junk that had been sat collecting dust in the various dark, shady corners of the Sanctum that needed sorting.

"I don't know what you guys are thinking, but straight away my heart wants pizza." Peter Parker strolled through and eagerly awaited your lunch-time response, he walked up to the table and scanned across the dusty relics. "Oh cool!" He reached down to the table and grabbed a large, dusty tome, the front had an embossing of a diabolical rams head and the pages were heavily bound in dark-red leather, but as menacing as it appeared it was just a completely normal book. Peter reached down to the small bronze clasp that held the pages together and slid his finger under the small leather overhand, and with a small click the clasp was undone.

"Peter... what did you just do." Stephen looked up with panicked eyes.

"I just opened the book, I don't know, I thought it looked cool." Peter quickly went to toss the book back down onto the table.

"Do not put that book down." Stephen looked over to you and hid a barely contained smirk behind his long, drooping sleeve. "Listen to me very carefully Peter and tell me. Did you undo the clasp?"

"Well yeah I just wanted to see what was inside." He said with eyes darting back and forth.

"Stephen, that isn't the..." With anxious tone Stephen cut you off.

"The tome of the Oracle." His jaw dropped. Strange stood up carefully.

"What of what?" Peter's breathing become quicker and quicker as he ran the book around his hands, Stephen slowly stepped over to Peter.

"In opening that book, you have bound your servitude to khaiogro, you will be his to toy with, unable to abide to anything but his will until your last breath. But you are in luck, there is... one thing you can do, but we don't have much time." Stephen reached out and coyly took the book

"What... what can I do! Come on you said yourself we don't have much time."

"The cure?" Stephen ran his fingers across the front of the book before bringing it up behind his head and smacking the cover against the back of Peter's head. "Don't touch other people stuff without asking."

~*~

Written by Aaron.