The Grimoire
The parasitic, human-skin-bound book that binds a mercenary company body and soul, grants its powers, and compels the killing that feeds it — holding thousands of names though the company is only ever 111 strong.
The Grimoire is the power at the heart of the Hundred-Eleven — a parasitic book bound in human skin, to which every soldier of the company is sworn body and soul. It is not a cultivation road and not a spellbook a mage might read; it is a named entity that recruits, empowers, and feeds on those who take its brand.
The pages carry thousands of names. The company is only ever a hundred and eleven strong.
The oath and the brand
A recruit swears an oath on the Grimoire, takes the "111" brand, and is bound into the company. From that moment the soldier cannot leave. The book burns mages who try to swear, and women's oaths "don't take" — a selectivity no one in Veleh has explained. Trained combat under the binding is called the Pattern.
What it grants, and what it takes
To the bound, the Grimoire grants strength, endurance, resistance to magic, and clean healing. In exchange it compels killing, for it feeds on the deaths its soldiers deal; a soldier who withholds finds his own body no longer his, for the Grimoire can lock a bound man's muscles where he stands. The bargain is legible in the brand itself, and Alden — the company's reluctant chronicler — reads his own oath in a barrack-myth of an oak that grows into a city, takes too much, and is made to die.
The roster of 111
The company numbers exactly 111, ranked by number from #1, the Centurion, down to #111. As soldiers fall, the survivors are renumbered downward, so a rank is also a measure of how many have died above you. Yet the Grimoire's pages hold thousands of names though only 111 are ever bound at once — far more than any single company's dead could account for.
Theories & resonances
The gap between thousands of names and a hundred-and-eleven bodies is an open thread that touches the wider Loom. Whether the surplus names are the company's long-dead, souls cycled through some reincarnation-like door, or recruits gathered from across the stitches of the weave, the wiki may only theorise. The parallel to other soul-binding entities — void-touched things, forging-engines that spend champions — is a resonance, not a fact. (For the one confirmed cross-universe link on the roster, see the mystery of #45.)
Open hooks
Who first bound the book, and in whose skin; why it burns mages and rejects women's oaths; whether the thousands of names can be read, and by whom; and what the Grimoire is ultimately feeding, above the soldiers who feed it.