Chapter 5: Whispers of the Conclave

Chapter 5: Whispers of the Conclave

The aftermath of unleashing Flóga was a descent into a private hell. Back in my flat, the world narrowed to the four walls of my bathroom and the searing agony radiating from the iron wound on my side. Normal injuries healed; this one felt like it was actively trying to unmake me. The flesh around the gash was blackened and necrotic, refusing to knit itself back together. It was a physical manifestation of an attack on my soul, a wound Flóga’s borrowed vitality couldn't touch.

<It is a clean wound,> she finally offered, her voice a distant, clinical hum in the back of my skull. She was coiled deep inside me, sated and heavy. The level of power I’d granted her had forged a stronger connection, and her presence now felt less like a passenger and more like a co-owner of my body. <They are skilled. They know how to hurt things like us. Exciting, isn't it? To be hunted by true professionals.>

"Thrilled," I grunted, splashing cold water on my face. My reflection was a stranger’s—a gaunt, haunted man with eyes that had seen too much crimson.

After disinfecting and dressing the wound as best I could, I pulled on fresh clothes, the simple act an exercise in agony. I had a symbol. I had a name: the Hounds of the Accord. But these meant nothing without context. And for context, I needed my handler.

When I walked into Khalfani Trent’s office for the second time in as many days, the atmosphere had changed. The veneer of corporate civility was gone. He stood not behind his desk, but before the massive window, staring down at the city lights. He didn’t have to turn around for me to know his composure was gone. I could smell the sharp, anxious scent of the wolf under his cologne.

“Report,” he commanded without turning.

“It was a trap,” I said, my voice hoarse. “Your Fae manager, Elara, sent me straight into it. Four of them. Tactical gear, anti-supernatural weaponry, magic dampening wards. They knew my tricks.”

Trent finally turned, his dark eyes burning with an intensity that had nothing to do with business and everything to do with territory. “Did you get anything from them?”

“They’re disciplined. Fought like a spec-ops unit. Suicide poison for the one I captured alive.” I pulled out my phone and slid it across the polished surface of his desk. On the screen was a clear photo of the tattoo from the dead man’s wrist: a balanced scale, impaled down the middle by a silver sword. “He said they were acting ‘for the Accord’. Called themselves the Hounds of the Accord.”

Trent stared at the image, his powerful frame perfectly still. I had expected recognition, anger, a plan of attack. Instead, for the first time since I’d met him, I saw something new on his face: uncertainty. He picked up his own tablet, his fingers flying across the screen, accessing secure databases that no one outside the supernatural elite even knew existed. He cross-referenced intelligence from his pack, from rival clans, from whisper networks that spanned the continent.

The silence stretched, thick and heavy.

“Nothing,” he finally said, and the word landed in the room like a stone. “No faction, no splinter group, no historical order matches this symbol or this name. They are a ghost. A ghost with enough power and knowledge to blind a Keres-bonded hunter and field a team of assassins in my city without me knowing.”

He looked at me, and the predatory gold in his eyes was clouded with something that looked almost like fear. “Whoever they are, they operate in the shadows of the shadows. They are a threat not just to you, Kaelen. They are a threat to me. To the entire established order.”

The cold knot in my stomach tightened. If Trent, with all his power and influence, was blind, then I was running through a minefield with no map. I was on my own.

“The Conclave,” I said. “Their official enforcers must know something.”

Trent let out a short, harsh laugh. “The Conclave of the Nine is a bureaucratic nightmare of ancient vampires and complacent Fae lords. They wouldn’t recognize a threat if it bit them on the arse. They’d form a committee to debate the threat’s procedural rights first. We need answers now, not in a century.”

He was right. But the Conclave wasn't just the Nine. It was an entire organization. And organizations, like chains, are only as strong as their weakest, most resentful link.

“There’s one other option,” I said, the idea tasting like ash in my mouth. “Silas Vane.”

Trent’s head snapped up, his expression hardening into a dangerous mask. “The Heretic Archivist? He was excommunicated for a reason, Kaelen. He traffics in knowledge that is meant to stay buried. Contacting him is a capital offense in the eyes of the Conclave.”

“We’re past caring about their eyes,” I countered. “We need to know who is trying to light this city on fire. Vane was the Conclave’s chief archivist for two centuries. If this symbol has ever appeared in any text, any historical record, he will have seen it.”

Trent stared at me for a long moment, the wolf inside him warring with the pragmatist. Finally, he gave a slow, deliberate nod. “Find him. Get the information. But understand this: you are walking on the razor’s edge. If the Conclave finds out, I cannot protect you.”


Silas Vane’s bookshop, ‘The Final Page’, was tucked away in a cobblestone alley near the British Museum, a place that time and gentrification had forgotten. The air inside was thick with the scent of decaying paper, leather, and dust motes that had been dancing in the same shafts of light for decades. Books were piled to the ceiling in precarious, terrifying stacks. It wasn’t a shop; it was a tomb of forgotten words.

I found him in the back, a thin, stooped man with spectacles perched on his nose and ink stains on his long, spidery fingers. He looked up from a crumbling grimoire, and his eyes, magnified by his lenses, were sharp and filled with a paranoid intelligence.

“I’m closed,” he said, his voice dry as parchment.

“Trent sent me,” I said, placing a heavy, sealed envelope on the table next to him. It contained a significant portion of my last payment. Information from Silas Vane never came cheap.

He eyed the envelope, then me. “Khalfani Trent is a beast who wears a man’s skin. I want nothing to do with him or his bloody affairs.”

“This affair already involves you,” I said, showing him the picture of the tattoo on my phone. “Ever seen this?”

Silas squinted at the screen. The change in him was immediate. The bored contempt vanished, replaced by a flicker of genuine fear. He snatched the phone from my hand, his breath catching in his throat.

“Where did you see this?” he whispered, his eyes darting towards the shadowed corners of his shop as if expecting an attack.

“On the men who tried to kill me last night,” I said. “They called themselves the Hounds of the Accord.”

Silas sank back into his chair, his face pale. “Then you are a dead man walking.” He pushed the phone back at me. “This isn’t some new faction. It’s an old idea. A cancer that has been growing in the heart of the Conclave for years. A whisper in the halls of power that has finally decided to start screaming.”

He explained, his voice a low, hurried whisper, that the Hounds were a radical, purist movement. They believed the Constantinople Accord was a failure, a pact that only managed the chaos of the supernatural world instead of curing it. They believed in a brutal, absolute order. Their vision wasn’t peace; it was a purge. A world where vampires were staked, werewolves collared, and Fae magic broken.

“But they need a catalyst,” Silas hissed, his fear making him animated. “They need to prove to the other factions that the current system is broken, that Trent’s ‘civilized’ order and the Conclave’s bureaucracy are too weak to stop the violence. They need a crisis.”

A horrifying, sickening understanding began to dawn on me. The pieces clicked into place with the cold, final sound of a prison door locking. The party. The werewolf princeling. The vampire envoys. Elara’s cryptic clue. The trap.

“They set it all up,” I said, the words feeling foreign in my own mouth. “The party… they orchestrated it. They put Alistair Thorne’s son and the Ordo’s people in the same room, knowing it was a powder keg.”

“And then,” Silas finished, his eyes wide with a terrible comprehension, “they ensured that a deniable, brutally efficient asset would be sent to light the fuse. An asset with no official allegiance, whose actions could be spun as a sign of escalating, uncontrollable chaos.”

He looked at me, his expression a mixture of pity and terror.

“They didn’t just try to kill you in that warehouse, Mr. Vance. That was a test. A recruitment attempt, perhaps. Or maybe just tying up a loose end. Their true purpose for you has already been served. They needed a pawn to topple the first domino.”

“They needed someone to murder a werewolf Alpha’s son and a delegation from a powerful vampire court, creating an incident that the Conclave can’t ignore and Trent can’t contain. They needed to shatter the peace.”

He took a shaky breath, the final, devastating truth laid bare.

“They needed you.”

Characters

Flóga Kerioú ('Flame of the Keres')

Flóga Kerioú ('Flame of the Keres')

Kaelen 'Kael' Vance

Kaelen 'Kael' Vance

Khalfani Trent

Khalfani Trent