Chapter 3: Gallery of Horrors

Chapter 3: Gallery of Horrors

The bell on Elias’s shop door sounded less like a chime and more like a death rattle. Alex stepped inside, letting the door swing shut on the grey London morning. The familiar smell of dust and decay felt suffocating. Elias was waiting in the back room, his beady eyes alight with a mixture of fear and avarice.

Alex didn't bother with pleasantries. They tossed the green leather-bound book onto the cluttered desk. It landed with a soft, final thud. “I held up my end,” Alex said, their voice a low rasp. “Now you hold up yours.”

Elias snatched the book, his long fingers stroking the cover as if greeting a lost pet. He tucked it safely into a drawer before turning his attention back to the charcoal sketch of the Conclave sigil. The trap in Kensington had been a stark warning—the Conclave knew their methods, knew their contacts. Standing here, in this hub of occult secrets, felt like standing in a spotlight.

“You were right to be cautious,” Elias murmured, adjusting his spectacles. He tapped a bony finger on the drawing. “This isn't a map marker. It’s… technical. An instruction. It’s a binding glyph that attunes a magical construct to a specific resonance.”

“Resonance of what?” Alex pressed, their patience wearing thin.

“Emotion,” Elias said, a flicker of professional fascination overriding his fear. “Powerful, raw emotion. The glyph keys the siphon to a specific cocktail of feelings. In this case, ‘Aesthetic Awe’ and ‘Sublime Confusion’. It’s designed to harvest the ambient emotional energy of a large group of people.” He looked up, his magnified eyes locking with Alex’s. “It’s a psychic leech, and the signature is overwhelming. It’s coming from the South Bank.”

“Where on the South Bank?”

Elias gave a dry, humourless chuckle. “The Tate Modern. The new exhibition in the Blavatnik Building. It’s called ‘Ephemeral Forms’.”

The name was a punchline to a joke Alex didn’t find funny. An art gallery. A public space teeming with tourists, students, and families. It was audacious. It was brilliant. And it felt like another perfectly tailored cage, this one built of social convention instead of glowing glyphs. The Conclave wasn't just hiding in the shadows anymore; they were hiding in plain sight, using the mundane world as both their hunting ground and their camouflage.

The Tate Modern was a cathedral of concrete and glass, its towering chimney a stark finger pointing at the overcast sky. Inside, the Turbine Hall was a cavern of echoing voices and footsteps. Alex bought a ticket, the simple, mundane transaction feeling utterly surreal. They were a ghost at the feast, a shadow slipping through a world of light and noise, their senses screaming that this entire place was fundamentally wrong.

They followed the signs for ‘Ephemeral Forms’, melting into a throng of art lovers and curious sightseers. The shift was immediate. The moment Alex stepped into the exhibition wing, the air changed. It grew heavy, charged with a low-level hum that vibrated just beneath the range of normal hearing. To Alex, whose senses were permanently scarred by the Umbra, it felt like walking into a powerful magnetic field.

The gallery was a series of vast, white-walled rooms. The art was jarring, deliberately unsettling. One room was dominated by a sculpture of twisted, blackened steel that looked like a petrified scream. In another, a massive canvas painted with Vantablack absorbed all light, creating a disorienting portal to nothingness. Visitors stood before the pieces, their faces a mixture of rapt attention, bewilderment, and faint unease.

Alex let their eyes drift out of focus, looking past the physical objects to the currents of energy that flowed around them. They could see it now. Faint, shimmering tendrils of light, ephemeral as heat haze, were rising from the crowd. Every thoughtful frown, every gasp of surprise, every murmur of appreciation was being gently, invisibly harvested. The art wasn't just being observed; it was actively feeding. The sculptures and paintings were focal points, intricate magical machines disguised as postmodern expressionism, siphoning the city's soul one gallery-goer at a time.

A cold dread coiled in Alex’s stomach. This operation was immense. The sheer amount of power being collected here was staggering. What for? To fuel what kind of ritual? To power what terrible engine of control?

Their gaze fell upon the centerpiece of the final room. It was a chaotic tangle of polished obsidian shards, suspended in the air by unseen forces, rotating slowly. It drank the gallery’s sterile light and seemed to radiate a profound cold. It was the heart of the machine. Alex moved closer, feigning interest, and their eyes traced the sculpture’s base. There, so faintly etched into the stone that it was nearly invisible, was the sigil from the alley. It pulsed with a slow, malevolent rhythm, the control rune for the entire, monstrous apparatus.

The Conclave wasn’t just a secret society of mages. They were farmers. And all of London was their field.

“It holds a certain… gravitational pull, don’t you think?”

The voice was smooth, cultured, and far too close. Alex stiffened, turning slowly. A woman stood beside them, her posture radiating an unshakeable, predatory calm. She was dressed in an impeccably tailored black suit, a stark slash of darkness against the gallery's white walls. A small silver name tag read: Isabelle Vane, Curator. Her eyes, the color of storm clouds, held no warmth, only a clinical, piercing intelligence. She knew.

“It’s designed to draw the eye, to hold the mind. To elicit a response,” she continued, her voice barely a murmur. She wasn't looking at Alex, but at the obsidian sculpture. “Magus Valerius has always said that the greatest works of art are those that take something from the viewer.”

The name hit Alex like a blast of arctic air. Magus Valerius. The leader of the Conclave. The architect of this entire nightmare.

Alex’s hand twitched, instinctively reaching for the Umbral cold within them. But what could they do? The room was full of people. An attack here would be a massacre.

Isabelle’s lips curved into a smile that didn't reach her eyes. It was a smile of pure, intellectual superiority. “You have an interesting energy about you,” she said, her gaze finally sliding to meet Alex’s. “Chaotic. Unrefined. Like a splash of paint on a pristine canvas. He was very curious about how you would react to his collection.”

As she spoke, the world seemed to tilt on its axis. In Alex’s peripheral vision, the edges of the obsidian shards began to blur and stretch. The twisted steel sculpture in the other room seemed to writhe, just for a second. The deep black of the light-absorbing canvas appeared to ripple, as if something were about to step through it.

The Curator wasn't just a lieutenant; she was the gallery’s warden, her will woven into the very fabric of the exhibition. The art was her weapon. The entire gallery was her domain.

“The little creature in the alley was a test. An invitation, of a sort,” Isabelle Vane continued, her calm voice a chilling counterpoint to the subtle warping of reality around them. “The apartment in Kensington was a key. We wanted to see if you were clever enough to find the lock.” She took a step closer, the ambient hum of the room rising in pitch. “And now, here you are. The flaw in the masterpiece. The Magus is eager to see what you’re made of.”

The exits seemed to stretch, the doorways elongating into impossibly distant tunnels. The murmuring of the crowd faded into a dull, meaningless roar. It was just Alex and the Curator, standing in the cold heart of a monstrous machine, and the trap had finally, irrevocably, sprung.