Chapter 4: The Price of a Spark

Chapter 4: The Price of a Spark

The city of Aethelburg held its breath. Alistair felt it in the hollow space where the clock’s ticking used to be. A momentary tremor in the cobblestones under his feet, a flicker in the gaslight on the corner that made a passing pedestrian pause in confusion. The temporal anchor was slipping, and his time was running out. His desire was simple, brutal, and absolute: acquire the Phoenix Ember, no matter the cost.

He shrugged on a dark, heavy coat over his simple clothes, the worn fabric a poor disguise for the tension coiled in his shoulders. Tonight, he was not Alistair Finch, the reclusive shopkeeper. He was stepping back into a shadow he had cast a century ago, a world of dangerous magic and lethal bargains. Umbra’s warning echoed in his mind—the serpent’s den. He had no doubt the serpent was waiting.

His primary obstacle was already in motion. As he locked the door to ‘The Gilded Cog’, he felt a faint, tell-tale prickle on the back of his neck. The monitoring ward Elara Vance had placed on his shop. It was a crude piece of work by Concord standards, but effective. She wasn't just watching his shop; she was watching him. He didn’t need to look to know she was out there, a hunter cloaked in the rainy night, convinced she was tailing a common magical trafficker. Let her think it. Her narrow worldview was a shield he could use, for now.

The entrance to the Midnight Auction wasn't a gilded door or a secret archway. It was a grimy iron grate in a forgotten alley, smelling of refuse and damp stone. Alistair descended a spiral staircase into the earth, the air growing warmer, scented with expensive perfume and potent magical reagents.

The staircase opened into a breathtaking, impossible space: a vast, subterranean ballroom. The ceiling was an enchanted starscape, shimmering with constellations that had not been seen in the sky for millennia. Glimmering fae-lights drifted through the air like captive fireflies, illuminating tables laden with food and drink. The attendees were a grotesque menagerie of the magical underworld—vampire lords in velvet coats, Fae nobles with cruel, beautiful faces, warlocks shrouded in shadow, and wealthy non-magical humans who paid exorbitantly for a taste of true power.

Alistair kept his head down, melting into the crowd. His action was one of careful observation. He was a ghost here, a forgotten name. He recognized a few faces, now lined and aged, who had been young upstarts when he last walked these circles. They didn't recognize him, a mercy he hadn't expected.

Across the ballroom, half-hidden behind a marble column, he spotted her. Elara Vance. She had traded her Concord coat for a sleek black dress, a poor disguise that screamed ‘undercover agent’. Her eyes were wide, taking in the sheer illegality of the gathering. She thought this was the bust of her career. She had no idea she was a pawn in a much deadlier game.

A chime silenced the murmur of the crowd. A wizened goblin in a tuxedo stood on a raised dais. "Esteemed guests," he rasped, his voice like grinding stones. "We have a most… unique item for your consideration tonight."

A velvet-lined case was brought forward. When the goblin opened it, a wave of palpable, life-giving warmth washed over the room, a stark contrast to the cloying magic that had filled the air. Inside, nestled on black silk, was the Phoenix Ember.

It wasn't a flame, but a crystal the size of a pigeon's egg. It glowed with an internal, shifting light, a miniature sun of gold and crimson. It pulsed with a gentle, life-giving heat that promised renewal, rebirth, creation itself. It was the perfect antithesis to the Void Shard’s annihilating emptiness. It was his only hope.

"We shall start the bidding at one hundred thousand crowns," the goblin announced.

The bidding was fierce, a flurry of hands and coded gestures. Alistair remained still, his heart a cold, heavy stone in his chest. He knew this was all theater. This was the moment the trap would spring. He waited for the other shoe to drop, his senses on a knife’s edge.

The price climbed to a staggering sum, one he could never hope to pay. A portly warlock with runes tattooed on his bald head made the final bid. "Sold!" the goblin cried.

And then, the turning point.

As the warlock stepped forward to claim his prize, the enchanted stars on the ceiling winked out. The fae-lights plunged to the floor and died. The entire ballroom was thrown into absolute darkness and a sudden, bone-deep silence. Gasps and screams were swallowed by a profound nothingness.

Alistair didn't need to see. He could feel it. The same silent, hungry void from the shard, magnified a thousand times. The ambush had begun.

From the corners of the room, shadows detached themselves from the walls. They were not just darkness; they were an absence of everything. They coalesced into the forms of gaunt, starving hounds, their bodies seeming to drink the very light from the air, their silent footfalls making no sound on the marble floor. Null-hounds. Creatures woven from the same anti-reality as the Void Shard.

Panic erupted. Spells flared and died before they could even form, their energy devoured by the hounds. A vampire lunged, his fangs extended, only to recoil with a scream as his hand withered where a hound’s flank should have been. These things didn't bite or claw. They unmade.

Alistair saw a flash of silver—Elara, drawing a warding blade, her Concord training kicking in. She was good, but she was out of her depth. She slashed at one of the hounds, and her blade passed through it as if through smoke, the silver edge instantly tarnishing to dull lead. The hound turned on her, its empty maw opening wide.

This was it. The moment of truth.

Alistair’s desire for anonymity warred with the primal need to survive. The Fae were silent, their connection too weak to reach him, but he could feel the ghost of Terra’s caution and the inferno of Ignis’s fury. He chose a middle path. Not overwhelming force, but absolute control.

He let go.

He let the weary facade of the shopkeeper fall away, and for the first time in a century, he willingly touched the power he had locked inside himself. He didn't cast a spell. He issued a command. He reached out and pushed against the flow of time itself.

The world around him did not freeze. It became thick, like hardening resin.

A Null-hound, leaping for Elara’s throat, hung suspended in the air, inches from her face. The panicked screams of the crowd stretched into low, distorted moans. A chandelier, its chain severed, fell in agonizing slow-motion. He had created a bubble of solidified moments around himself and the stunned Concord agent.

Elara stared, her mouth agape, not at the frozen hound, but at him. The air around Alistair shimmered. The faded tattoos on his forearms blazed with a soft, silver light, intricate runes of Chronomancy that crawled up his neck and danced at his temples. His eyes, no longer just weary, now held the cold, ancient light of dying stars. He was no longer a shopkeeper. He was something else. Something terrifying.

"Stay behind me," he said, his voice imbued with an echo, as if spoken a second ago and a second from now all at once.

He walked forward, out of the safety of the time-bubble. The world snapped back to its chaotic speed. He ignored the fleeing crowd and the attacking hounds. His focus was singular. He strode to the dais where the goblin auctioneer now lay, a grey, desiccated husk.

The Phoenix Ember lay on the floor, its light the only thing the Null-hounds seemed to shy away from. As one of the creatures lunged for it, Alistair raised a hand. He didn't conjure a shield. He simply plucked the moment of the hound’s lunge from the timestream and cast it aside. The creature flickered and vanished, its attack not blocked, but erased from ever having happened.

He snatched the Ember from the floor. Its warmth was a shocking, brilliant comfort in his hand.

The remaining hounds turned their collective, empty gaze on him, sensing the true power in the room. They converged.

Alistair didn't flinch. He let a sliver of his true, awesome power flare. A shockwave, not of force, but of pure temporal energy, erupted from him. Time buckled. For a single, silent instant, the ballroom was filled with ghostly after-images of the past and fleeting glimpses of the future. The Null-hounds, creatures with no past and no future, were caught in the paradox. They dissolved into motes of black dust, their void-nature unable to exist in the temporal storm.

Silence returned. A real silence this time, broken by the whimpering of the few survivors.

The surprise, and the final, devastating result of the night’s actions, was Elara Vance. She stood frozen, her defensive posture forgotten, her warding blade hanging limply in her hand. The professional suspicion on her face was gone, replaced by a profound, naked shock. She was staring at him as if seeing him for the first time.

She had come here to bust a criminal. Instead, she had watched a man bend reality to his will. She had seen power on a scale she had only read about in textbooks, power that hadn't been seen in the city since the last great war of the mages.

Alistair met her gaze, the silver light of his runes slowly fading back into his skin. He held the glowing Phoenix Ember in his hand. He had the cure, but he had lost his cover completely.

"You," she breathed, her voice barely a whisper, filled with awe and terror. "You're not a shopkeeper."

He knew, with absolute certainty, that the lies were over. The next chapter of his life had just begun, whether he wanted it to or not.