Chapter 5: An Unwilling Alliance

Chapter 5: An Unwilling Alliance

The chaos of the ruined ballroom faded behind them, swallowed by the rain-slicked quiet of the alley. The air was cold, but the Phoenix Ember in Alistair’s hand pulsed with a gentle, life-giving warmth, a stark contrast to the icy dread coiling in his gut. He had the cure, but he had traded his anonymity for it.

The obstacle now stood directly in front of him, her face pale in the gloom, her black dress soaked with rain. Elara Vance no longer looked like a confident Concord agent on a career-making bust. She looked like someone who had just seen the fundamental laws of her universe rewritten by a ghost. Her hand, still holding the now-useless warding blade, trembled slightly.

"What... are you?" she asked, her voice stripped of its earlier authority, replaced by a raw, profound shock. It was the question he had spent a century ensuring no one would ever ask.

His desire for solitude, for the quiet peace of his exile, was a shattered relic. His new, immediate desire was to get back to his shop and restart the clock before Aethelburg’s timeline frayed into irreparable knots. To do that, he needed her out of his way.

"I am the man who just saved your life," he said, his voice flat and weary. The faint light from his tattoos had faded, but she had seen them. The lie was dead. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a fire to light."

He made to push past her, but she blocked his path, her resolve hardening even through the shock. "Not a chance. You used forbidden Chronomancy. You erased those… things from existence. That's power on a scale that gets people executed, or worse. I can't just let you walk away."

"You have no choice," Alistair countered, his patience evaporating. "Unless you want to see what happens when a city’s worth of causality unravels. The coffee flowing back into the pot was a parlor trick. Soon, buildings will forget they were built. People will forget they were born. All because of that," he nodded toward the alley, "and this." He opened his hand, showing her the Ember. "This is the solution. I am the only one who can use it. Now, stand aside."

For a long moment, they stood locked in a stalemate, the rain plastering her hair to her face and dripping from his jaw. She was the law, and he was the transgression. But the law was useless against the coming chaos. Elara, for all her rigid adherence to rules, was intelligent. She could see the terrifying truth in his eyes.

"Alright," she said, her voice regaining its edge. The action she proposed was a dangerous bargain. "I will help you. Or at least, I won't stop you. But you owe me the truth. All of it. No more lies about 'clumsy curses' or 'humble shopkeepers'. Why is a man with your power hiding in a dusty antique shop? What is that clock in your back room? And what was that attack all about?" She took a breath. "My silence in exchange for the truth. That's the deal."

He stared at her, weighing the options. His secrets were his shield, but his duty was to the clock. To the Fae. The city. The choice was no choice at all. "Fine," he bit out. "But we talk while I work. Time, as you may have noticed, is a luxury we no longer have."

The walk back to The Gilded Cog was a tense, silent affair. The temporal anomalies were growing more frequent, more pronounced. A carriage rattled past them, pulled by two horses, then for a split second, three. The headline on a newsstand they passed flickered between SHADOWS DEVOUR MIDNIGHT AUCTION and CONCORD VOWS REFORM. Moments were bleeding together.

Back inside the shop, the silence was more profound than ever. The great Fae Clock stood like a tombstone, its pendulum still and lifeless. Alistair felt the weakened, fluttering presences of the Fae within, a trio of dying stars.

He placed the Phoenix Ember on his workbench. It bathed the chaotic mess of grimoires and tools in a warm, golden light. As promised, he began to talk. He dropped the facade of Alistair Finch and let the Arch-Mage speak.

"This shop is a prison. This clock is my warden," he stated, his voice resonating with an ancient authority that made Elara flinch. "It is the Temporal Anchor of Aethelburg. It regulates the flow of causality, ensuring yesterday flows into today and today flows into tomorrow. My curse, my sentence, is to be its Custodian. To maintain it."

Elara stared at the clock with new understanding. "An anchor... So when it stopped..."

"The ship began to drift," Alistair finished. He spared her the full, bloody details of his past, the war, the cataclysm he had caused that led to this sentence. He gave her the what, not the why. "The Void Shard you saw evidence of was a poison designed to stop its heart. The auction was a trap, designed to lure me out."

"By who?"

"Someone who knows my past. Someone who wants the anchor broken," he said, turning his full attention to the task at hand. His action was now one of pure, unadulterated magic. He unrolled a scroll of spellsilk, its surface bare. He dipped his finger into a pot of powdered moonstone and began to draw, his hands moving with a speed and precision that was mesmerizing. Runes blazed to life on the silk, forming a complex matrix of restoration and ignition.

Elara watched, her skepticism warring with awe. This was magic beyond theory, beyond anything taught at the Concord academies. This was the art of creation itself. "And the Fae?" she asked quietly, remembering the term from his panicked ramblings in the alley.

"The living gears of the machine," Alistair said without looking up. "Ancient spirits bound to the clock. They are its life force. And they are dying." He finished the array and placed the Phoenix Ember at its center. The runes flared, pulling at the Ember’s power, channeling it into a focused beam of golden energy. "Now, I need you to stand back. When I release this, the backlash will be..."

He never finished the sentence.

The turning point was not a sound, but a feeling. A wave of absolute null-energy washed over the shop. The protective wards Elara had placed on the exterior didn't just break; they were unmade, dissolving into nothing with a faint, sorrowful chime.

CRACK!

The shop's front windows didn't shatter into glass. They atomized into a cloud of fine, grey dust that was immediately swallowed by an encroaching, unnatural darkness. The ancient, hidden wards Alistair had woven into the very bones of the building flared to life—silver lines of power that crisscrossed the walls and floors, only to flicker and sputter against the suffocating void.

The attack was direct, brutal, and overwhelming.

Then came the voice. It wasn't spoken; it was impressed directly into their minds, a chilling, resonant baritone that oozed possessive greed. It was the voice of the spider in the web, the serpent in the den.

"Alistair Finch. You have aged better than I expected. But I am not here for you, old friend."

The surprise, the true horror of the situation, landed with a single, terrifying word. The voice ignored the clock. It ignored Alistair's preparations. It focused on the weakest, most volatile of the Fae.

"Ignis!" the voice boomed, making the very foundations of the shop tremble. "I have come to collect the spark you owe me."

From within the silent clock, a terrified flicker of red-orange light pulsed once, a desperate S.O.S. from a panicked soul.

The Shadow Collector didn't want the clock. They didn't want to destroy the city. They wanted one of the Fae. They had come to rip a living gear from the machine.

Shadowy forms, more defined than the hounds, began to coalesce in the doorway—humanoid figures cloaked in shifting darkness, their faces empty voids. Alistair abandoned the ritual, snatching the still-glowing Phoenix Ember from the array. The plan had changed. This was no longer a repair job.

It was a siege.

He met Elara’s wide, terrified eyes. For the first time, they were on the same side, facing the same enemy. "It seems," Alistair said, a grim, dangerous light returning to his eyes, "that you're about to get a more thorough demonstration of my work."