Chapter 3: The First Tithe

Chapter 3: The First Tithe

The final day dawned not with a bang, but with a slow, grinding burn. The brand on Elara’s forearm had ceased its intermittent pulsing and settled into a constant, agonizing throb, like a nerve exposed to a bitter wind. Every beat of her heart sent a fresh wave of fire through the thorny script. Malakor was impatient.

Elara moved through the morning routine like a ghost, her movements stiff and clumsy. She poured cereal for Lily, her hand trembling so badly that O-shaped flakes skittered across the countertop.

“You’re shaking, El,” Liam observed, his brow furrowed with the familiar, helpless concern that was starting to feel like an accusation. “Maybe you should see Dr. Evans again. It could be nerve damage from the accident.”

“I’m fine,” she bit out, the lie thin and brittle. “Just low on sleep.”

She wanted to refuse. The thought was a constant, defiant scream in the back of her mind. She was a graphic designer, a mother, a wife. Not a thief. She had spent the last forty-eight hours dissecting the museum’s security schematics, her mind searching for a flaw, an excuse, a reason it was impossible. But the plans only confirmed the futility of a normal approach: pressure plates, laser grids, motion sensors tied to a private security firm and the local police. It was a fortress. A sane person would walk away.

But sanity was a luxury she no longer had.

Lily, sitting at the table, pushed her cereal bowl away. Her face, usually pale, had a wan, greyish tint to it. She shivered, despite the warmth of the kitchen.

“Sweetie? Are you cold?” Elara asked, her own pain momentarily forgotten as a spear of maternal fear pierced through her.

Lily nodded, wrapping her thin arms around herself. “My chest is cold again, Mommy,” she whispered, her voice faint. “Like… like before.”

The words from two nights ago echoed in Elara’s memory: It makes my chest feel cold when he’s angry.

This wasn't just a child’s complaint. It was a status report. Malakor wasn't just torturing her; he was siphoning the life from her daughter as a penalty for her delay. The miracle was flickering like a dying candle. Every second she hesitated, she was pushing Lily back towards the darkness from which she had paid so dearly to retrieve her.

The primal need to protect her child finally, violently, overrode everything else. Her moral compass, her fear of being caught, her identity as a good person—it all burned away in a blaze of terrified love.

“Liam,” she said, her voice eerily calm. “I need you to take Lily to your mother’s house for the night. I have a… a freelance deadline that popped up. It’s a huge rush job. I need the house to myself to focus.”

Liam looked surprised, then suspicious. “A deadline? Now? El, you haven’t taken any work since the accident. Who is it for?”

“An old client,” she lied, the words tasting like ash. “High-paying, high-pressure. Please, Liam. I just… I need this. For a sense of normalcy.”

He stared at her, his gaze searching her face for the woman he knew, the woman who had been disappearing piece by piece since she woke up in that hospital bed. He saw the desperation in her eyes, the dark circles, the tremor in her hands, and he misinterpreted it all as stress. He sighed, defeated. “Okay, El. Okay. But you need to rest.”

The moment the front door closed behind them, Elara collapsed against it, a ragged sob escaping her lips. Alone in the silent house, she clutched her burning arm. Fine, she thought, directing the word into the abyss, a desperate prayer to a merciless god. You win. I’ll do it. Just leave her alone. Stop hurting her.

The response was immediate. A profound cold, far more intense than Lily’s chill, flooded into her from the brand. It wasn’t a painful cold, but a deep, absolute emptiness that extinguished the fire in her arm. It felt like liquid night being injected directly into her veins. The world swam, colors desaturating for a moment before snapping back into focus, sharper and stranger than before.

Her perception had changed.

She could feel the shadows in the house as if they were extensions of her own body. The darkness under the sofa, the sliver of night in the space between the refrigerator and the wall, the deep, cool shade of the attic—they were no longer just an absence of light. They were places. They were pathways. A sliver of his power, a taste of the magic that bound her. The key to the impossible task he had set.

She stumbled to her feet, a dawning, terrifying understanding filling her. She looked at her hand, and for a half-second, its edges seemed to blur, dissolving into wisps of smoke before solidifying again. She knew, with an instinct that had just been born inside her, that she could step into the shadow behind the coat rack in the hall and emerge from the one cast by the oak tree in the front yard.

The gift was a chain, and the chain was a weapon.

That evening, dressed in her most unassuming clothes—dark jeans, soft-soled boots, and the simple grey hoodie that made her feel invisible—she stood across the street from the Grand Triumvirate Museum. It was a monolith of granite and marble, floodlights painting its columns in stark relief. To the world, it was a bastion of culture, impregnable.

But Elara didn't see the floodlights anymore. She saw the deep, inviting pools of absolute blackness they cast. She saw the architecture of shadow, the unseen network that connected every unlit corner, every darkened alley, every space untouched by the artificial glare of the city.

The security cameras were blind spots. The laser grids were irrelevant. He hadn’t given her a tool to circumvent the security. He had given her a key to a different door.

Fear was still a cold knot in her stomach, but it was now overlaid with a grim, chilling purpose. She was no longer Elara Vance, freelance graphic designer. She was a tool of Malakor, a mother doing the unthinkable for the right reasons.

Pulling her hood low over her face, she walked away from the streetlamp’s glow. She found a deep patch of darkness in the alley beside the museum, a place where the light from the street and the building’s own floodlights could not reach. It felt cool and welcoming.

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Elara Vance closed her eyes and stepped into the shadow.