Chapter 7: The Gilded Scorpion

Chapter 7: The Gilded Scorpion

The auctioneer was a creature of polished obsidian and whispers, its form shifting subtly under the enchanted lights of the repurposed cathedral. It stood at a lectern of petrified wood, and its voice was the sound of dry leaves skittering across pavement. One by one, lots were presented on a velvet cushion: a vial containing a captured sunbeam, the last breath of a frost dragon, a map of a city that had sunk beneath the waves millennia ago. The bids were equally esoteric—decades of stolen luck, the true name of a powerful demon, a memory of the world's first sunrise. Kaelen felt like a man who had stumbled into a god's private marketplace, utterly and hopelessly out of his depth.

Then, the auctioneer announced the next lot. "Item seventy-three. A relic of the lost Chimu'kar. The so-called Gilded Scorpion."

Two attendants in faceless silver masks brought the artifact forward. It rested on a cushion of black silk, smaller than Kaelen had imagined, no bigger than his palm. It was crafted from a gold so pure it seemed to drink the light, its form a perfect, stylized scorpion. The stinger, as the old texts described, was a shard of dark, pitted metal that seemed to absorb all light, a speck of void in the surrounding brilliance. Even from across the hall, Kaelen could feel its presence—a deep, resonant cold that hummed in tune with the power bound to his very soul.

It is one of the keys, Inti-Phaqsi's voice was a low thrum of desperate need in Kaelen's mind. It must be secured.

Before the auctioneer could even ask for an opening bid, a clear, cold voice rang out from the elevated box. "We offer a full tithe of anima from the Finch London acquisitions."

A collective, sharp intake of breath swept through the hall. Kaelen had no idea what that meant, but the shock and envy on the faces of the Fae and sorcerers around him told him everything. It was a king's ransom. Finch's lieutenant, the woman in the severe black dress, hadn't come to bid. She had come to end the auction before it began.

"She's trying to crush the competition," Elara whispered, her voice tight. "No one here will challenge an offer that big from the Unravelers. They'd be marking themselves for later."

"We have nothing," Kaelen whispered back, a cold knot of despair tightening in his gut.

"We have him," Elara countered, her eyes fixed on the dais. "The currency here is rarity and power. You have access to something no one else does. Offer it. Bluff."

The obsidian auctioneer turned its shifting head towards their seats, its silence an expectant void. This was it. Kaelen's heart hammered against his ribs. He was no longer Mr. Kincaid, eccentric academic. He was a cornered man playing a game he didn't understand. He drew on his one true skill. He became the archivist.

"We offer," Kaelen began, his voice surprisingly steady as it projected across the silent hall, "the complete and true cartographical data of the primary Chimu'kar ley-lines, as they existed prior to the cataclysm."

A murmur went through the crowd. It was an audacious bid. Lost knowledge, pure and untainted. Information that could lead to countless other forgotten sites of power.

Finch's lieutenant looked down at him from her box, her expression one of mild amusement, as if a mouse had just squeaked a challenge at her. "Memories? You bid with memories? How quaint." She turned back to the auctioneer. "We will add the soul-contract of the minor storm-god of the Azorean archipelago."

The hall fell silent again. She had called his bluff and raised the stakes to an impossible level. They were bartering with the chains of a god. They were outmatched. Defeated.

The auctioneer raised a hand of polished stone. "The bid stands with the Unravelers. Going once..."

Elara leaned in close. "Plan B," she breathed.

"What's Plan B?" Kaelen asked.

"Cause a scene," she said, just as the lieutenant in the box gave a subtle, almost imperceptible nod to a man standing near the cathedral's main entrance.

"...Going twice..."

The man at the door reached into his coat. He wasn't pulling out a wallet. Kaelen saw the glint of something dark, a rod of obsidian that seemed to writhe with contained shadow.

Elara was already moving. "Down!" she yelled, shoving Kaelen off his chair an instant before a bolt of crackling black energy ripped through the air where his head had been, slamming into the wall behind them with a sickening sizzle that left stone blackened and smoking.

Chaos erupted. The Unravelers, positioned throughout the hall, threw off the pretense of the auction. The sacred neutrality of the Elysian Exchange was shattered. Spells flew, curses were shrieked in forgotten tongues, and the shimmering dome over the cathedral flickered violently as its protective wards were assaulted. The obsidian auctioneer let out a screech of pure sonic fury, and the silver-masked attendants drew swords of solidified moonlight. The ballroom had become a battlefield.

Elara was a whirlwind of controlled violence. The silver Keeper's sigil on her wrist flared with white light, deflecting a curse meant for her. She drew an ornate dagger from a sheath on her ankle, its ancient metal singing as it cut the air. She moved with a dancer's grace and a predator's efficiency, disabling two Unravelers before they could even raise their weapons.

Kaelen scrambled behind a toppled marble pillar, his heart trying to beat its way out of his chest. An Unraveler, his eyes burning with a zealot's fire, rounded the pillar, a sphere of corrosive green energy forming in his palm. There was no time to think, no time for fear. There was only instinct.

The price will be high, scribe, the priest warned, his voice a gale in Kaelen’s mind.

"I don't care!" Kaelen snarled back, a sentiment that came from a place of desperation so deep he didn't recognize himself.

He didn't just pull on the power this time. He tore at it, yanking it from the depths of his being with a raw, desperate need. The fire that had burned before was now a supernova. It roared up his arm, searing his nerves, and for a terrifying second, he felt the golden tracings on his skin burn through his suit, charring the fabric. He thrust his hand forward.

The wave of sand that erupted was not the shimmering, desiccating cloud from the museum. This was a grinding, scouring blast, a tidal wave of golden grit that howled through the air. It struck the Unraveler and didn't just dry him out; it eroded him, stripping flesh from bone in a cloud of dust and a single, choked-off scream. The wave continued, slamming into a nearby statue of a forgotten saint, and the marble disintegrated into a pile of fine white powder.

The raw, intoxicating power of it left him breathless. He and Elara were suddenly back-to-back in the eye of the storm.

"The Scorpion!" Elara yelled over the din.

Together, they charged the dais. Kaelen unleashed another, smaller blast of sand to send the silver-masked attendants reeling. Elara engaged Finch's lieutenant, who had descended from her box, their daggers ringing against each other in a deadly dance. Kaelen lunged for the artifact, his fingers closing around the cold, heavy gold of the Gilded Scorpion.

The moment he touched it, the power surging through him found a new conduit. The Scorpion acted like a focusing lens, an amplifier. The torrent became a laser. And the connection to Inti-Phaqsi deepened, punching through a wall he hadn't known was there.

He didn't just feel the priest's strength anymore.

He felt the prison.

And for one, soul-shattering moment, he felt the prisoner.

His mind was plunged into an abyss of absolute cold and silent, screaming infinity. He felt a consciousness, an intelligence vast as a galaxy and hungry as a dying star. It wasn't evil in a way a human could comprehend; it was a form of cosmic, calculating hate, a sentience of pure entropy. It was aware of him. It had been aware of him since the first drop of his blood touched the wrappings.

Little lock, a voice that was not a voice whispered through the deepest cracks of his soul. It was a thought made of geometric impossibilities and the concept of decay. You strain the chain. Good. The chain will break. I can give you power beyond this dust-god's imagining. Let me help you.

A wave of vertigo and nausea crashed over him, so profound it nearly tore his sanity apart. He saw visions of dying suns and worlds crumbling to ash, and he felt a sliver of the being that had witnessed it all and called it beautiful.

Kaelen screamed, a raw, ragged sound of pure terror, and collapsed, clutching the Gilded Scorpion to his chest as if it were both poison and antidote.

The last thing he saw before the world dissolved into blackness was Elara, having driven the lieutenant back, grabbing him by the collar and dragging him away from the chaos, her face a grim mask of fury and concern. He had the artifact. They had won. But as the darkness claimed him, he knew with chilling certainty that he had just touched the face of the real enemy, and it was not Alistair Finch. It was the thing that slept inside his own soul.