Chapter 7: The Canary Wharf Anchor

Chapter 7: The Canary Wharf Anchor

Dr. Finch was a problem. A brave, intelligent, and utterly breakable problem. Alex couldn't drag him through the shadow war he was about to wage, but he couldn't leave him to be hunted, either. Before the grey light of dawn broke over the London skyline, he’d escorted the trembling historian to the ridiculously mundane safety of a 24-hour Tube station. Finch had a former colleague, a disgraced anthropologist living in self-imposed exile in Edinburgh who owed him a significant debt and believed the world was run by lizard people. “He’ll think I’m a lunatic,” Finch had said, a flicker of his old self in his eyes, “but he’ll hide me.”

With the scholar and his research safely on a train north, Alex was alone again, the chilling weight of his new purpose settling over him. He stood across the river, watching the sunrise paint the glass-and-steel towers of Canary Wharf in hues of orange and rose. The place was a monument to modern commerce, a temple of soulless transactions. It was the last place one would expect to find a nexus of ancient, corrupting magic. And that, he knew, was precisely the point. Valerius was nothing if not a master of hiding his work in plain sight.

According to Finch’s map, the anchor was located in the European headquarters of a monolithic investment firm, OmniCorp. The tower was a sterile, impassive shard of glass that scraped the sky, radiating an aura of calculated order that made Alex’s skin crawl. The shadows here were wrong. They weren't the deep, comfortable pools of history he was used to. They were sharp, transient, and shallow, cast by brutalist architecture and fleeting sunlight. There was no ancient darkness to draw upon, no centuries of grime and secrets to weave into his power. This was enemy territory in every sense of the word.

Getting in was a new kind of challenge. The building was a fortress of mundane security—key cards, retinal scanners, motion sensors. But beneath that, he could feel the Council’s touch. A fine, shimmering lattice of wards was woven into the very fibre-optic cables that fed the building data. It wasn’t a wall; it was a network, an immune system. He couldn’t brute-force it, and he couldn’t slip through a forgotten crack in a centuries-old wall. He had to think like them. Modern. Efficient.

He found his way in through the building’s nervous system. In a sub-level maintenance corridor, amidst the hum of servers and air-conditioning units, he found a junction box for the building's internal network. He placed his hand on the cold metal, not to break it, but to listen. He let his Umbral sense sink into the flow of electricity, the river of data. And in that river, he found what he was looking for: a flicker. A minute, repeating power fluctuation caused by a faulty server rack two floors up. It was an imperfection. A flaw in their perfect system. His doorway.

He didn't melt into shadow; he dissolved into a glitch. He converted his essence into a sliver of disruptive energy and poured himself into the cables, riding the current. The journey was disorienting, a non-physical transit through a screaming torrent of information and electricity. He re-formed in the shadow cast by the malfunctioning server, emerging into a vast, silent office space on the fortieth floor.

The air was cold and sterile. Rows of identical desks sat in perfect, geometric lines. The only light came from the blue and green status LEDs of a thousand sleeping computers. But overlaid on this mundane scene was the Council's work. The glass walls that separated the offices were etched with what looked like decorative patterns, but to his magical senses, they were shimmering lines of code—digital wards. They pulsed with a soft, silver light, monitoring the entire floor.

He was not alone. Two men stood guard near the elevators. They weren’t robed mages or armoured enforcers. They wore the impeccably tailored black suits and discreet earpieces of high-level corporate security. They were what the Council used when they wanted to be invisible: corporate sorcerers.

One of them spoke, his voice a low, professional murmur. “System reports a minor energy flux in server bank seven. Run a diagnostic.”

The other man tapped on a tablet he was holding. A complex array of glowing symbols appeared on the screen. He wasn't typing; he was casting.

Alex froze in the sliver of darkness behind the server. They hadn't seen him, but their systems had felt his entry. This was the Council’s modern face: pragmatic, integrated, and terrifyingly efficient. Their magic wasn't incanted; it was executed.

He had to move, and he had to be quiet. He flowed from shadow to shadow, a ghost moving under desks and around cubicle dividers. The digital wards on the glass walls flared as he passed, their code-like patterns brightening. An alert chimed softly from the guard's tablet.

“Unauthorised signature detected. Sector three.”

There was no panic in their voices. The first guard raised his hand, and the sleek, minimalist light fixture above Alex’s position glowed with a sudden, intense white light, incinerating his cover.

Exposed, Alex lunged. He sent a wave of solidified shadow towards them, not to injure, but to obscure. The guards didn’t flinch. The second man swept his finger across his tablet, and a wall of hard light, perfectly formed and pixel-sharp, materialized in front of them, absorbing the attack without a flicker.

“Target is a Class-Four Umbral entity,” the first guard stated calmly, as if reading a stock ticker. He snapped his fingers. “Initiate containment protocol.”

The entire office came alive. The magnetic locks on the doors slammed shut with a heavy thud. Sprinkler heads in the ceiling hissed, but instead of water, they began to mist a fine, silvery dust into the air—a magically conductive material designed to reveal shadow-weavers. The serene blue LEDs on the computer monitors all turned a uniform, angry red. He wasn't just fighting two men; he was fighting the building itself.

Alex abandoned any hope of stealth. He was too weak for a sustained battle, the light-lance burn on his back a throbbing agony in the presence of their clean magic. He needed to find the anchor, and fast.

He vaulted over a desk, his hand morphing into a ragged claw, and slashed at the nearest glass wall. It was a desperate move. His claws, designed to rend flesh and stone, scraped against the digital ward with a horrific shriek of feedback. The ward flared, and a jolt of pure data and energy shot up his arm, overloading his senses with a phantom scream of a thousand dial-up modems.

He recoiled, his arm numb and useless. The corporate sorcerers advanced, their tablets held aloft, weaving a cage of light and data around him.

Trapped, wounded, and outmanoeuvred, Alex fell back on his most primal instincts. If he couldn't beat their system, he would break it. He ignored the guards and plunged his good hand towards the floor, not into shadow, but into the power conduit running beneath the tiles.

He didn't try to control the electricity. He simply let a raw, undiluted thread of the Umbra—the essence of chaos and void—touch the clean, orderly flow of power.

The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.

Every light on the floor exploded in a shower of sparks. The monitors went dark. The silver wards on the glass walls sputtered and died. The building's emergency generator kicked in with a distant groan, but it was too late. For a precious few seconds, Alex had plunged the entire floor into absolute, primitive darkness. His darkness.

In the sudden, disorienting black, he was king. He shadow-stepped behind the two guards, who were momentarily blinded and cut off from their network. He didn't kill them. He delivered a swift, brutal strike of hardened shadow to the back of each of their heads, and they crumpled to the floor, their tablets clattering uselessly beside them.

He followed the residual thrum of corrupt energy to a heavy, magnetically sealed door at the far end of the floor. The server room. He ripped the door from its frame and stepped inside.

The sight stole his breath. In the centre of the room, surrounded by humming server racks, was the anchor. It wasn't an altar or a rune-stone. It was a central server column, a monolith of black metal and pulsing violet light. Thick, shadowy cables, like cancerous veins, snaked out from its base, burrowing through the floor to connect with the ley line deep beneath the earth. The air crackled with a sickening energy, a fusion of raw magic and cold data, humming a song of terrible power. Finch’s ‘entropic decay’ was being refined, processed, and fed into the city-wide network.

He had to destroy it. Smashing it would only release the corrupted energy in a devastating wave. He had to unmake it.

He staggered forward, placing his hands on the humming, vibrating column. He closed his eyes, ignoring the pain, ignoring his exhaustion, and reached into the heart of the machine. He felt the flow of corrupted power, the stolen lifeblood of the city being twisted to Valerius’s will.

He didn't push against it. He pulled. He found the central loop of the magical program, the core command that sustained the anchor, and with a final, desperate surge of his own chaotic power, he fed it a single, simple instruction: Invert.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the low hum of the anchor began to rise in pitch, becoming a piercing, agonizing shriek. The violet light flickered, turned a sickly white, and then the anchor began to devour itself. The flow of energy reversed, collapsing inward.

A silent shockwave of pure Umbral static erupted from the server. It didn't destroy matter; it erased energy. The servers in the room went dead. The emergency lights in the corridor outside shattered.

Alex was thrown back, his body screaming in protest. He felt the shockwave ripple out from the tower, a tremor in the magical fabric of the city. He felt the great web of power Valerius was weaving shudder as one of its crucial threads snapped.

He had done it. One anchor was down.

But as he pulled himself to his feet amidst the sudden, profound silence, a new, chilling realization washed over him. The Council had been blind to him, hunting him with scouts and trackers. Now, he had just set off a metaphysical flare visible to every magically-attuned person in London. He had just taken a piece off the board, and in doing so, had painted a giant, unmissable target on his own back.

They knew he was coming. The real hunt was about to begin.