The commander's dismissal was a slap. It cut through Aris's paralyzing fear, leaving behind a raw, smarting pride. She was Dr. Aris Thorne, a pioneer in quantum mechanics, not some fainting damsel to be scornfully dismissed.
But pride was a luxury she couldn't afford. The reality of her situation crashed down again, heavier than before. She was stranded in a nightmare version of the past, hunted by creatures from a folktale, and her only potential ally had made it clear she was less than nothing to him.
Swallowing the lump of terror and indignation in her throat, she stumbled out of the alley and onto the main street. The scene was a chaotic, gaslit tableau. The few people who hadn't fled were huddled in doorways, their faces pale and terrified, staring at the commander—Kaelen Vance, she heard someone whisper the name with a mix of awe and fear—as he moved with lethal grace. Another Ember-Wraith materialized from the wall of a pub, and he was on it in an instant, his fiery axe a blur, reducing the creature to cinders with brutal efficiency.
This was his world. A world of magic and monsters. Her world of logic and reason had no place here. The thought was a chasm of despair.
She had to move. She had to find shelter, some way to orient herself. She ducked into another, narrower alley, her mind racing, trying to formulate a plan with zero resources. Think, Aris! First principles. Shelter. Water. Information.
Her foot kicked against an empty glass bottle. She picked it up. Then, her eyes fell on a pile of rags and a discarded, half-rusted metal canister nearby. An idea, desperate and born of pure scientific instinct, sparked in her mind.
The air in this new alley grew cold. Another Wraith. It was smaller than the first, a scout perhaps, but its silent, shimmering approach was no less terrifying. It was between her and the street.
Panic threatened to short-circuit her brain. But her hands moved on their own, a lifetime of experimentation taking over. She tore a strip of cloth from the rags, stuffing it into the bottle. She shook the canister—it sloshed, thank God. Some kind of lamp oil. She poured it into the bottle, soaking the rag. A makeshift Molotov cocktail. But she had no ignition source.
The Wraith slithered closer, the air around it frosting.
Friction. Spark.
Her eyes darted around, landing on a piece of flint someone had likely used to light a pipe, discarded near the wall. She snatched it and a small, rusty knife from the pile. Her hands trembled so violently she nearly dropped them.
As the Wraith lunged, Aris struck the flint with the knife blade. A shower of sparks. Once. Twice. On the third try, a spark caught the oil-soaked rag. It flared to life.
She didn't throw it. She held it up, a pathetic, sputtering flame in the face of the supernatural cold. The Wraith recoiled, not from the fire itself, but from the disruption. The simple, chaotic chemical reaction, the heat and light it produced, seemed to interfere with its cohesive form. It hissed, a sound like steam on ice, and hesitated.
It was only a moment. A fleeting second of confusion from the creature.
But it was enough.
A blur of dark coat and blue fire. Kaelen Vance was there. His axe swept down, and the smaller Wraith was extinguished without a fight. The fight had gone out of it the moment her little flame had flared.
This time, he didn't immediately turn away. He stood over the dissipating embers, his glowing eyes fixed on her. On the burning bottle still clutched in her hand. The contempt in his gaze was gone, replaced by something else: a sharp, calculating intensity. It was the look a master swordsman might give a novice who had, by pure luck, performed an unexpectedly clever parry.
"You," he said, his voice still a rasp, but the edge was different. "What did you do?"
Aris lowered the bottle, her arm shaking from adrenaline and its weight. "I… I disrupted its energy field. Or… the localized increase in thermal energy created an unstable boundary layer in its pseudo-physical form…" She trailed off, the jargon sounding absurd even to her own ears.
He took a step closer, and she instinctively took a step back, hitting the cold brick wall. He loomed over her, a giant of heat and shadow. The scent of smoke and something ozone-like, like a storm, clung to him.
"You used… science," he stated, the word foreign and distasteful on his tongue.
"It was all I had," she whispered, her defiance crumbling under the weight of his presence.
He was silent for a long moment, his fiery gaze dissecting her. He saw her strange clothing, her dead technology, her clear lack of any magical ability, and now, this bizarre, effective knowledge.
"You are a liability," he declared, his tone final. "A strange, lost thing with no power, who draws the Wraiths like a beacon." He gestured with his axe to the now-empty alley. "But you have… something else. A way of thinking they do not expect."
He made his decision, his expression hardening back into its familiar grim lines.
"You will come with me." It was not a request.
"Where?" Aris managed to ask, her voice small.
"To the Pyre Guard Barracks." His lips twisted into a humorless approximation of a smile. "Consider it a new… research position. You will work for me. You will use your… theories… to help us understand what we are fighting."
"And if I refuse?" The question was out before she could stop it.
His glowing eyes narrowed. The air around him seemed to grow warmer, more dangerous. He leaned in, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper.
"Then I leave you here. And you can see how long your little bottles of fire last against the things that hunt in the deep dark."
He straightened up, turning to leave, fully expecting her to follow. The ultimatum hung in the polluted air, as tangible as the smog.
Work for the formidable, terrifying commander. Or die in the gutter.
Clutching the now-extinct bottle like a talisman, her mind reeling with a chaotic mix of terror and a strange, burgeoning curiosity, Aris Thorne took her first step to follow him. Her path home was gone. Her only path now was forward, into the fire.