Chapter 3: The Snuffed Candle
"Wait," Elara hissed, pulling Kaelen into the hollow of a defunct mail-tube. Her Spark-glow was a mere ember now, a faint orange pulsing beneath her fingernails. "Someone's breathing. Close."
Kaelen tightened his grip on the heavy wrench. He peeked around the copper casing of the tube. Huddled behind a stack of frozen coal crates was a figure wrapped in the unmistakable silver-thread silks of the High Academy. But the silks were scorched, and the man inside them was shaking so violently his teeth sounded like castanets.
"A Mage?" Kaelen whispered, stepping forward.
The man bolted upright, his eyes wide and bloodshot. He didn't summon a fireball. He didn't conjure a shield. Instead, he lunged forward and clamped a hand over Kaelen's mouth, his skin shockingly cold.
"Quiet!" the man wheezed. "It hears the resonance of your voice. It hears the heat in your lungs."
Kaelen pried the man's hand away. This was Master Valerius, the Arch-Standard Bearer of the Inner Circle. A man who, a week ago, would have had Kaelen whipped for standing in his shadow. Now, he looked like a gutter-rat.
"The Palace," Elara whispered. "What happened?"
Valerius looked at the girl, his gaze falling on the faint glow of her fingertips. He recoiled as if she were holding a viper. "Snuff it, child! Put it out! They came for the High Hearth first. We thought... we thought we could burn them away. We opened the Great Reservoir of Solar Essence." He let out a jagged, hysterical laugh. "We didn't fight them. We fed them. They grew ten stories tall on our spells. I saw the Grand Master turned into a pillar of violet glass in seconds."
"How are you alive?" Kaelen asked, looking at the Mage's dull, grey eyes.
"I did the unthinkable," Valerius whispered, shamed. "I used a Void-Sigil. I cauterized my own connection to the Core. I snuffed my Spark. I am... I am a Dullard now. Like you."
Kaelen felt a surge of grim irony. The elite had spent centuries mocking his kind, only to find that being "empty" was the only way to survive the end of the world.
"Then you're exactly what we need," Kaelen said, hauling the Mage to his feet. "You know the bypass codes for the Core-Access. We're going to the Sinking Sun."
Valerius stared at him as if he'd suggested walking into a furnace. "The Core-Access is at the bottom of the Trench. It's been sealed for three hundred years. Even if we get past the Blight in the streets, the pressure regulators will have frozen solid. You can't 'wrench' your way into a sun, boy."
"Maybe not," Kaelen said, pointing toward the massive, frozen canal that ran through the center of the district. A line of abandoned ice-barges sat trapped in the slush. "But I know how the plumbing works. If the Core is being 'hollowed out' like Elara says, then the pressure isn't high—it's dropping. There's a vacuum forming. That's why the Blight is being sucked in from the surface."
Valerius blinked, his academic mind momentarily overriding his terror. "A pressure differential... the Frost-Blight isn't just an invader. It's a filler. It's rushing in to occupy the space where the heat used to be."
"Which means," Elara added, her voice gaining strength, "if we can trigger the emergency ignition, the expansion of the new heat will blow the Blight out of the city like soot out of a chimney."
A low, vibrating hum began to thrum through the soles of their boots. It wasn't the steady heartbeat of the city; it was a hungry, rhythmic pulsing.
"They're coming," Valerius whispered, his face turning ashen. "The Greater Hounds. They've finished with the Palace."
Down the canal, three shapes emerged from the frozen fog. They were quadrupedal horrors made of jagged, translucent ice, their ribcages glowing with the stolen orange light of the Mages they had consumed. They didn't breathe; they simply exhaled a killing frost that turned the very air into needles.
Kaelen stepped in front of Elara and Valerius. He had no magic. He had no silver-thread armor. He had a rusted wrench and a heart that was stubborn enough to stay warm.
"Get to the barge," Kaelen commanded. "Valerius, you're the ballast. Elara, you're the engine. Use just enough Spark to melt the ice around the hull. I'll keep them busy."
"Kael, you can't fight three of them!" Elara cried.
"I'm not going to fight them," Kaelen said, his eyes locking onto a massive, cracked steam-main that hung over the canal. "I'm going to fix the plumbing."