The Gloomwood Exchange was not a town or a fortress, but a chaotic, multi-leveled shantytown built into, and hanging from, the sheer cliff face of the ravine. Rickety platforms, connected by a web of swaying rope bridges and crude staircases, clung to the rock. Lanterns burning with multicolored flames—some magical, some mundane—cast a dizzying pattern of light and shadow, illuminating a bizarre cross-section of the Umbral Realm's inhabitants. Creatures Aria could never have imagined moved through the crowds: hulking, furred beings haggling with wispy, ethereal shades; goblins with sacks of glittering junk scurrying underfoot; and figures in dark cloaks who could have been anything at all.
Kael, carrying Aria's limp form, stumbled off the banks of the Umbraflow and onto the lowest platform. He was met immediately by two guards. They were large, reptilian humanoids with tough, scaly green hides and flat, yellow eyes. They held wicked-looking halberds, which they crossed to bar his path.
"State your business, off-worlder," one of them rasped, its forked tongue flicking out to taste the air.
"We need to see Silas," Kael gasped, his voice ragged. He was still weak, the phantom ache of the poison a fire in his side. "It's urgent. The girl is dying."
The guards looked down at Aria. Her face was deathly pale, the black veins of the necrotic blight starkly visible against her skin, having now reached her neck. The Aegis on her chest was pulsing with a frantic, weak violet light, as if fighting a losing battle.
The second guard hissed. "Necrotic blight. Vile magic. Silas wants no part of that. Be on your way."
"Tell him Kael of House Cinder is here," Kael insisted, desperation making his voice sharp. "And I have brought him the Heir of Blackwood. Tell him that, and if he still refuses, I will leave. But her death will be on his head, and the war that follows will start on his doorstep."
The mention of House Blackwood made the guards pause. They exchanged a nervous, uncertain glance. The name still carried weight, even after twenty years. It was a name of myth, of power, of trouble.
The first guard grunted. "Wait here." It turned and lumbered up a nearby staircase, disappearing into the crowded platforms above.
Kael gently laid Aria down on the rough wooden planks. She was cold, so cold. Her breathing was shallow, barely a flutter. The poison was winning. He knelt beside her, his mind racing. He had failed. He had led her into a trap, and now his only hope was a creature whose loyalty was famously for sale to the highest bidder.
Minutes later, the guard returned, followed by a new figure. This one was short and stooped, wrapped in layers of extravagant, albeit filthy, silk robes. Its face was a wrinkled, leathery gray, dominated by two enormous, luminous black eyes like pools of oil. It had long, spindly fingers, and it leaned heavily on a cane carved from some kind of polished bone. This was Silas, proprietor of the Gloomwood Exchange.
Silas shuffled forward, his huge eyes fixing on Aria's still form. He made a soft clucking sound of mingled interest and distaste.
"Kael of Cinder," Silas chirped, his voice a reedy, high-pitched thing. "Still alive. I'd have lost that bet. And you bring me… this." He gestured a three-fingered hand at Aria. "A child tainted by a Hunter's blight. You are foolish to bring Council trouble to my establishment."
"She is Aria Blackwood," Kael said, his voice low and intense. "The Egoro. She took the poison from me, into herself. She saved my life. Silas, you owe my family a debt."
Silas's massive eyes narrowed. "Debts are subject to interest and inflation, Kael. The Blackwoods have been out of business for twenty years. Their credit is… poor."
"There's a bounty on her head, isn't there?" Kael pressed. "A big one."
"Lord Malakor is offering a small kingdom for her, alive and… malleable," Silas admitted, a greedy glint in his oily eyes. "Tempting. Very tempting."
"And what do you think he will do to you once he has her?" Kael shot back. "You, the great neutral party who gave sanctuary to his most wanted fugitive? Your neutrality only works as long as you're not harboring the one person who can unravel his entire regime. Help her, and the future Queen of the Umbral Realm will owe you a debt far greater than any bounty Malakor can offer. Turn her over, and you sign your own death warrant. The Council does not reward its tools; it discards them."
Silas was silent for a long moment, his huge, unblinking eyes weighing the odds. He looked from Kael's desperate face to Aria's dying form, then up at the dark, unseen sky. He was a creature of calculation, and Kael had just laid out the equation perfectly. A short-term profit versus a long-term investment in survival.
"The blight is a nasty thing," Silas said finally, his tone shifting from dismissive to professional. "It cannot be cured by conventional means. It must be drawn out by a sympathetic source. It feeds on shadow. To pull it out, one needs a vessel of purer, stronger shadow to lure it." He tapped his chin with a long finger. "Expensive. Very difficult."
"Can you do it?" Kael demanded.
"This is the Gloomwood Exchange, my friend," Silas chirped with a grim smile. "Anything can be had, for the right price. Bring her."
He turned and shuffled away, his guards falling in behind him. Kael carefully lifted Aria and followed, carrying her up a series of rickety stairs and across swaying bridges, deeper into the chaotic heart of the Exchange. The denizens of the outpost stared at them, their strange faces a mixture of curiosity, pity, and avarice. They all saw the dying girl, the Blackwood heir, and the bounty she represented. They were in a nest of vipers, with only the most venomous one of all offering them protection.
Silas led them to a chamber carved directly into the rock of the ravine wall, its entrance covered by a heavy, beaded curtain. The air inside was thick with the smoke of exotic incense and the hum of contained power. The room was a hoarder's den of magical artifacts, glowing crystals, and bubbling alembics.
In the center of the room was a large, flat slab of obsidian. "Put her there," Silas commanded.
Kael gently laid Aria on the cold stone. Her skin seemed almost translucent now, the black veins a stark, terrifying map of her impending death.
Silas hobbled over to a locked chest and, after a series of complex clicks, opened it. He carefully removed a small, crystalline shard. It was a sliver of pure, solidified night, so black it seemed to absorb the light around it. It radiated an immense, ancient cold.
"A sliver of the Umbral Core," Silas explained, holding it up. "Pure, foundational shadow. Concentrated potential. The blight will be drawn to it like a moth to a flame." He approached the slab where Aria lay. "But the process is… aggressive. The poison will not leave its host willingly. It will fight. The strain may destroy her mind before the blight destroys her body."
"Do it," Kael said, his voice a raw command. His hand rested on the hilt of his sword.
Silas gave him a look, then turned his attention to Aria. He placed the shard of pure shadow on her forehead, directly over her third eye.
The moment it touched her skin, Aria's body convulsed. A silent scream tore from her throat, her back arching off the slab. The Aegis flared with a blinding violet light, and the black veins on her skin began to writhe and squirm, as if alive. They started to move, slowly, horribly, flowing from her limbs and torso up her neck, all converging on the shard on her forehead.
The poison was being drawn out, but the battle was tearing her apart. Her mind was now a battlefield. Aria was no longer in the room, but trapped in a psychic void, a storm of black fire and icy agony. The poison was a malevolent consciousness, a devouring hunger, and it was fighting the pure, cold lure of the Umbral Core shard. Both forces were pulling at her, threatening to rip her soul in two.
*Let go,* a voice whispered in the storm. The voice of the poison. *Surrender. It will be so much easier.*
*Come,* another voice called, vast and empty and cold. The voice of the shard. *Come to the true dark.*
She was drowning between two competing eternities.
Back in the room, Kael watched in horror as her body trembled, caught in a violent seizure. The black veins were almost entirely gone from her body, all of it coalescing into a single, writhing knot on her forehead, being slowly absorbed into the crystalline shard.
"It's too much for her!" Kael yelled. "Stop it!"
"It cannot be stopped!" Silas shrieked over the psychic din. "It can only be completed! She must choose! The host's will is the fulcrum! She must choose the path back to herself, or be consumed by one of the extremes!"
In the void, Aria heard Silas's distant words. *Choose.* But what was there to choose? There was only pain. The fire of the poison, the ice of the core. Her own identity, the archivist, the heir, was being shredded between them. She was nothing. She was no one.
Then, a third voice. Faint. Familiar.
*Aria.*
Her father's voice. A memory. A whisper from a night of fire and smoke.
*Live, Aria. Be the light in the shadow. Not the shadow itself.*
Her mother's voice. The memory of a gentle hand.
A light. A small, flickering candle flame of her own consciousness in the heart of the storm. It was weak, insignificant, but it was *hers*. It was the girl who loved the smell of old books. The woman who felt a thrill of defiance on a log bridge. The heir who had grown wings of night. She was all of them.
She didn't choose the poison. She didn't choose the core.
She chose herself.
She reached for that tiny flame of selfhood and held on with all her might. With a final, desperate surge of will, she pushed against both the devouring hunger and the vast emptiness. *I AM ARIA BLACKWOOD!*
In the chamber, the writhing knot of poison on her forehead vanished, sucked completely into the shard. The crystal flashed once, a brilliant, blinding black, and then crumbled into fine, inert dust.
Aria's body went limp on the slab. The violent seizure stopped. The Aegis's frantic pulse settled into a slow, steady, healthy beat. Her color began to return. She was breathing. Deeply. Evenly.
Kael rushed to her side, his hand checking her pulse. It was strong. He looked at her face. She was unconscious, but she was peaceful. She had won.
Silas let out a long, shaky breath, looking at the dust on the obsidian slab. "Remarkable," he whispered. "The will of the old blood runs strong indeed."
Kael looked from Aria's sleeping face to the calculating proprietor. "She'll live?"
"She will live," Silas confirmed. "She is exhausted, psychically drained, but she is cleansed. She will sleep for a day, maybe more. When she wakes…" he trailed off, his large eyes wide with something that looked almost like fear. "She will be… changed. One does not touch both the blight and the core and remain the same."
As if to punctuate his words, a great bell began to toll somewhere outside in the Exchange, a deep, resonant clang that echoed through the ravine. It was a sound of alarm.
One of Silas's reptilian guards burst through the curtain, its yellow eyes wide with panic.
"Master!" it hissed. "A proclamation! From the Obsidian Keep! It is being broadcast across the realms!"
Silas scurried to a large, dark mirror hanging on the wall. He waved a hand over it, and the surface rippled, resolving into an image of the Council's throne room. Lord Malakor sat upon his throne, his face a mask of cold fury. His voice boomed from the mirror, magically amplified and dripping with venom.
"...for crimes of treason and rebellion, the false heir, Aria of the defunct House Blackwood, is declared an enemy of the state and a traitor to the Umbral Realm. A bounty is placed upon her head, and a new decree is issued. The *Lex Umbra*. Any who harbor her, aid her, or fail to report her presence will be declared traitors as well, their lives and lands forfeit to the Council. There are no more neutral parties. There is no more sanctuary. You are with the Council, or you are against us. Choose wisely."
The image faded. A stunned silence filled the room. Silas stared at the mirror, his leathery face pale. The Lex Umbra. An ancient, brutal law that hadn't been invoked in centuries. Malakor had just declared total war.
Silas turned his huge, terrified eyes to Kael, and then to the sleeping girl on the slab. "You," Silas whispered, his voice trembling with rage and fear. "You have brought war to my doorstep. You have doomed us all."
The gates of the Gloomwood Exchange, once open to all, now felt like the bars of a cage. Aria was alive, but she had woken into a world where every hand was now turned against her, and her only sanctuary was now her prison.