Albus potter's Arc

Chapter 3 of 9

The vault gate stood open when Albus reached it. No guards. No torches. Only a narrow stone hall that swallowed his footsteps. He kept the pale scale in one fist and the wrapped relic in his coat. He was alone, exactly as she had ordered. If she killed him here, no one would know he had ever come. At the end of the hall a woman waited. The Warden. She wore gray, and she held a small cage in one hand. Inside it, a tiny winged creature pressed against the bars. Its scales scattered faint light, the same light Albus knew from the seed-sized token in his palm. His first sprite. Alive, wings folded tight, watching him. "You came alone," the Warden said. "Good. Give me the relic." Albus did not move. His heart beat hard, but he had planned for this walk. He drew the silver phylactery from his coat and held it up, still wrapped in cloth. "You want this," he said. "So it is worth something to you. That means you need me to hand it over. You cannot simply take it." Her eyes narrowed. "I can take it from your body." "You could," Albus said. His voice stayed low, the way it did when he read letters aloud. "But you do not know how much I understand. Only I know which of your symbols I have already copied and where those copies now sit." He let the cloth fall. The etched signs caught the dim light. "Kill me, and the copies stay hidden. Someone else finds them. Someone you did not summon and cannot leash." It was a bluff, half of it. He had copied three symbols onto a scrap of paper. He had left that scrap on his desk, nothing more. But she did not know that. She only knew he kept records, because her own captive proved it. The Warden studied him for a long moment. Then she set the cage down on the stone. "A trade," she said. "The relic for the sprite. And you tell me what you know." "The sprite first," Albus said. She opened the cage door. The tiny creature shot out and landed on his shoulder, trembling, gripping his collar. Albus pressed the pale scale back against its wing, and the missing light fit home. He felt the small weight of her, warm and quick, and something in his chest loosened. He handed the Warden the phylactery. Her fingers closed over the silver with hunger he could not miss. "Now," she said, "you know part of my rite. So do I. But you do not know all of it, and neither, I think, do you know why the relic is hollow." She turned it in her hand. "Come deeper. I will show you what immortality costs." Albus had walked in expecting a grave. He walked out of the hall with his messenger on his shoulder, his relic gone, and a door opening toward the very truth he chased.