# Chapter 1: The Last Call
The eviction notice wasn't a surprise. It was a period at the end of a long, miserable sentence. Relly Moe stared at the stark white paper taped to the inside of the bar's glass door, the black block letters spelling out his failure with bureaucratic indifference. FINAL NOTICE. VACATE PREMISES WITHIN 72 HOURS. Outside, the rain-slicked asphalt of the Lower East Side reflected the city's neon glow in garish, watercolor smears. The sign for his bar, *The Gilded Flask*, flickered erratically, a dying heartbeat in the urban gloom. *Gilded* was a joke. There was no gold here, only the tarnished brass of the taps and the cheap, sticky varnish on the bar.
He was twenty-six, but he felt ancient. A lifetime of scraping by, of inherited debt and dwindling hope, had settled into his bones. His dark hair was perpetually messy, his eyes, the color of storm clouds, held a permanent glaze of exhaustion. He moved with a practiced, weary grace, his motions honed by thousands of nights just like this one. He picked up a clean rocks glass, the heavy crystal cool in his palm, and began to polish it with a worn linen cloth. The circular motion was a meditation, a futile attempt to bring a sliver of order to the chaos of his life. Each squeak of the cloth was a tiny protest against the silence, against the finality of that notice. This bar, this leaky, forgotten corner of the world, was all he had left of his grandfather. Losing it felt like losing the man all over again. The Wound, that old, hollow ache in his chest, throbbed with a familiar, dull pain. He'd learned long ago to wall off the sharper emotions, to keep them locked down tight where they couldn't hurt him or anyone else. It was the only way to survive.
His grandfather, a man who'd smelled of old books and pipe tobacco, had been a tinkerer, a believer in forgotten sciences. He'd left Relly this bar and a mountain of debt, along with a storage unit in Brooklyn he'd been paying for out of habit. With the eviction looming, it was time to finally face it, to sift through the relics of a dead man's life and see if anything was worth selling. Anything to buy him another week, another month. The next morning, Relly found himself standing before the corrugated metal door of Unit 7B, the key cold and heavy in his hand. The air inside was thick with the scent of dust and decaying paper, a smell that spoke of abandonment. It was a graveyard of ambitions. Stacks of yellowed newspapers, boxes of rusted tools, and furniture shrouded in white sheets like spectral guests at a forgotten party. He felt a pang of grief so sharp it almost broke through his carefully constructed emotional dam. He pushed it down, burying it under the practical need to just get this over with.
He worked methodically, sorting things into piles: keep, sell, trash. Most of it was trash. Near the back, behind a stack of *Scientific American* magazines from the 1980s, was a heavy oak bookshelf. It was filled with his grandfather's old chemistry textbooks. Relly ran a hand over their cracked spines. He remembered his grandfather trying to explain atomic theory to him, his eyes alight with a passion for the hidden architecture of the world. "Everything is connected, Relly," he used to say. "Everything is just waiting for the right key to change its form." As he pulled out a thick volume titled *Principles of Modern Chemistry*, something shifted inside. The book was lighter than it should be. He tilted it, and a section of the pages fell away, revealing a hollowed-out core. Nestled within was another book, much smaller, bound in dark, supple leather that felt strangely warm to the touch. There was no title on its cover, only a single, intricate symbol embossed in faded gold: an ouroboros devouring a crucible.
He took it back to the bar. The place felt even more like a tomb in the daylight, the empty stools like headstones. He sat the grimoire on the bar, the leather seeming to drink in the dim light. He opened it. The pages were vellum, thin and tough, filled with spidery script and hand-drawn diagrams that made his head ache to look at. They weren't chemistry. They were something else. Symbols that seemed to shift and writhe at the edge of his vision, equations that balanced concepts like 'Will' and 'Essence' alongside 'Matter' and 'Energy'. It was madness. A beautiful, terrifying madness. He slammed it shut, his heart hammering. It was just an old book, a piece of eccentric family history. Nothing more.
Night fell, and the city's hum returned. Relly was alone, the silence pressing in on him. He poured himself a glass of tap water, the cheap glass sweating onto the polished wood. He was out of everything else. Out of liquor, out of money, out of time. He stared into the clear, uninteresting liquid, a perfect reflection of his own bleak future. Desperation, a cold and clawing thing, gnawed at his insides. He didn't want to feel this. He didn't want to be here. His eyes fell on the grimoire, still sitting where he'd left it. He remembered one of the symbols, a simple-looking sigil drawn inside a circle. The text beside it was in a language he couldn't read, but the diagram was clear. It was a transmutation circle. For a joke, for a desperate, stupid wish, he picked up a wet finger from the condensation on his glass and, on the scarred wood of the bar, he traced the symbol. *Water to whiskey*, he thought, the idea so absurd it was almost funny. *Please, just… anything better than this.*
The world went silent.
The symbol on the bar flared with a soft, golden light, so brief he thought he'd imagined it. A wave of vertigo washed over him, a sensation of his entire being being unstitched and then hastily re-knitted. The air crackled, smelling of ozone and something ancient, like petrified honey and lightning. He blinked, his gaze falling back to the glass. The water was gone. In its place was a liquid the color of polished mahogany, swirling with thick, slow legs that clung to the sides of the glass. A rich, complex aroma rose from it—notes of vanilla, caramel, and a hint of peat smoke. It was impossible. It was a trick of the light, a stress-induced hallucination. But his hand trembled as he lifted the glass. It felt heavier, more substantial. He brought it to his lips, the scent intoxicating, promising a warmth and solace he hadn't felt in years. This was it. The end of the line, the final, crazy act before they dragged him out onto the street. He closed his eyes and took a sip.
The whiskey exploded on his tongue, a symphony of flavor so profound it brought tears to his eyes. It was real. And in that moment of pure, unadulterated shock, as the magic settled into his very cells, it happened. A silent, invisible pulse of energy erupted from him, from the bar, a shockwave of pure, unadulterated creation. It rippled outwards, passing through walls, through people, through the very fabric of the city. No human eye saw it, no human ear heard it. But high above the Manhattan skyline, in boardrooms and shadowed penthouses, ancient beings stirred. On screens that monitored the city's hidden energies, a single, blinding light flashed into existence, a signal that had not been seen in a thousand years. A beacon. A target. The hunt had begun.