"Oh? It looks like everyone is already present here." John smiled upon seeing five people there.
All five were considerably powerful, but one held an extraodinary aura.
"You must be the emperor."
The emperor had shoulder-length brown hair and war-hardened face. His eyes looked the most radiant and strong among the others.
"Mr. Tuaren. Given the name of your organization, I thought I should personally show up for this trade." Emperor Dranvok mildly smiled.
The other four with him were likely the leaders of his territories. Dukes and Commanders.
One of them was Duke Fergor who was already here yesterday. He said, "You told us to bring the gift if we wish to participate."
Waving his hand, he put a pouch on the table, and smiled. "I hope you like it."
John chuckled, but he still didn’t sit at the table. "No rush. The auction hasn’t started yet."
"What are we waiting for?" Emperor Dranvok raised his eyebrows.
But right as he finished speaking, his eyes awarness shot upward before his head followed.
Eyes narrowing, he said. "To think they would show up here..."
A moment later, Dukes and Commanders also sensed something and looked up.
"Words travel fast indeed." John lightly laughed and snapped his finger.
The island descended slow and deliberate, settling into place above the Exchange’s garden terrace like it had always belonged there, grass and stone and a ring of pale, drifting lanterns that answered to no sun anyone present could name.
"After you," John said, gesturing toward the bridge of solid light that had unfolded itself the moment the island leveled out.
Emperor Baldric Dranvok crossed first, and up close he cut an even more formidable figure than distance had suggested. Tall and broad through the shoulders despite the silver threading through his brown hair, he carried a single old scar running from jaw to throat like a story nobody dared ask him to finish.
Behind him came the others, and John felt each new arrival settle onto the island like a different kind of weather moving in.
Lady Iralith of Levetron came first among them, seated already in a floating chair woven from something that looked less like wood and more like breathing stardust, her form shifting faintly at the edges whenever she moved, as though her body hadn’t fully decided to commit to solid matter. Two silent attendants in astral robes drifted a pace behind her, feet never quite touching ground.
The Elder of Thorns arrived next, and conversation near her simply stopped on its own. Gaunt beyond anything living should be, her lips stitched shut with dark thread that pulsed faintly in time with some rhythm only she could hear, she communicated through a voice that arrived directly inside the skull rather than the ear. Two Demon Commanders flanked her, horned and armored, radiating a barely leashed hunger that made even Vashti’s aides look relaxed by comparison.
High Princess Kyvena of Celestshade descended like she’d been poured from moonlight, silver-blooded and impossibly graceful, divine runes drifting lazily around her fingers even at rest. Her brother, Prince Calrieth, walked a half-step behind her, sharp-eyed and watchful, while a second attendant, an elven scribe named Fenwyth, trailed them both taking notes nobody had asked for.
Crypt-King Voragul came last, and the temperature on the island dropped visibly the moment he crossed the bridge. Eyeless, five-mouthed, his robes stitched from something that had once been alive and clearly regretted it, he moved with a slow, deliberate patience that belonged to something that had genuinely stopped being afraid of time. Two black-robed Reapers followed in perfect silence, neither one casting a shadow despite the lanterns overhead.
...
Five low tables ringed a central seat where John settled himself, umbrella resting against one shoulder, watching each delegation claim their place with the particular tension of rivals forced to share a room they’d all rather have entered alone.
"Since we’re all here," John said once the last chair had stopped shifting, "introductions seem fair. I’m Tauren Silver, of the Vault of Curio Traders."
"Baldric Dranvok," the Emperor said simply. "Empire of the same name."
"Iralith," the Levetron woman said, voice arriving slightly out of sync with her lips, like sound reaching him from somewhere just behind where she actually stood. "Speaking on behalf of the Levetron council, with their full trust and considerably less of their patience."
The Elder of Thorns said nothing aloud. Instead, cold, precise words simply arrived inside John’s mind, and judging by the flicker of discomfort around the table, everyone else’s too. ’The Elder of Thorns. Ebonveil sends its curiosity, Mr. Silver. We so rarely find something worth being curious about.’
"Kyvena," the High Princess said, smiling in a way that felt entirely too pleased with itself, "of Celestshade. I’ve been looking forward to this rather longer than you’d guess."
Voragul’s laugh arrived before his introduction, low and dry, like something scraping across old stone. "Voragul," he said, five mouths moving in a way that never quite matched. "Noxtheran sent its king personally, which should tell you how rare an occasion this is."
...
"Since you’re here," John said, once the round had finished, "you already know the price to participate in a Vault Curio Traders auction. I’d like each gift introduced properly. Its history, its meaning, and then placed on my table. Thank you."
Emperor Baldric set a small pouch on the table himself this time, opening it to reveal the same ancient fang, preserved in eternal ice, that Fergor had shown the day before.
"Taken from a Calamity-8 beast," Baldric said, "slain by my own bloodline’s founder. It has never left the royal vault until now."
Iralith’s gift rose from her floating chair on its own, a small shard of crystallized starlight that hummed faintly with trapped constellations.
"Pulled from the astral citadel’s own foundation stone," she said. "Levetron was built atop a fallen piece of sky. This is a splinter of it."
The Elder of Thorns produced hers without moving her stitched lips at all, a small black seed that pulsed faintly like something with its own slow, patient heartbeat.
’A seed from the Hollow Garden,’ her voice said inside every mind at the table simultaneously. ’Grown from soil fed on grief that never properly ended. It has not sprouted in four hundred years. Perhaps it simply hasn’t found the right reason yet.’
Kyvena’s gift came wrapped in a single silver leaf that never wilted, a slender vial of liquid moonlight drawn from something ancient.
"Tears of the first Silverblood ancestor," she said, setting it down with obvious reverence. "Wept the night she chose to descend from the Realm of Gods rather than remain. We do not part with these lightly."
Voragul’s offering was the strangest of all, a small, sealed hourglass filled not with sand but with slowly drifting motes of captured void-mist.
"A fragment of the sea our necropolis floats above," he said. "Older than any kingdom at this table. It remembers things even we have chosen to forget."
John looked over the five offerings laid across his table, star-splinter and grief-seed and ancestor’s tears and captured void beside an ancient beast’s fang, each one carrying weight far beyond what its size suggested.
"Well," he said, allowing himself a slow, genuinely pleased smile. "It seems everyone understood the assignment."
He rose, gathering all five gifts into his storage ring with the same unhurried care he’d shown taking them, and let his gaze move once around the circle of tables.
"The Vault opens in five minutes," he said. "I’d suggest deciding now how much you’re willing to lose to each other, because I promise you, at least one item tonight will make that decision considerably harder than you’re expecting."
Nobody at any of the five tables looked entirely comfortable with that.