**Chapter 5: Thief in the Night**
Aelar moved like a wraith, his slight form gliding through the clinging night shadows between the capital city's noble manors. Despite his tender age of only eleven years, the urchin had honed an almost preternatural stealth from years of learning how to survive—and thrive—among the most unforgiving stretches of the underground slums.
He knew every hidden nook and crevice, every blind spot between the street torches' flickering halos, thanks to an uncanny spatial awareness bordering on supernatural intuition. Moving silently from the darkest slipstream to the next came as naturally as breathing.
Unfortunately, possessing such finely honed skulking abilities also carried with it the curse of hypervigilance. Every nerve, every sense remained attuned to the subtlest stimuli that might betray threats lurking amidst the night's stillness.
Which was why Aelar froze instantly, crouched against the rough stonework of a towering wall, at the faint scrape of leather on cobblestone from the alley ahead.
Only the faint rise and fall of his narrow chest marked him as anything other than an unmoving shadow. He pressed the side of his head against the cold stone, emerald eyes unblinking while he filtered every sound with heightened focus.
Two pairs of heavy footsteps—guards, undoubtedly, on their hourly patrol. Their raucous conversation about some tavern wench carelessly trailed behind as they meandered closer at an unhurried pace. So long as he remained still and silent, they would pass without issue.
Aelar steadied his breathing, mentally preparing to hold it entirely once they entered the alley. Not even the motion of a stray insect would dare give away his—
"Wait..." one of the gruff voices rumbled suddenly, freezing in place. "You hear that? Pitter-patter of tiny feet, I wager."
The other man grunted in the affirmative, both falling silent to listen for the subtle noise that had piqued their suspicion. Aelar felt his pulse hammering against his throat as a familiar, bitter dread clawed through his gut.
"Could be a rat," the first brute suggested after several fraught moments passed with only silence. "There's been sightings of the vermin infiltrating the outer walls seeking shelter from the coming winter."
"Aye, but if it's that conniving little rat everyone's been nattering about..." His companion's voice lowered to a gruff murmur, heavy with vindictive greed. "Someone put a pretty price on his tiny head...the one who's been hitting all the outer estates these past few moons."
Aelar's breath caught in his throat as heavy bootsteps began advancing once more, now deliberately slow and probing down the alleyway toward his hiding spot. Sweat beaded on his grimy forehead and palms as survival instincts kicked in with adrenaline's feverish urgency.
No alarms sounded, so the guards likely hadn't pinpointed his exact location yet. But it was only a matter of time before—
CRAAA-THUNK!
Something large slammed down mere feet behind him, shaking dust from the stones before Aelar even registered the blunt impact. He spun just as the weighted net fell over his shoulder, trapping his upper body and arms with cold, unforgiving iron links.
Yelping in shock and terror, the tangled urchin tumbled face-first onto the hard-packed earth as two burly silhouettes rushed out from their concealed positions. He thrashed wildly, but the net's heavy weights pinned him with inexorable force while one of the brutes casually trod forward and delivered a sharp kick to his lower back.
"No! Get...off...me!" Aelar growled through gritted teeth, even as stars burst across his vision from the savage blow.
"Silence, you little wretch, before I crush your scrawny neck!" the man snarled back, punctuating his threat with another vicious stomp. "Gods, so this rat has been the one sowing such misery across these noble estates? Just the sight makes my stomach roil."
The other watchman nudged Aelar's prone form with the tip of his iron-shod boot in a display of mocking cruelty. "Aye, almost makes you pity the miserable creature, if he weren't a plague of ill omen upon every soul unlucky enough to cross his path."
His beady eyes narrowed thoughtfully before adding, "Though now that I get a good look, this rat's got a peculiar shade of fur...striking green eyes. Could fetch a hefty prize from the right sorts, assuming he's got more than just a scavenger's luck imbued in his blood."
Despite his blinding terror and agony, Aelar understood their unmistakable implication far too clearly. For even in the festering city slums, rumors persisted of certain elements—callous nobles and shadowy merchants alike—who prized anything and anyone with the most remote cultivation potential. Many considered such poor souls luckier when greeting a swift demise rather than being corralled into such dens of grisly harvesting and breeding.
Before his mind even fully grasped his imminent peril, Aelar's will surged with fierce desperation born of the slums' brutal lessons learned at far too young an age.
"No...Not today! I...won't...perish...like this!"
All conscious thought disintegrated into pure instinct for survival as the tangled urchin thrashed with a feral intensity that momentarily caught his captors off-guard. In that split-second, half a dozen miniscule sparks winked into existence along his constricted limbs and forehead—pinpricks of light too fleeting to register fully in the moment.
Until raw, searing heat exploded outward with concussive force, vaporizing the iron net and scorching both watchmen with sudden blasts of white flames.
Dazed screams echoed into the night as Aelar scrabbled upright on instinct, blinking at the hazy silhouettes of the two men flailing and batting at their smoldering garments. Only then, amid their pained shouts, did the scalding agony blossoming across his own forearms and face finally register in his stunned awareness.
Rivulets of searing pain lanced through his nerves with each breath and blink. He stared down numbly at the mottled, seared flesh coating his wrists and palms, the memory of that indelible eruption already fading like a fevered dream.
Only one frantic thought echoed with cutting lucidity through his shaken mind: Run. Run now, while you still draw breath!
And so Aelar fled without hesitation, vanishing back into the clinging night with silent footfalls as agonized screams echoed in his wake. He couldn't fathom what had just transpired—that which teetered on the precipice of the truly impossible for one such as him.
He only knew that those haunting pinpricks of radiant light and searing anguish had been both his undoing...and his salvation from a bleaker fate.
For even one so lowly and unassuming as a street rat might possess the rarest spark glimmering beyond ken, it seemed. And though he couldn't hope to understand the implications, Aelar realized in that fleeting moment that spark would irrevocably alter the course of his destiny forevermore.
Whether to brilliance or damnation, only the inferno yet to come would unmask the truth scorched into his very being.
As he fled raggedly into that inky abyss of an uncertain future, a lone pair of immortal eyes—cobalt vortices of cosmic perception—watched events unfold with rapt omniscience from realms unseen.
A barely perceptible smile grazed Luminaria's radiant countenance as she murmured in a voice that would resonate across eternities still unfolding, "So it begins, little spark..."