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A/N: Another Merchant-esque fic, but this time in Danmachi. I typed this like two weeks ago but I wasn’t sure whether or not to post it then right until I (partially) ignored and forgot about it.
As for our Merchant, Alistair Finch deals in a wide spread of magical varieties, solely magical. Rune crafting, spell working, enchanting, hexing, rituals, alchemy, divination, warding – every and anything that has to do with manipulating exoteric energy is his bread and butter.
The idea for this fic was solely inspired by (formerly Dylz) Tattered Flesh’s The Forbidden Sanctum’s Keeper on QQ. Unlike his, however, this one takes place during canon.
As for Alistair, I might have him fit into the world, in terms of interaction outside the shop, more than Isaac. Not in any way invasive or direct, but definitely more than Isaac(which honestly really isn't that high of a bar).
Nothing is settled as of now. The second chapter needs some reworking and editing so I’ll post it when I’m done, probably after the next chapter of Merchant Days.
(There was also another one about a reclusive blacksmith in ASOIAF/GOT ignorantly forging enchanted weapons not knowing the ruckus his hobby was causing across Westeros. I couldn't write it past a thousand words so I shoved it to some folder)
If this one tickles your fancy well enough to want more chapters all you have to do is just say so.
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Alistair Finch exhaled as he put the conspicuously marked box down. He was standing hunched in front of rows of empty shelves in his newly rented shop. He had spent the last three days taking care of every avenue of legality regarding the opening of his shop, and only had this morning to start filling his shelves and making sure his shop was ready for customers.
Honestly, if this were anywhere else, he would have foregone stressing himself with all the paperwork and would've simply sprung open his shop to his enthusiastically waiting potential customers…. Would have if not for the knowledge of just how petty the local deities were.
All Alistair Finch cared about was propagating the arcane as much as he could, at every chance he could— at a suitable price of course.
He rolled up the sleeves of the elegant deep blue scholar robes and pushed open the lid of the box. He ignored the whispered wails that escaped the box in a black fume as soon as the lid fell off and started digging out tomes, scrolls, skin covered parchments and magical reagents, and sliding them into shelves.
Basic magic, novice magic, journeyman practices, grand spells, sacred texts, ritualistic magic, forbidden magic, ancient sorceries, forgotten magic, old magic, the Old Magic, transcendent scripts – slowly and surely every item found a resting spot for themselves in specific order.
Arranging the books and scrolls took away a lot of hours from the day, but Alistair wasn’t done. He hummed a soulful tune from his practitioner days at one of the numerous arcane institutes he had graduated from as he started arranging all the reagents and composites and catalysts in their own section.
The scholar robes he wore gained some specks of dust on it that never stayed for long as they simply slid off the surface after a few minutes. The golden-embroiled red stole he wore on his shoulders over the robes sometimes swerved and erased every speck of dust in its path.
The robe itself was from one of his past schools of magic. While Raya Lucaria was not bereft of its own faults, it had been a true school of magic, even to the bitter end of its collapse.
Alistair had been both a student, a scholar and a teacher at the institute; the robes were as much his identity as was his name.
Dressing the part was a vital part of all magical practices after all. The robes were just as important as any spell he could cast.
The memories of those days brought a smile to his face and the tune he whistled turned more upbeat. Hogwarts, Isle of Roke, Babyls Demon School, Amestris, Brakebills, Fairytail, Grauzauberer, the Pointed Caps AND the Brimmed Caps – there was no end to the ways of the arcane and the deeper secrets of magic. It was a self-fulfilling journey, as despairing as it was elating.
As he sang his hearty tune carefreely, he picked up a black formless mass, his entire fingers turning black on contact, and sieved it into a flask. He simply continued on with his arrangements, not paying attention to his fingers as they slowly regained their pallor.
He paused for a moment and looked around his shop before exhaling through his mouth. “Should’ve started yesterday.”
Sure, the books were done with and he was halfway done with the reagents and catalysts, but there was still so much to be done. Herbs, poultices, balms, tools, artifacts, not to mention setting up his small workshop for keeping himself busy or for private consultations.
“Probably should’ve even started the day before.” The only work he had done around the shop after purchasing it was laying down his wards, his bounded field and his domain, along with a few dozen edicts. Without setting those up first, he otherwise wouldn’t be able to put down any of his items inside the shop.
Even as Alistair mentally berated himself, he could've simply snapped his fingers and be done with it all, except he didn’t. It wasn’t simply because of discipline. Doing the first arrangement by hand was a ritual he had been doing for so long now that he hardly remembered when he first started it.
If there was anyone to blame for his tardiness then that honor belonged solely to the Guild. He had expected some form of opposition upon settling down but didn’t expect it before he even settled in. Sure, most of his goods he intended to peddle to the blessed – which meant a level of screening and tests from the governing body that oversaw the blessed in the city – but that shouldn’t have meant outright rejection, neither the time wasting and the subtle sabotage.
(The fraudulent taxes too. He had hardly spent a day inside the city and his future business rivals were already trying to shut him down and outrightly scam his pockets raw).
‘This is why I hate dealing with divines and their pettiness. It is definitely not ichor that runs through their veins.’
Unfortunately for the guild workers, they were too young and too inexperienced to catch him in the sparse webs of their shallow games.
Alistair dragged along the mobile ladder and climbed it with hands full of alchemical reagents and arranged them neatly on the top of the shelf before moving on to the next.
‘On the bright side, I got this whole place for a deal.’ The shop was just big enough for his needs; it was at the perfect distance from the Guild and was snuggly surrounded by a host of different Familia storefronts. He even had a cranky neighbor in the form of an old witch.
‘Should I hang the decorations now or later when I’m done?’ He thought on it for a bit before resuming his humming with a dismissing shrug. He’ll get to it either way.
Alistair finished with the reagents and moved on to the rare herbs, balms, poultices and potions. He quickly wrapped up with their careful placements and hung up his staves, magic tools, the few enchanted arms and enchanted armor pieces he had, rattling skulls and singing bones.
By the time he was done with the shelves, the sun was already halfway through its descent. Alistair stopped and took a moment to survey the amount of work remaining.
‘Decorations, some gradual customization, and the workshops.’
The shop was divided into three parts: the general area where he was, the secondary area for his workshop and other personal services – private lessons, rituals and the likes – he might offer for sale. The last was the floor above which he had turned into his residence.
The general area was divided into clear sections that ranged from a progressive order of grimoires containing simple spells like the common fireball spell to dark magics, karmic curses, Angelic transcripts, Demonic tomes, Eldritch scribbles, Abyssal contracts all the way to Primordial Languages.
If bloody words written on a parchment of wriggling human skin scares you, then that obviously means that you’re in the wrong section. It was that simple. On the other hand, they all had cool looking covers; even the flayed skins held themselves in grim-fashioned aesthetics.
Alistair couldn’t wait until all sorts of magic started flying off the shelves. His love for magic and the inherent desire to spread it everywhere he went was only curtailed(barely) by his immutable identity as a Merchant.
A practitioner and a purveyor of magic – both went hand in hand when it came to Alistair. He had easily become a Nomadic Merchant wandering the Lands Between after the fall of Raya Lucaria. Even during his time in magical Britain, he had opened up a shop in Diagon Alley immediately after Hogwarts went on strike during the whole Dark Lord fiasco. If he wasn’t learning magic then Alistair was selling it.
A Merchant with a love for magic. The Shoppe Keeper he had been for as long as he had known magic.
And now, in another foreign land like the thousands and thousands he had been to, the Sanctum Sanctorum – The Archive of the Forgotten, The Scriptorium of the Lost, The Apocrypha. A thousand names for a thousand worlds – once again would open its doors.
With the main inventory sorted, Alistair decided to start with some decorations to set the mood of the shoppe. The conceptual weight of the thousands of books lining his shelves made the atmosphere heavy and dark.
Since he wasn’t going for a hermit’s cove this time around, Alistair made sure that the occult items were more visible and used them to draw out the ambience he wanted. A few opened Urns of Whispering Warriors put an indecipherable thrum in the air, and the visible showcase of freshly preserved entrails from monsters and Abyssal Nightmares made the image even more memorable.
The spatial expansion of his edicts did its thing and made the ceiling look an extra floor higher. Deciding that it wasn’t enough, Alistair opened a flask containing black water and poured it out.
Instead of falling to the ground, the black water rose up against gravity and flew up to the ceiling and was absorbed into it. A few seconds passed in silence then suddenly the spot where the water sank into began bubbling and started spewing out inky black water that quickly spread until it covered every inch of the ceiling across the whole shop. As soon as it settled, a layer of fog formed and moved over the water’s surface. It was like looking up to the surface of the dark sea.
Done with that, he turned towards the end sections containing shelves of forbidden, forgotten and eldritch knowledge, his robes swishing elegantly behind him, and demarcated it from the outer sections with a visible astral curtain. It was purely cosmetic but the curtain that was halfway between visible and invisible sent a loud message.
He walked back to the central area towards a cupboard that was leaning against a pillar and picked up the idle jar filled with water sitting on top of it.
Alistair looked thoughtful and contemplative as he held the jar.
“This might be overdoing it. Not to mention it’ll be a pain and a half to get you guys out of there if it turns out for the worst.” He said to the jar and in response the water inside it roiled like a turbulent wave as a tiny tentacle tore out of the water and slapped against the waves. Following after it was a razor thin fin that simply sliced through the surface before disappearing under the waves.
“Ground rules: no one down here is food. Act otherwise and I won’t be letting you guys out of the jar again.” Alistair warned.
Another wave smashed against the glass, this time followed by three tentacles.
“Try me.” At Alistair’s dare, the waves calmed while the tentacles peacefully retreated underneath. “That’s what I thought.”
He opened the jar, and like the inky black water earlier, the water inside the jar floated upwards towards the sea on the ceiling. If one were to look pointedly at the floating blob of water, it was possible to make out different shapes of marine life swimming around inside the blob.
“Don’t make me repeat myself.” He warned again for good measure as the blob entered into the foggy sea.
No sooner had he said that, the bare surface of a gigantic tentacle silently, and without disturbing the calm surface, tore through the surface of the water before disappearing into whatever depths the black sea held.
“That takes care of that.” Alistair said after closing the jar and keeping it back on the cupboard. Other than his own workshop, he was pretty much done and was ready to open his doors—
He was yet to hang up the new name for the Sanctum Sanctorum. As a personal rule, he never reuses a name for his shop whenever he sets up in a new location.
He scratched his chin and racked his brain for a solid minute before the new name registered. The name came to him as well as the memory of irate pocket-pinching corporate goblins.
“Gringotts Vaults.” Alistair tasted the name for a moment before nodding in contentment. It was weird enough, stuck awkwardly to the tongue, inquisitive in form, and generally nonsensical to those who thought less of names.
Having chosen the standing name for his reopening establishment, Alistair nicked his right thumb with the tiny blade on the ring he wore on his left pinky. He smudged the blood with his fingers and then wrote out the new name of the shop on the air.
Gringotts Vaults.
And then in a smaller font, in the signage column in the bottom right corner, he wrote:
—Alistair Finch, Shoppe Keeper of the Sanctum Sanctorum.
“Perfect.” He snapped his fingers and the bloodied letters started evaporating and with its disappearance, an intricately carved signboard started appearing with his written words burned neatly into it.
At the end of his signage, there was an Ouroboros symbol of a serpent eating its own tail, representing cyclical eternity and transmutation.
—Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost.
Alchemy’s first law of Equivalent Exchange.
As a Merchant, and a connoisseur of even the forgotten branches of magic, that simple and irrefutable law was something he lived and abided by.
He went outside with the signboard floating above his hand and placed a palm on the wall by the doorpost and transmuted a pole to jut out of the wall. He levitated the signboard to the pole and hung it tightly, once more transmuting the pole to meld completely against the signboard.
“That’s better.” Alistair said with a wide satisfied smile on his face. “Gringotts Vaults. Strangely fitting.”
Alistair turned to go back inside only to see his neighbor, the old witch, looking at him with surprise clear on her face only for her to replace it with a scowl when she realized he was looking at her.
“Good evening, ma'am. Wonderful day, isn’t it?” He said as he walked over to introduce himself. “I’m Alistair Finch. I bought this property two days ago. I tried introducing myself yesterday but it seemed like you were busy.”
She looked at him up and down and snorted. “Lenoa. What are you? Another upstart wasting away his life for fame? I have better things to do than waste my time entertaining whatever your kick is.”
Alistair laughed. “No, I’m not an adventurer if that is what you’re asking. I’m opening a magic shop, so I guess we’ll be neighbors going forward.”
He saw the way whatever opinion she had of him drop sharply into disdain. He had been on both ends of that look more times than he could remember. He probably has had and been addressed with every conceivable misconception under the topic of magic in his long life so he easily brushed it aside.
She scoffed derisively. “What kind of spells are you selling?” She could hardly care about him, but if she could get a magic spell for cheap due to the naiveté of a foolish opportunistic man, then all the better for her.
“Any kind you might need. Elemental spells of any rank, spells for dark magic and hexes, and even spells from obscure schools of magic.” He said with a smile, wondering if she would be his first customer in this new world.
“Don’t waste my time again with your foolishness.” She hissed and slammed the door of her hut in his face.
Again, understandable misconceptions. But again, just because he understood those misconceptions didn’t mean he accepted them. Magic was all about discovery and keeping an open mind. Alistair’s understanding of the developments of magic in this dimension was shabby at best, something he aimed to rectify as soon as possible.
Since he hit a snag in his first interaction with his neighbor, he returned to his shop to finish what he could with his setup before the day ran out.
“Hmm. I think some torches will be good.” He mused to himself as he took in the ambience of the shop upon his entrance. Perfect.
The inside, despite being well illuminated, felt deceptively dark and unsettling. Whispers you doubt you heard, the feeling of being watched, the tiny spills of the oppressive auras of some of the items — Alistair found it all perfect. The uncertainty at every step and the foreboding feeling that crept down every aisle was exactly what he wanted for Gringotts Vaults.
“Now torches.” Even with the addition of tastefully placed torches, it did nothing to improve or worsen the illumination of the shop. What it did however was solidify the old vibe that Alistair had expertly cultivated for the shop.
He walked towards the section of the shop partitioned for his workshops, while above his head the still black sea rippled as a jagged fin emerged for a few seconds before disappearing.
The workshop he was building was for all intensive and personal practices he would be commissioned to carry out, like advanced rituals, advanced alchemy, rune crafting and engraving, and even his potion making – they would all fulfill his workshop’s calling.
‘That reminds me. I have to prepare the catalogs for all the services I’ll be putting up for sale… but to do that, I’ll first have to know what era of magic I’m dealing with. Tipping the scales is not the same as flipping it. Hopefully the local deities understand that and leave me to my little business.’
From a cursory look, Orario resembled your typical adventuring city, but a quick closer look easily highlighted the differences. The first was the unmistakable monolithic structure in the heart of the city that served as the entrance, as well as the regulating shackles, to the grand dungeon that bore deep into the earth.
The second major difference was the presence of deities and the effect that their direct influence had on the city and its people.
The divines who wanted a first row seat to the greatest story ever told, so much so that they staked their essence on it, and the mortals who accepted the aiding hands of their patron deities in order to save their world, both ambitions tied to a pact of familiarity and companionship.
And here was Alistair Finch – Vaunted Scholar of GOLB(and a thousand others), The Last Great Sage, Mage of Merlin, Sorcerer Supreme and Master of the Mystic Arts, Master of the Clock Tower and Wielder of all True Magics, Heroic Spirit, Firstborn of Magic, The Honored One, Lord of Mysteries, Gandalf…. etc. – appearing as a bespectacled man in his mid thirties and opening a magic shop in a foreign city, in a foreign land, in a foreign dimension.
“Phew. Done and dusted. And with that, the Sanctum Sanctorum’s Gringotts Vaults, Orario’s Branch is officially opened.” Alistair said with a smile as he stroked his beard and, once more, appreciated his fine work.
Now it was time to figure out where and when he was, as well as who and what he needed to know.
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A/N: So how is it? No pressure.