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Just one more. Just to see.

By the time she realised how far she’d gone, she’d lost track of the patrol’s rhythm entirely, the stairs behind her had branched twice and the sconces had thinned to darkness.

The chamber opened before her without warning.

It was larger than she’d expected, vaulted and rough-hewn, the walls slick with condensation. Torchlight moved unevenly across the stone. Several Umbralyn gathered in loose clusters: some were still bound by chains, fewer were free, the metal pooled beside them like shed skin. The atmosphere was nothing like the Archive above. It was looser, rawer, stripped of the careful performance they maintained around humans.

Some drank from heavy cups, their movements unhurried. Others spoke in low voices, their language shifting between the human tongue and something older that Maia couldn’t follow.

In the far corner, human women sat among them. They weren’t prisoners, but something told Maia they weren’t entirely at ease either. Some leaned close, murmuring. Others simply waited, their expressions carrying the particular blankness of people who had learned not to ask questions about arrangements that kept them fed.

Maia pressed herself into the shadow of the doorway, her heart hammering. She scanned the room for Caelith, telling herself that was all she needed and then she would return to where she was meant to be. She would just see him, place him, and understand what part of himself he kept here that he wouldn’t show her in the Archive.

She found him near the far wall. He stood apart from the others, arms folded, watching the room with an expression she couldn’t read from this distance. He wasn’t drinking like the others. He wasn’t speaking. He simply stood there, and the space around him was still in a way the rest of the room was not.

She should have left then. After all, she mostly had what she came for. But she stayed a moment too long, leaning slightly to see past a column, and her boot scraped audibly against the stone floor.

The sound was small. In the Archive above, it would have vanished beneath the ambient noise of quills and turning pages. Down here, in a room full of creatures whose senses were not human, it was loud.

An Umbralyn at the nearest table turned his head.

He was tall and scarred, the deep marks running across his whole face in silver lines. His eyes locked in on her, finding her in the doorway in such an unhurried way that told her he had probably been aware of her for longer than she realised. He studied her with a cold, appraising interest that was somehow worse than hate or hunger.

He rose from the table without rushing and crossed toward her.

Maia’s instinct was to run. But the corridor behind her branched in directions she no longer remembered clearly, and running from an Umbralyn in the dark felt like a worse option than standing still.

So she stood still. She lifted her chin slightly, the way she did when Orell questioned her in front of the other scribes, and tried to make her presence look deliberate rather than accidental.

It didn’t work.

“You’re a long way from your desk, scribe,” he said. His voice was quiet, almost conversational. He stopped a pace away from her, close enough that she could see the torchlight moving across the silver scars. “I don’t recall anyone extending you an invitation.”

“I was looking for a text,” she said. “From the lower catalogues.”

“You were.” It wasn’t a question, and she could tell he didn’t believe a word of it. His gaze moved over her slowly, cataloguing rather than wanting, which offered no comfort at all.

“The lower catalogues are three levels above us,” he continued. “Which means you are either spectacularly lost, or you came here deliberately.” He tilted his head. “I’m curious which.”

Maia’s mouth was dry. “Lost,” she managed. “I’m lost.”

“No,” he said, almost gently. “You’re not. You moved too quietly for someone who didn’t know where she was going. And you’ve been watching us for several minutes.” He stepped closer. The torchlight shifted behind him, throwing his face into a deeper shadow. “The question is what you expected to find.”

Her back was against the corridor wall now. She hadn’t remembered stepping backward, but the cold stone pressed against her shoulders. The sounds of the chamber continued behind him, the voices, movement, the scrape of cup, but none of it reached toward her. No one was watching. No one would intervene. Down here, she understood suddenly, the rules that governed the rest of Eryssan did not apply.

“You’re shaking,” he observed casually. “Humans do that, don’t they? When they’ve miscalculated.”

His hand came up, not fast, not aggressively. He touched the end of her braid where it lay against her shoulder, lifting it slightly, turning it in the light as though examining the colour.

“Pale gold,” he murmured. “Unusual. Coastal stock, yes? I can smell the salt still in it.”

Maia’s throat closed. She willed herself to speak, to snap back, to be the version of herself that argued with Julen and demanded answers from Elders. But that version of herself had never stood a chance down here.

“I wonder,” he said, still holding the braid, his tone thoughtful rather than threatening, which frightened her more, “what a girl like you thought she’d learn down here. What you imagined you’d see.” He looked back at her face. “And whether anyone knows where you are.”

The last question landed like a blade laid flat against her skin. But it didn’t cut. Not yet.

From the shadows behind him, something shifted.