They didn't drag her.
They escorted her cautiously—two robed figures walking half a step ahead and half a step behind, moving like she was a suspicious bomb they weren't totally sure how to deactivate.
Neither touched her.
One kept a hand hovering near a scroll, clearly pre-loaded for "emergency vaporization."
Maya behaved. Mostly.
Her legs still felt like they were stitched together with bubblegum and passive-aggressive intent.
The corridor was a humid nightmare of dungeon chic. Stone blocks sweated. Candles lined the walls, dripping wax that had given up being decorative sometime around the fall of Rome. Somewhere in the dark, water plinked at regular intervals—an endless loop of plumbing malice.
Behind her, the whispers fluttered.
"It completed the binding by touch."
"Or it broke it. There's a difference."
"It spoke Old Engineer. No outsider knows Old Engineer."
Maya tugged the scratchy towel tighter around her shoulders. Her oxygen tank thunked softly against the wall every few steps, like a drunk tuba trailing behind her.
The codex-flipper from before had attached himself to her side. He looked young, sharp, and unfortunately eager, like a grad student who'd just found a living thesis topic.
"You saw the gap," he said in a reverent whisper. "By the Relay-Point. You knew it had to connect."
Ahead, a narrow woman with ink-smudged sleeves marched briskly, muttering under her breath.
"I told them the glyph alignment was off. I told them not to buy cheap candles. But no. And now: soggy demon."
"I'm not a demon," Maya called after her. "I'm an app designer. Your binding spell was duct tape on wet cardboard."
The woman didn't turn, but her spine stiffened in deeply offended punctuation.
The procession ended at a massive oak door bound in iron. The hinges groaned when opened, like an old man standing up out of spite.
Inside was the "Red Study."
Which, of course, was not red.
And barely a study.
Stone walls. A table bolted to the floor. Two mismatched chairs. A wall-mounted rune that pulsed like a slow heartbeat. Chalk rings scrawled across the flagstones like overlapping scars.
Everything smelled faintly of iron, ink, and magical antiseptic.
Maya was deposited in one of the chairs. One cultist left. One stayed.
The codex acolyte cleared his throat with ceremonial formality. "I am called Rue. Research Acolyte, Third Circle."
He straightened.
"And you, O Being of Air and Shell—how shall we name you?"
Maya blinked.
This was the part where she was supposed to demand answers, insist on her rights, scream about going home. Instead, she sat wrapped in a medieval dish towel, dripping on the floor, with absolutely zero leverage.
"…Maya," she said finally. "Just Maya."
The room stilled.
"Maya?" repeated the ink-stained woman. Her voice dropped.
The bell-ringer fumbled his grip, the bell giving a guilty chime.
"The Devourer of Words," someone whispered.
Rue's eyes lit with unsettling clarity. "The Paper Moth."
"Excuse me?" Maya asked.
"Tiny. Insatiable. It feeds on written knowledge. Scroll by scroll. Archive by archive."
"So you think my name means I'm a killer librarian moth?"
No one laughed.
She rubbed her face. "Great. Endangered insect, devourer of knowledge. That tracks."
The Sentiment Seal above the door pulsed in awkward sympathy.
Rue sat across from her with the posture of someone trying very hard to be professional in front of a potentially world-ending soggy stranger.
"You are not bound," he said. "There are no chains. Only passive wards. You can leave if you wish. But the High Adept believes it is safer if you remain until Master Shefu arrives."
Maya glanced at the rune glowing above the door. "And that?"
"The Sentiment Seal. It records emotional resonance in the room. If you become violent, it alerts the Wardens."
"So… a magical mood ring?"
She flicked a damp finger at it. "Neat."
The rune pulsed disapprovingly.
Rue leaned forward, eyes gleaming. "You manipulated a binding circle. You touched an incomplete glyph and completed it by intuition. That is… almost unheard of."
"It's just pattern recognition," Maya said. "I see what wants to connect. I connect it. It's literally my job."
She rubbed her temple. "Well. It was. Before I fell through a sentient Excel sheet."
Rue tilted his head. "You speak of your old world with bitterness."
"That's because it sucked."
He nodded slowly. "Our world also sucks. But perhaps differently."
Maya cracked a reluctant smile. "Are you even allowed to say that as a junior cultist?"
"I'm not a cultist," Rue said quickly. "I am a Research Acolyte. This is sanctioned magical theory. Not a cult."
"And the robes?"
"Traditional," Rue said stiffly. "And warm."
Maya sagged back in the chair, the towel itching her neck. "Let me guess: you tried to summon a Hero of Light to stop some kind of world-ending threat, and instead you got me. Now you're not sure if it's a mistake, bad spellcraft, or avant-garde prophecy."
Rue looked faintly betrayed. "You read the prophecy?"
"No. I'm genre-savvy."
He fumbled with his scroll and unrolled it like a sacred CVS receipt.
"One shall come bearing air, with fins of silver and shell of steel. She shall complete what is broken and bind what is unbound."
He looked up, wide-eyed. "You breathe with a device. You wear silver fins. Your shell—"
"Is not a shell. It's a tank. And I didn't come from the sky. I came from a whirlpool."
"To us, it was sky."
Maya pinched the bridge of her nose. The Sentiment Seal pulsed in rhythm with her headache. "Prophecy is vague and dumb. What's the real problem?"
Rue hesitated.
"There is a breach. In the Deep Layer."
"The what now?"
"We patch our magic. But the patches leak. Into the Deep Layer."
"So it's like the Trash folder of your universe?"
Rue nodded gravely. "And sometimes… the trash climbs back out."
"You summoned a debugger."
He blinked. "A what?"
"Never mind. You'd need a crash course in operating systems and heartbreak."
Maya's thoughts drifted.
She imagined her phone buzzing with unread texts, her inbox growing like a fungus. The barista who might eventually notice she stopped showing up. Her dead plant, which would not.
Would anyone even realize she was gone?
The Sentiment Seal above the door pulsed faintly. Like a shrug.
The door creaked open.
A tall man stepped in, draped in crimson and grey. His posture was all efficiency, his eyes sharp and assessing.
Rue leapt to his feet. "Master Shefu."
Shefu nodded to Rue, then to the guard by the door. Finally, his eyes landed on Maya.
"So. You are the one who rewrote our circle."
"Debugged," she said. "You're welcome."
He studied her like a textbook with bad margins. "Tell me, foreigner. Do you understand the cost of mistakes in this world?"
"Buddy," Maya said, "I've deployed hotfixes to a million users while sobbing into cold coffee. I live in the cost of mistakes."
A twitch at the corner of his mouth. Maybe respect. Maybe indigestion.
"Show me," he said.
What followed was not a trial. It was an exam.
Rue chalked out a levitation matrix. The spell flickered. Maya pointed to a broken loop and told him to curve the line into the Relay-Point. The chair floated six inches.
Next: a more complex set of runes. Redundant loops. Wobbly anchors. Maya trimmed the clutter and re-anchored the feed. The chair floated waist-high.
Then Shefu added a comment line—a non-rune scribble mistaken for law.
Maya narrowed her eyes. "Someone left a note inside your spell. Your system doesn't know how to ignore it. So it's trying to obey 'don't obey me.' That's why it jitters."
Rue looked scandalized. "People… write in spells?"
"Everyone writes where they shouldn't," Maya said.
Shefu erased the line. The chair rose smoothly, smug in its gravity-defying triumph.
"Enough," Shefu said. He turned back to Maya. "You will not touch a rune again without my leave."
"Happy to oblige."
His tone sharpened. "The Inquisitor arrives at dusk. She will demand proof. If you are what the prophecy claims, she will test you. If not, she will demand penance."
"Cool," Maya said. "Love a binary."
"Rest," Shefu said. "Eat if you can. You look like a thread pulled too long."
He almost smiled.
Then swept out, leaving Rue scribbling frantic notes and Maya sagging against the table, the towel slipping from her shoulders.
The Sentiment Seal above the door pulsed a neutral grey, like it was reserving judgment.
From their perspective, she'd rewritten sacred bindings and reeducated a Research Acolyte.
From hers, she was still a soggy woman with a steel lung who had accidentally become the scariest moth in the room.
And now she had until dusk to prove she wasn't a monster.