The climb to the surface was slow with a prisoner and two half-frozen thugs in tow, but the maze didn't fight them.
That was the strangest—and most telling—part.
With the flood frozen solid below, the corridors that had shifted and tricked them on the way down now lay completely still.
It was just dead stone and dead roots; a labyrinth with its tongue cut out. The fake paths remained fake.
The distances made sense.
Rayleigh's glowing markers pulsed steadily the whole way back, and for once, none of them faded.
They finally emerged past the dye vats and into the warehouse, greeted by ordinary lamplight and crisp night air that felt almost warm after the freezing depths.
Eleonora and Lulune were waiting.
This time, Finn stood with them, having arrived while the team was underground.
In a single heartbeat, Finn's eyes scanned the group—counting their numbers, noting the prisoner, spotting the frost still clinging to Kaguya's sleeves—before landing on Rayleigh.
"You went down to secure a route and came up with a man who can read Knossos," Finn said. It wasn't a question; he had already pieced the story together just by looking at them.
"That's a much better night than I planned for."
"It got worse and better at the same time," Rayleigh replied. "The creature that opens the walls broke away. It went deeper than anyone's maps go." He nodded at the trembling scholar Kaguya had just set on his feet.
"But this guy knows the maze's language. The people funding this operation are older and quieter than Corvin, and I'd very much like to know their names before that monster finds its way back up with a fresh arm."
Finn studied the prisoner for a long moment.
Suddenly, the calm demeanor of the Pallum sharpened into a deadly focus.
"Then let's find out what he knows," Finn said, "before someone comes looking for their reader."
..
They put him in a windowless stone room beneath the Guild, furnished with nothing but a table and two lamps.
He sat there shaking, looking exactly like a man who expected the walls to start talking.
Which, given his profession, was entirely fair.
His name was Merek.
Up close and in decent light, he looked the part: a lifelong indoor scholar who had never willingly been in a fight.
He had ink beneath his nails and a permanent stoop from hunching over old scrolls.
But the most telling detail was in his left eye.
Half-drowned in fear sat a small, dark mark—a crooked D branded directly into the iris. It was the birthright every child of that cursed bloodline was born wearing.
Rayleigh saw it, and the missing pieces finally clicked into place.
Daedalus.
Of course it's Daedalus.
It's always Daedalus with this city's worst holes.
Fels stood motionless in the corner, a silent shadow in black robes. Finn sat across from Merek, his hands folded on the table, as patient as stone.
Alise leaned against the far wall with her arms crossed, her usual sunny disposition entirely absent, while Kaguya stood beside her, projecting a quiet stillness that made people nervous.
Rayleigh leaned near the door, positioned so he could read the prisoner's entire body instead of just his face.
Finn spoke first, his tone gentle and level. "You're not going to be hurt in this room. Whatever you're afraid of, it isn't us."
Merek let out a wet, humorless breath. "You only say that because you don't know what else is out there."
"Then tell us," Finn replied. "And we'll decide together who should be frightened."
It was Finn's entire interrogation method packed into a single sentence, and Rayleigh watched it work its usual magic.
The scholar's shoulders dropped half an inch.
"You have the mark," Fels said from the corner.
The voice was dry, ancient, and devoid of warmth. Merek flinched as if the sound itself had physically struck him. "Show me your hand."
Merek flipped his palm up without needing to be told twice.
More of the small, dark letters were faintly woven into the lines of his skin—old ink layered over even older scars.
"A reader, then," Fels deduced. "Not a builder. Your family stopped building generations ago. But some of you preserved the reading—the ability to speak with what your ancestors left behind."
He drifted a step closer.
"You woke something beneath the city. Tell me what."
The scholar swallowed hard, struggling for a long moment before he could speak.
"I didn't want to," he stammered. "You have to understand, I never wanted any of this. I just sell readings. Old deeds, dead scripts, the markings on ruins that nobody else can make sense of. It's mostly honest work. But then they came. They knew what I was before I even opened my mouth. After that, there was no scenario where I could say no and keep my hands."
"Who came?" Finn asked.
"A man named Corvin. And the thing he brought with him." Merek pressed his ink-stained fingers flat against the table to stop them from shaking. "You've seen it. The tall one. The creature that opens the walls!"
"We've seen it," Rayleigh confirmed. "Now tell us what it actually is. Not what it looks like—what it is."
Merek looked at him.
Something about Rayleigh's flat, unyielding certainty seemed to make the truth easier to confess than Finn's kindness had.
"It's ....old," the scholar began. "Older than Evilus, older than any of us. My family's records refer to things like it as watchers. When Daedalus dug the deepest routes, he was terrified of what he might find at the bottom. So, he built guardians to hold the doors."
"They aren't soldiers..... they aren't even monsters. He took what he had—monster flesh, corpses, and his own machinery—bound it all together with the marks, and set it to listen. That way, anything moving through his maze the wrong way would be dealt with." He swallowed hard.
"Most of them failed. They fell apart, went mad, or just broke down. But that one didn't completely fail. It just... went to sleep. For centuries."
"And you woke it," Fels stated.
"They made me wake it!" Merek's voice cracked. "I didn't have the Orb. Nobody has the Orb. But I had fragments—copied rhythms, pieces of old command-scripts salvaged from a dozen ruins. Corvin's people had the property records and the routes down. Between the two of us, I taught it how to hear again. I gave them the knock." He buried his face in his hands.
"I thought I was giving them a tool. A key. Something they could point and aim."
"But you weren't," Rayleigh said.
"No." When Merek looked up, his eyes were wet and hollow. "It doesn't obey the knock. It recognizes it. There's a massive difference, and I didn't understand that until it was too late. When you knock, you aren't commanding it—you're reminding it of what it is."
"Once it remembered, it stopped needing us altogether. It only answers to the maze now. Corvin thinks he's holding the leash, but Corvin is an idiot who is going to die confused."
A violent shudder ran through him. "It kept the voices of the people it took. It speaks to the walls in a dead man's language. And every day, it wakes up a little more. It becomes a little more certain of its purpose: to keep the deepest door shut against anything that tries to open it."
A heavy silence settled over the room after the confession. For once, Rayleigh let it linger, letting the silence do his work for him.
Then, Alise pushed off the wall.
"So that's the thing in the tunnels," she said.
Her voice was tight and rigidly controlled—which, coming from Alise, meant she was holding back something enormous.
"The guardian. The cords. Fine. I understand the monster now. What I want is the person who dug it up. You said Corvin came for you, but Corvin is just a hired hand. Who is paying Corvin?"
Merek went dangerously still.
"You already know it's not him," Alise pressed, stepping closer. "A broker, a hired handler, a terrified scholar—that's just a lot of small people running errands. Somebody with real money and a real motive woke a creature that even Daedalus was afraid of. I want a name."
"I can't."
"You can."
"You don't understand what she—"
He stopped himself. It was one word too late, and the entire room heard it.
She.
Alise slowly uncrossed her arms. Beside her, Kaguya's quiet demeanor sharpened into something ice-cold, her hand drifting instinctively to the sword at her hip.
"A woman," Alise repeated. Every single trace of the cheerful captain was gone now. "Keep going."
Merek looked like he was praying for the stone floor to swallow him whole.
When he spoke again, it was barely a whisper.
"I only saw her twice. She keeps her distance from the actual work. Corvin handles everything—the routes, the money, the guardian—so she never has to be anywhere near the fallout. But it's her money, and her motive. Everyone working for her is terrified of her in a way they aren't even terrified of the monster in the dark." His hands were shaking violently now.
"She's older than this scheme. Old enough that her money is clean and quiet, buried under a dozen dead names. Evilus.. .from the war. She has—" his voice dropped even further,
"—she has scars running down one side of her face. Old burns. She touches them when she's thinking. She smiled at me once, and I haven't slept a full night since."
Rayleigh watched the blood completely drain from Alise's face.
He watched Kaguya's knuckles turn bone-white around her sword hilt.
"Valletta," Alise breathed.
The word was ripped from her throat like a physical weight.
"Valletta Grede."
Merek's terrified silence was the only answer they needed.