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"Go with Grolm."

I leave before the impulse to remain beside her becomes stronger than duty.

The route to the lightning-works descends through five levels of black stairs. Emergency light runs in crimson veins under my feet. Servants press against the walls as guards direct them toward northern chambers. A pair of Zonak workers carry an unconscious dark elf between them. All three bear burns along their exposed skin.

The failures extend beyond one locked room.

Whoever struck the regulator knew where damage would spread.

Heat thickens as I approach the main lightning-works chamber. The doors have been torn open and left against the walls. Burned ozone, scorched metal, and discharged chaos magic fill the air. Blue sparks crawl across the ceiling channels, searching for paths no longer connected to the core.

Zog stands inside a ring of shattered crystal.

The Zonak reaches only to the lower plates of my chest. Copper shielding covers his arms and shoulders. Tufts of white hair rise around two short horns, charged by the power still leaking through the room.

Three assistants work behind him, driving grounding rods into the floor around a fractured black housing.

"Arena-Master," Zog says. "Do not step between the rods unless you want your carapace fused to the walls."

I stop outside the ring.

"The regulator failed."

"Regulators fail inward. This one was struck."

He points to a conduit mounted above the central housing.

Its crystal should be a single dark shard as long as my arm. Now half of it lies across the floor in glittering fragments. The remaining section protrudes from its frame, split around a round white scar.

"A pressure break?" I ask.

"Would fracture along the growth lines." Zog climbs onto the housing and taps beside the scar with a metal tool. "This cut across them. A precise magical pulse entered from outside the spire, passed through three layers of warding, and struck the conduit before dispersing into the atmospheric network."

"Could an internal caster produce the same mark?"

"Not from this angle."

He points toward a narrow inspection slit in the eastern wall. Beyond it, the storm hides Ti'lith behind white fire and red haze.

"The pulse entered through there," he says. "The wards should have turned it, but someone tuned the strike to the conduit. They knew its charge pattern."

"Who possesses that knowledge?"

Zog bares small dark teeth. "Every noble who has bribed a dismissed works servant in the past fifty years. Fewer possess the weapon."

"Name it."

"A directional caster. Soz'garoth construction, though no honorable sorcerer admits making one. It compresses chaos force into a narrow path and leaves the wielder safely beyond ordinary ward range. Assassins favor them. So do political rivals too cowardly to enter the arena."

Korgath.

Certainty arrives clean and lethal.

He stood on the upper promenade and asked whether I could control Beatrix. He touched his broken horn while testing how I would respond to a threat against her. My warning taught him that she mattered. His attack followed before the court's gossip had cooled.

He aimed at the solarium because the room had become hers.

The wider failures provide concealment. A damaged spire can be called political aggression. A human suffocated behind reinforced glass can be dismissed as an unfortunate consequence.