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“And steal something explicitly forbidden.”

“Yes.”

Julen winced. “And if the Umbralyn catch us—”

“They will,” Maia said. “Which is why we don’t all go.”

Julen looked at her. “You have a plan?”

“I’ll get the stone,” she continued. “It responded to me before. If one of us can find it quickly, it’ll be me.”

Julen shook his head immediately. “Absolutely not alone.”

“I’ll be the one who touches it.”

Julen exhaled slowly, then nodded. “Then we need access timing, and a reason for you to be near the Umbralyn quarters without raising suspicion.”

“Selinne?”

Julen sighed. “You know she’ll figure out a way. She won’t let you go alone, though.”

Maia felt it then, the resolve settling into place. This was no longer about guessing where Caelith had been taken. It was about finding what he had left for her to find.

35

Forgotten Spaces

Maia had never been good at sitting still. She was about to be worse at it than usual.

As soon as her work was done with Nuada, she rose again. He didn’t question her this time, only let her leave after another silence-filled stretch of work. The less she said, the safer they all were.

An hour after evening supper, she met Selinne and Julen before curfew set in, the sun setting slowly.

The eastern underways beneath the spire were a tangle of old stone and half-forgotten conduits, passages abandoned not because they were forbidden, but because they were obsolete. The Umbralyn no longer patrolled them; nothing of consequence was meant to pass through here.

Selinne had found the routes the way she found most things: by noticing what others stopped seeing. Old maintenance ledgers, half-erased transit markings, doors that were sealed only by custom instead of command. She’d tested them slowly, learning which paths swallowed sound and which bent perception just enough to be overlooked.

Old resonance bled into the walls here, a remnant of earlier bindings, strong enough to blur perception and soften noise. Maia could feel it humming faintly beneath her boots, like a memory refusing to fade.

Selinne leaned against a support column, arms folded, eyes alert. Julen stood nearby, pale but upright, his weight carefully balanced. His body not yet forgiven for what it had been through.

Maia resisted the urge to pace. The tension felt too sharp for movement; she stood with her fingertips pressed into her palms instead.

“They’ll have sealed his quarters with some kind of spell,” Selinne said at last. “But they may not have stripped them.”

Maia nodded slowly. “Not if they thought something was still unresolved. That he might have taken information with him.”

Julen frowned. “You think they know about the stone?”

“I don’t think so. He didn’t keep it as a possession. He hid it as a secret. That means it wasn’t logged, wasn’t catalogued, and certainly wasn’t declared.”

Selinne’s gaze sharpened. “From humans.”

“Yes,” Maia said. “But I’ll bet he hid it from the Umbralyn, too. Especially them.”

Julen exhaled softly. “Then why keep it at all?”

Maia hesitated, then answered honestly. “Because destroying it would have meant understanding it. And he didn’t want that. Not yet. There must have been a reason.” She looked down at her hands. “He let me see it because he trusted me. Or… maybe he wanted me to see it. To use it.”