"Knowledge," Isla whispered, her voice trembling slightly as she reached into the deep folds of her Sea-Leather tunic. "Is heavier than gold."
She pulled out a book. It wasn't the massive tome she had been studying in the Archives, but a smaller, erratic collection of papers bound in cracked Sköll-skin. The cover was stained with water and time, the leather warped by centuries of dampness.
"I found it tucked inside the cover of the architectural diagrams," Isla confessed, placing the journal on the table next to the glowing pouch of Kristal Biru. "It belonged to the Master Engineer who designed the cooling pumps for the Lacus Mortis. The one who... who realized what they were really building."
Roui leaned forward, the humor vanishing from his face. "You stole a primary source document from the Archives of the All-Seeing? Isla, that is high treason. I am incredibly impressed."
"It's not treason if the government is trying to eat you," Aurora murmured, sitting up and swinging her legs off the counter. She gestured to the book. "Read it, Isla. What did the dead engineer have to say?"
Isla opened the journal. The pages were brittle, covered in the frantic, jagged script of a man losing his mind. She ran a pale finger under the lines, translating the Old World dialect.
"'The geometry is wrong,'" she read. "'We are not building a prison. We are building a trough. The Triumvirate speaks of containment, of the Great Cost, but I see only a butcher's bill.'"
"Triumvirate?" Persya asked, his slate-grey brow furrowing. "The Guild is run by a Council of Twelve. There is no Triumvirate."
"'They call themselves the Asphodel Conclave,'" Isla continued, her voice dropping to a hush as she pronounced the name. The syllables felt heavy in the room, ancient and cloying. "'They do not seek to win the war against the Void. They seek to manage the defeat. To feed the darkness just enough to keep it sleepy.'"
Alyia moved from her spot on the rug, her crystalline eyes narrowing behind her glasses. She peered at the diagram sketched on the open page—a complex array of ley-lines and mana-flow charts.
"Analysis," Alyia stated, tracing the lines with a sharp fingernail. "This schematic matches the 'feeding mechanism' we encountered in the Cathedral. But look here." She pointed to a symbol stamped repeatedly in the margins: a stylized flower wrapping around a dagger.
"The Asphodel," Roui recognized, his face paling. "The flower of the underworld. In the old myths of New Earth, it's where souls go to... fade. To do nothing. Stasis."
"'Varrick is but a hand,'" Isla read the final entry, ink splattered as if the quill had broken. "'A Gatekeeper. He filters the coal for the furnace. The heroes are the coal. We burn the brightest so the world can sleep in the grey.'"
Silence descended on the apartment, heavier than the stone of the slums outside. The implication was a physical weight. Varrick wasn't just a corrupt bureaucrat skimming off the top; he was a functionary in a machine designed to harvest them.
"We aren't fighting a person," Aurora said softly, the bioluminescence in her eyes dimming to a cold, hard sapphire. "We're fighting an ideology. 'Necessary Attrition.' They think we're batteries, Persya."
Persya stood up, his chair scraping loudly against the floor. The orange veins in his neck pulsed with a slow, angry rhythm. "So we are livestock. And Varrick is the farmer." He looked at the Kristal Biru—the very fuel they were supposed to become. "Farmers don't expect the cattle to arm themselves."
"This journal proves the intent," Roui said, pouring himself a glass of Luminara with a shaking hand. "But it's three hundred years old. If we take this to the Council, they'll call it the ramblings of a madman. We need modern proof. We need to connect the ancient ideology to Varrick's current operations."
Isla turned the page. "There's... something else. A list of locations. Supply drops for the materials needed to maintain the seals. Void-Glass. Schismite." She pointed to a coordinate that had been circled recently in fresh ink—likely by a later reader before Isla stole it. "A warehouse. Here in the Port. Lady Thorne's district."
"Thorne," Roui spat the name like a curse. "The Merchant Prince. The 'Procurer.' If she's involved, she's the one laundering the gear of the dead squads."
Aurora stood, walking to the window. She looked out at the rain-slicked streets of Raimei-Gai, where the neon moss glowed in the gutters.
"We have the why," Aurora said, turning back to her squad, her expression sharpening into the 'Warlord' mask she wore in battle. "Now we go get the who. If Thorne is holding the assets of the dead, she has the receipts. We don't just steal the ledger; we steal the proof that turns Varrick from a Scribe into a murderer."
"Ghost Protocol," Roui announced, fastening his cloak with a grim finality. He looked less like a courtier now and more like the predator the Argent Legions had trained him to be. "If Thorne is the spider, we do not kick the web. We map it. We find the gap, we slip in, we steal the ledger, and we leave before she feels the vibration."
The reconnaissance mission was a study in tension. They moved through the Canal District under the cover of a weeping, acid-tinged rain that washed the soot from the factories into the harbor. Roui took point, his Tenebrae affinity allowing him to blend the squad's silhouettes into the heavy gloom of the port night. They didn't walk on the street; they stuck to the rusted maintenance gantries and the slick, moss-covered rooftops of the Ningen tenements overlooking the warehouse district.
They settled on a ridge of slate overlooking Thorne's private dock. The warehouse was a monolith of black stone, silent and imposing against the churning grey water of the harbor.
"It's too quiet," Aurora whispered, lying prone next to Roui. She didn't use her Lumen sight—it would act as a beacon in the dark—but her Arktiske night vision picked out the details. "No patrols. No lanterns. Just... emptiness."
"Not empty," Roui hissed, his hand gripping his Aether-Glaive white-knuckled. He closed his eyes, extending his Tenebrae senses not to cast a spell, but to taste the ambient mana. "The shadows down there... they aren't natural. They're... occupied."
He flinched, pulling his hand back as if burned. "Silencers," he breathed, the word tasting of ash. "Thorne's private wet-work squad. I can feel their resonance. They are using Tenebrae cloaks to merge with the architecture. If we had tried to sneak past the gate, they would have gutted us before we heard a footstep."
"Silencers?" Persya grunted from the rear, eyeing the dark building. "Mercenaries?"
"Worse," Roui corrected, his face pale in the moonlight. "Illegal specialists. They don't just hide; they hunt in the dark. My stealth can mask us from eyes, but not from other Tenebrae users. They'll sense the disturbance in the shadows the moment we step on the lot."
"So the Ghost Protocol is a bust," Aurora surmised, her jaw tightening. "We can't sneak past ghosts. We can't out-hide them."
"No," Roui admitted, the defeat bitter in his voice. "If we go in quiet, we die quiet. They have the advantage in the dark."
Aurora rolled onto her back, looking up at the bruised violet sky. "Then we don't play their game. If they own the dark, we bring the light. We don't sneak, Roui. We breach."
She looked at Persya. "We need teeth. Big ones. The kind that bite through shadow-magic."
Persya looked at the warehouse, then at the pouch of Kristal Biru at Aurora's hip. He did the math. Stealth was statistically impossible. Brute force was suicidal... unless the force was overwhelming.
"We go back to the safehouse," Persya growled, turning away from the target. "I have work to do."