The weight of the discovery was a physical thing. They sat in the dust of the dead archive, the ghostly green light of the spectrograph screen the only illumination.
"Lysander wants us to get this evidence to his people," Sage said, his voice rough. "To start a resistance."
"A resistance needs a goal," Valentine countered, but her usual discipline was fractured by the enormity of what they knew. "Overthrowing the Soladorns just changes who controls the poison. The source is still sick. The machine is still creating this… this entropy."
"So the goal isn't just to change the controller," Sage said, the idea forming as he spoke. "It's to heal the source. To change the mechanic."
He looked at the schematic Lysander had provided. The Catalyzation Core. "What if this machine isn't just for extraction? What if it's a dam? Not just holding back water, but holding back a natural process? What if the Aqua Vitae isn't supposed to be separated? What if its power is in its wholeness?"
Valentine stared at him. "You're talking about theology. Not engineering."
"I'm talking about the puzzle!" Sage insisted, his curiosity blazing. "The Syndicate's rule is: Separate to Control. But what if the world's rule is: Unify to Sustain? The corruption is a product of their rule. The cure might be in breaking it."
He stood up, energized by a new direction. "We don't just need to expose them, Val. We need to understand what the Aqua Vitae truly is. We need to find someone who sees it as more than a utility or a weapon."
Valentine looked from his fervent face to the chilling data on the screen, then to the cabinet holding the seed of unmaking. The organized path was gone. Before them were only precipices.
"Then we need more than a mechanic or a revolutionary," she said, standing. Her voice held a new, grim resolve. "We need a different kind of expert. Someone who remembers when the water just… flowed."
They had the symptom, and the schematic of the cause. Now, they needed the lost knowledge of the cure. The next step wasn't forward or back. It was deeper, into the forgotten past.