Leonotis went first, disappearing into the oppressive darkness of the ventilation shaft. The cold, smooth metal felt alien under his scraped hands. Jacqueline followed, her movements fluid and utterly silent, a ghost in the narrow passage. Low, with a bit more maneuvering and a muffled curse as her shoulder caught on a rivet, managed to wriggle through. Zombiel brought up the rear.
The shafts were claustrophobic and stifling, a maze of echoing metal. Dust, thick and ancient, puffed up with every movement, making their throats raw. The muffled sounds of the institute reverberated eerily through the narrow tunnels, creating a disorienting soundscape.
After what felt like an eternity of crawling through the suffocating darkness, Leonotis reached a wider section of the shaft. A harsh, steady light spilled from a grate in the floor below. Carefully, his heart hammering against his ribs, he peered down.
They were looking into a long, sterile laboratory that seemed to have been carved from ivory tile and polished steel. The walls gleamed under harsh, magically-amplified lights that banished every shadow. Strange glass instruments bubbled with viscous, unnaturally colored liquids, and metal tables were cluttered with an array of surgical tools and arcane devices they couldn't identify. Figures in pristine white coats moved with a detached, almost robotic efficiency, their faces grim and utterly focused on their grim work.
In the center of the room, a massive glass orb, at least ten feet high, pulsed with a faint, sickly green light. Within it, a figure was suspended in a thick, translucent fluid. It wa vaguely humanoid in shape, but with skin like cracked, weeping bark and leafy, thorny tendrils woven through her moss-green hair, wrapping around her limbs like cruel, living bindings. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her face, even in its twisted state, was contorted in an expression of profound, unending suffering. Thin, glowing tubes were connected to various points on her body, siphoning the faint green light from her, feeding it into a complex crystalline apparatus nearby.
The atmosphere in the ventilation shaft shifted, the air growing heavy with a shared sense of violation. The sterile environment below felt profoundly unnatural, a profane space utterly devoid of the vibrant, chaotic energy of the outside world. A cold, heavy dread settled in their stomachs as they realized they had stumbled into something far more sinister than they could have imagined. A faint, almost inaudible whimper, a psychic cry of pain, reached Leonotis from the orb, and he flinched as it resonated deep within his own green magic, a sympathetic chord of agony.
Suddenly, a hush fell over the laboratory below, a tense, expectant silence that cut through the low hum of the machinery. The white-coated scientists straightened from their consoles and workbenches, their movements suddenly imbued with a nervous, obsequious energy. Through the ventilation grate, the children saw the reason for the abrupt change.
A figure had entered the lab, radiating an aura of absolute authority that seemed to physically press down on the room, making the very air feel heavy. He wore robes of deep indigo, exquisitely embroidered with threads of shimmering gold that depicted celestial patterns and forgotten constellations. A heavy gold torc, a symbol of kingship, rested upon his neck, and a simple, yet undeniably powerful, signet ring adorned his hand. His movements were deliberate, imbued with a grace that was both elegant and predatory, his sharp, intelligent gaze sweeping across the equipment and the scientists with cold assessment.
Even from their hidden vantage point, the weight of his presence was palpable. The scientists bowed their heads deeply, their previous air of detached professionalism completely replaced by a fawning, fearful deference. One older man, his face etched with the sleepless nights of years of research, hurried forward to greet him, his posture stooped in respect.
"Your Majesty," the lead scientist began, his voice a low, reverent murmur. He gestured with a trembling hand towards the pulsating orb in the center of the room. "The specimen is stable. The energy transference rate has increased by six percent since your last visit. We are… proceeding as planned."
King Rega's attention, however, was already fixed on the massive glass orb. The sickly green glow cast an eerie, unflattering light on his handsome features. His expression was not one of triumph, but of intense, critical analysis. He walked slowly around the orb, his gaze scrutinizing the suffering dryad within. The low, pained moan that escaped the dryad's lips, barely audible even in the stillness that had fallen over the lab, did not seem to register with him at all.
"Stabilized?" Rega's voice was quiet, yet it cut through the room like a shard of ice. He tapped a elegant finger against the thick glass. "The resonance feedback from the biomantic matrix is still showing fluctuations. Minor, yes, but they are imperfections. An energy loss of three percent is not stability, it is waste."
The scientist swallowed hard. "Your Majesty, the subject's inherent life-force… its natural 'will'… creates a certain amount of biological resistance. It is a chaotic variable we are working to… nullify."
Rega turned from the orb, a cold, dismissive smile touching his lips. It was a smile utterly devoid of warmth. "Nature's 'will' is a flaw. It is a chaotic, inefficient, sentimental variable in an equation that demands perfection. What we are creating here, what we are building from this raw, messy material," he gestured dismissively at the dryad, "will have no will but my own. It will not wither with the seasons or weep when a forest burns. It will be perfect."
He began to walk towards the exit, his indigo robes swirling around him. "Have you primed the core for the next transference?"
"Yes, Your Majesty," the scientist scrambled to answer. "It is prepared."
"Proceed," Rega commanded without looking back. "Do not fail me with percentages. I expect perfection. I will have my artificial god, and it will be flawless."
The heavy indigo of the king's robes had barely disappeared through the laboratory doors. The children breathed quietly in the dusty confines of the duct, the sterile, chemical scent of the lab clinging to their clothes like a shroud. The silence within the duct was thick and suffocating, filled with the unspoken horror of what they had not only just witnessed, but finally, terrifyingly, understood.
Leonotis, however, remained fixed on the grate, his eyes wide and unfocused, seeing not the grimy metal but the scene unfolding below. The image of the twisted dryad, suspended in that sickly green, life-siphoning glow, was seared into his mind. But it wasn't just the visual that held him captive in the cramped, dusty shaft. It was the feeling, a raw untamed agony that clawed at the edges of his awareness so profound it felt like his own. It was a discordant, screaming chord struck just beneath his skin. The dryad's pain wasn't a sound he heard with his ears, but a psychic scream that resonated directly with his green magic, a violent tearing at the very roots of his connection to the living earth. He felt the unnatural stillness of her magically bound form, the choked, sluggish flow of her life force, the desperate, silent plea for release echoing in the deepest parts of his being. He alone, it seemed, could hear this agonizing cry, a telepathic lament that bypassed the ears and struck directly at his soul.
He reached out a trembling hand, pressing his palm flat against the cold metal of the grate, as if he could somehow touch the suffering below, offer some small comfort.
"Leonotis?" Jacqueline's voice was a low murmur in the darkness, pulling him from the brink. "Are you alright? You look… haunted."
Low and Zombiel turned towards him, their own expressions of shock momentarily forgotten, replaced by a shared concern. The playful, fiery glint in Zombiel's eyes was gone, supplanted by a quiet, watchful intensity. Low's usual gruffness was softened by a palpable unease.
Leonotis blinked, dragging himself back from the abyss of the dryad's pain with a shuddering breath. "I… I can hear her," he whispered, his voice strained and hoarse.
Low frowned, her skepticism an almost audible snap in the tense air. "Hear who? The King? He's long gone. And that scientist didn't say a word after he left."
"No," Leonotis shook his head, his gaze returning irresistibly to the grate, to the faint green glow from the lab below. "The… the creature in the orb. The dryad."
A beat of heavy silence hung in the dusty confines of the ventilation shaft.
"Hear her how?" Low asked, her voice sharp with disbelief. "She didn't make a sound. You're sure you didn't just eat one of those weird mushrooms back in the woods?"
"It's not with my ears," Leonotis explained, his voice gaining a desperate, pleading conviction as he looked at them. "It's with… with my magic. It's a feeling. Her pain… it's like a wound in the earth itself, and it's… it's screaming. She's trapped, you guys. Tortured." The dryad's silent agony was a relentless, unbearable assault on his senses, a constant pressure he couldn't block out.
Jacqueline's brow furrowed, her scientific, logical mind struggling to reconcile the phenomenon with the principles of magic she understood. "That… that's highly improbable, Leonotis. For telepathic communication to occur, there must be active intent from the sender. That being… it appeared comatose, its higher brain functions likely suppressed by whatever processes they are subjecting it to. It cannot project a thought."
"It's not a thought! It's not words!" Leonotis insisted, his frustration mounting. He pressed a hand to his own chest. "It's life. Her life. It feels like a beautiful tree being ripped apart from the inside, root by root, but I'm feeling it right here. And it's being stifled, twisted into that… that thing the King wants. We have to help her."
The urgency of the dryad's silent cry was eclipsing everything else, burning away his fear of the king, the need to get to the Capital. The library, finding his guardians, getting Jacqueline a way south, it all seemed trivial, distant, in the face of this immediate ongoing suffering.
He looked at each of them in turn, his gaze unwavering, his eyes bright with a desperate fire. "We can't just leave her there. We heard him. We saw what he's doing. We can't be a part of that by doing nothing."
A new, heavy tension filled the cramped space, a shift from the stunned horror of passive observation to the stark, terrifying reality of a decision. The weight of the king's unimaginable cruelty was now compounded by the potential weight of their own inaction.
"You want to go against the King…" Low began, her voice heavy with the grim, practical implications of his words. "Leonotis, that was the King. Not some back-alley bounty hunter. You want to declare war on the whole kingdom because you want to be a hero?"
"This isn't just a feeling, and it's not a choice between us and the kingdom," Jacqueline countered softly, her initial scientific detachment giving way to a dawning sense of moral obligation. She was looking at Leonotis, seeing the genuine pain his empathy was causing him. "It's a choice between right and profoundly, fundamentally wrong. What he is doing… creating that thing by torturing a living soul… it's a magical abomination. It upsets the very balance of things."
Zombiel, who had been listening with an unnerving stillness, finally spoke. His voice, still holding a flat, resonant quality, was laced with the faint, fiery echo of the salamander spirit within him. "Njiru made me empty," he stated simply. "The King is making her… wrong." His gaze, usually distant, now held a flicker of fierce, protective fire. "We should not let him."
Leonotis felt a surge of profound relief, the dryad's silent plea resonating with a newfound, shared hope. "See? Zombiel gets it." He looked at Low, then Jacqueline, his voice low but firm. "We have to get her out. Whatever it takes. The Capital… it can wait. This… this can't."
"You're a lot of work, you know that?" Low said just loud enough for Leonotis to hear.
The air in the cramped duct solidified with their shared, unspoken agreement. The lab below was no longer just a scene of horror; it had become their new battlefield. Their whispered resolve was a quiet but defiant cry against the cold, sterile evil they had witnessed. Their descent into the Institute had begun as a detour, an investigation. Now, it had become a rescue. A rebellion. And now came the daunting task of execution.