The damp air beneath the terrace flags smelled of saltpetre and stagnant slime. Without her spark, her marrow felt hollowed, stripped bare like an unstrung viol. “Right,” she muttered, pushing off the column, a new resolve hardening her slouch. “The Hollowing Ward. Janko, you said it was under the greenhouses?” Janko, surprisingly subdued after Liska’s meltdown, nodded, his usual frantic energy replaced by a nervous fidgeting. “Precisely! Below the fungal nurseries! That’s where they grow the, uh, *batteries*.” He mimed an explosion with his hands, then quickly dropped them, glancing around as if expecting to be overheard by the very air. “Lead the way,” Yulva said, the words feeling foreign on her tongue. It was a command, not a plea for a quiet corner. She actually *cared*. The unfamiliar urge scratched at her temples, grating and unwelcome, but she forced her boots forward. The descent was through a labyrinth of service tunnels, reeking of damp earth and an acrid, metallic tang Yulva couldn't place. Bioluminescent fungi, fat and pulsating with dim azure light, clung to the sweating stone walls, casting grotesque shadows that danced with their every tremor. The air grew heavier, thick with a low, thrumming vibration that resonated deep within her chest, a dull, insistent ache. Janko, for once, kept his theories to a murmur, pointing out rusted pipes and half-collapsed archways with a conspiratorial zeal. “This way, this way!” he hissed, pulling aside a heavy, fungus-encrusted tarp that veiled a narrow opening. “The old maintenance passage. Goes straight to the Subterranean Processing Sector.” The passage opened into a vast, cavernous space, its ceiling lost in perpetual gloom. The air here was alive with a soft, melancholic hum, a dozen overlapping low-frequency drones that seemed to vibrate directly in one’s teeth. The source of the light, and the sound, soon became terrifyingly clear. Row upon row of massive, cylindrical vats, each roughly twice Yulva’s height, stood like silent sentinels across the chamber. They were filled with a viscous, phosphorescent fluid, the same murky green as the sap from her exploded tuning-sphere, though here it pulsed with a far more sinister luster. Inside each vat, suspended by translucent tendrils that snaked from their temples and wrists, drifted human figures. Dozens of them. Young men and women, slack-jawed and glassy, bobbed in the clouded brine. Their mouths were slightly agape, and from each, the soft, ceaseless hum emanated, joining the chorus of the chamber. Their forms were preserved, but their essence was gone. Hollowed. Lobotomized. Acoustic batteries for the city’s grid. A gasp tore from Yulva’s throat, raw and involuntary. The exhaustion that had been her constant companion for so long suddenly felt utterly trivial. This was not merely the loss of a spark; this was the loss of everything. Damp air seized in her throat. The old rumors from the dormitory corridors—cadets who vanished overnight, bunks stripped before dawn—coagulated into cold glass and steel. “They… they just hum,” Janko whispered, his voice thin, losing its usual bravado. Even he seemed momentarily stunned by the sheer, industrial scale of the atrocity. “Endlessly. It’s the purest, most stable frequency. They call it the ‘Vrostian Drone.’ Powers the whole Lower District.” Yulva took a step forward, then another, drawn by a morbid fascination. The students looked so young, some barely older than herself. Their blank eyes stared through the jade liquid, seeing nothing. She felt a burning in her chest, a heat that had nothing to do with magic, and everything to do with a sudden, searing fury she hadn't known she possessed. As Yulva moved closer to inspect one of the vats, Janko stumbled on a loose piece of rock, a theatrical yelp escaping his lips. His satchel, a worn leather affair crammed with notebooks and arcane tools, swung wildly, its flap coming undone. A thick, dog-eared journal, bound in faded crimson leather, tumbled out and landed with a soft *thud* near Yulva's feet. It lay open to a page filled with Janko’s notoriously messy scrawl, a chaotic diagram of concentric circles and intersecting lines. She leaned down to pick it up, her gaze idly falling upon the open page. Her throat locked. Amidst the frantic scribbles and arrows, she saw it: an intricate schematic, a web of ink-drawn, almost *living* lines crisscrossing the parchment like a dissected frequency modulator. But it wasn't the technical drawing itself that froze her. It was the *font*. The glyphs, the characters Janko had used to label the various nodes and conduits within the diagram, were stark, angular, and imbued with an impossible, almost kinetic energy. They pulsed with a faint, phantom glow on the page, a trick of the dim light or her own strained vision. But the design, the precise, aggressive *styling* of the letters, was unmistakable. It was the same bizarre script that had hovered over Liska's forehead in the amphitheater, the angry crimson characters that had fractured into embers when her magic had failed. The same precise, unnerving, *jagged* font. An impossible coincidence. The thought slammed into her, a cold, hard stone in her gut. She had dismissed it then, attributing it to fatigue, to her own unraveling focus. But to see it here, in Janko’s private notebook, detailed with such precision… “Janko,” she began, her voice tight, a sudden, chilling suspicion eclipsing the horror of the vats. Her mind raced, connecting disparate, ignored threads. His absurd theories. His inexplicable knowledge. The way he always seemed to be *there*. Before she could turn, before she could even fully articulate the question forming on her lips, a hand shot out from the closest vat. It was pale, impossibly cold, and surprisingly strong. It clamped around Yulva’s wrist, startling her with its sudden, lifeless grip. The Hollowed student, a girl with limp, sodden hair, slowly, agonizingly, opened her eyes. They were no longer vacant. They burned an unnatural, phosphor blue, filled with sharp intelligence. And the voice that emerged from her throat was not her own. It was Liska’s, clear and chillingly distinct, echoing in the humming chamber. “He is watching you.”

Descent into the Hollowing Ward