The corridors twisted in on themselves, arching, narrowing, and widening without sense or rhythm.
There was the general sense of a spiral, but it had been modified, carved out, and patched until all cohesion was lost.
Only someone already familiar with the place could have made sense of it.
Each passageway looked like the last one too.
Sonder thought she had to move fast, and time was slipping. She didn't know how long the court session would last, but luckily, the farther she went, the fewer voices and footsteps she heard.
She came to a junction and paused.
She put her hands on the ground and asked the sand, "Can you help me? Can you show me something hidden? A door, a room, anything out of the ordinary?"
The grains stirred, curious. Some rose from the cracks in the floor; others bled from the edges of the wall, drawn by her mana like filings to a magnet. She felt their shifting against her skin.
But their language wasn't hers, and neither was theirs hers.
She pushed the image into her mind: a hidden room, a secret place, something beneath or behind. The sand shivered. A few threads crawled outward along the wall like blind fingers searching but then faltered, unsure.
It didn't understand.
She couldn't force the sand to understand her thoughts.
It could feel weight, movement, and air, but not meaning. If she wanted to find anything, she'd have to do it herself.
So she kept moving.
Corridor after corridor: alcoves and stairs. She followed up on anything that seemed even slightly strange or unusual: subtle shifts of draft and sound, the faintest hint of air movement.
Her steps grew slower, quieter. She was no detective.
She went down a long, torchlit hall.
There, a few tapestries hung from ceiling to floor in deep reds. The threads shimmered like they were wet.
It bore the same crest as the one above the entrance of the seat of Hoar.
But there was something strange: the way the sand moved near the bottom of one of the tapestries.
The grains were restless. They drifted closer of their own accord, skittering toward the bottom of the hanging fabric.
Sonder stepped closer.
She pressed her fingers to the edge of the tapestry and lifted it slightly. Behind was a wall… but not like the rest. The surface was smooth and cut, not grown like the spiral stone around it. And near the seam where the wall met the floor, she saw it: a faint outline.
A door.