The rain had not stopped for two days.
Gotham's streets stank of sewage and smoke, its cobblestones slick with filth. Jonathan pulled his collar high as he moved through the East End, Tate's riddle echoing in his mind where the first fire burned, the Owe was born.
Scrap skittered along the alleys ahead of him, moving quick and sure-footed despite the downpour. The boy's voice carried back through the mist.
"Yer not gonna like what I show ya, Mister Wayne. Best folk pretend it ain't there."
Jonathan's hand tightened on the lantern he carried. "I don't have the luxury of pretending."
They reached a boarded-up warehouse at the edge of the docks. Scrap squeezed through a gap in the planks and beckoned Jonathan inside.
Dust and mold greeted them, the air thick with rot. The boy pulled aside a stack of crates to reveal a trapdoor sunken into the floor.
"This," Scrap whispered, eyes darting nervously, "is where it starts."
Jonathan pried the trap open astaircase of rough-hewn stone descended into blackness. Cold air spilled upward like the breath of something ancient.
He lowered the lantern, and the light revealed walls scrawled with symbols half-erased, half-burned, yet still pulsing with menace.
The boy hesitated at the threshold. "They say folks who go down don't come back the Owe owns these paths."
Jonathan placed a hand on the boy's shoulder. "Stay close if i fall, you run but I won't fall."
They descended into Gotham's underbelly.
The tunnels stretched endlessly, a labyrinth carved beneath the city's bones. Water dripped in steady rhythms, echoing like a metronome.
Strange markings lined the walls, some gouged deep, others painted in crimson long faded. Jonathan paused, lantern raised, recognizing the curves from Tate's sketches.
When he traced them with his fingers, Scrap gasped. The grooves connected to form the same pattern Tate had shown him a map hidden across stone.
Jonathan squinted, piecing the fragments together. Every tunnel, every symbol, converged toward a single point.
"The Founders' Square," he murmured. "The city was built over it."
Scrap frowned. "The place with the big statue, the one they light lanterns at every year?"
"Yes," Jonathan said grimly. "But below it lies something older."
They pressed deeper the tunnels twisted and narrowed until the air grew thin.
Jonathan noticed the walls change brick giving way to blackened stone, scorched and cracked as though fire had once raged here centuries ago.
At the end of a passage, they came upon a sealed iron door, its surface scorched, a circle of ash still staining the ground before it.
Etched into the metal, worn but unmistakable, was the symbol he had seen again and again: a circle within a circle, the mark of the Owe.
Scrap clutched Jonathan's arm. "Don't touch it. Don't even look at it too long."
Jonathan's lantern flame guttered, as though the door itself had drawn its breath.
He stepped back, heart pounding Tate's riddle made sense now. Where the first fire burned, the Owe was born this was no ordinary chamber ,this was the womb of Gotham's curse.
Jonathan turned to Scrap. "We leave now but remember this place everything begins here."
As they climbed back into the storm above, Jonathan felt the weight of the map burning into his mind the Owe had hidden their truth in Gotham's foundations.
And if he meant to destroy them, he would have to tear the city's history open, brick by cursed brick.