Enanita hauls herself over the final icy lip of the chimney. Below, the Magistrate’s stronghold rises from the snow, black towers bristling with lanterns and spears.

Wind tears over the ledge as Enanita crouches behind the iron grate. A small service stair runs along the cliff face to a blind arch under the outer wall, half hidden by drifting snow.

A guard patrol turns on the battlements. Lantern light sweeps close, then passes on. The path is open for a breath, just long enough to move.

Behind her, the Inquisitor grips the ledger case, and Meren steadies against the gale. Ahead, the stair waits under the wall, the shortest road to the Magistrate’s lies.

Enanita moves on the breath between lantern sweeps, flattening to the wall as snow skims past her boots.

She slips under the blind arch, where the stone swallows the wind and the stair narrows into shadow.

A thin stripe of frost lines the threshold, and a rubbed patch of stone marks how often this hidden way is used.

Below the arch, a narrow landing opens just enough for one person to stand, and a dark slot in the masonry suggests the stair climbs farther in.

From somewhere above, a boot scrapes stone, and a lantern glow begins to slide back toward the stair entrance.

The lantern light flares, casting a long, jagged shadow of a guard against the stairwell wall as he pauses to peer into the dark slot.

Enanita holds as still as stone. The lantern climbs the wall, then drifts past her hidden niche without finding her breath.

Above, the guard leans farther into the stairwell, scanning the dark slot and finding only frost, soot, and old mortar.

A second shadow crosses the stair opening, not a guard, but a hanging chain swaying in the wind, and the light breaks into strips.

In that broken glare, Enanita catches the edge of a carved mark on the inner stone, a narrow servant's sigil half-hidden under frost.

The guard's lantern turns away at last, and the stairwell falls back into shadow, but now the hidden mark waits in clear memory, just below the next step.

Enanita leaves the niche and drifts up to the first worn step, her boots finding the shallowest edges of the stone.

The servant's sigil sits at knee height now, scuffed but clear, and a ribbon of wind threads cold through the stair.

Above them, the lantern glow fades behind the turn, and the stair mouth remains empty.

Enanita reaches the landing beneath the sigil, close enough to touch the iron seam in the wall.

Enanita sets the dagger aside and fits her fingers into the iron seam. The metal gives with a muted click, then slides inward on a hidden track.

Cold air breathes out of the wall. Behind the panel, a narrow service passage opens, dark and steep, with old footprints pressed into dust.

A thin strip of snow slips over Enanita's boot and vanishes into the passage. Far above, iron creaks somewhere inside the stronghold.

Enanita slips through the seam without a scrape, her boots finding the hidden tread inside.

The passage swallows her in stale cold, and the wall settles behind her with a soft iron hush.

Snow drifts across the opening outside, then thins as the dark corridor slopes upward toward a faint seam of light.

Dust lifts around Enanita's ankles, and far above, a chain gives a quiet, uneasy rattle inside the stronghold.

Enanita reaches the end of the narrow service corridor, where the wall terminates in a heavy, rusted grate overlooking a vast, vertical ventilation shaft.

Beyond the iron bars, a series of ancient, hand-carved stone handholds spiral deep into the mountain, bypassing the main gatehouse entirely.

Enanita hooks a boot into the first stone handhold and lowers herself through the grate’s shadow. The blue glow below washes over her gloves as she lets the shaft take her weight.

Rusted air scrapes her lungs. She shifts her grip, slides down a beat at a time, and the shaft walls swallow the last of the corridor light above.

A hidden ledge catches under her fingertips. She pauses there, balanced above the dark, and spots a narrow service niche cut into the wall beside her.

Inside the niche rests a wax-sealed packet, wedged behind dust and old lint. The seal bears the Magistrate’s mark, cracked but intact.

Below, a faint clatter drifts up from somewhere deeper in the mountain, followed by the slow pulse of that blue light. Enanita stays still, listening.