The next day, the group gathered in one of the secret rooms beneath the guild.
The room had been prepared in a hurry but not carelessly. A proper bed had been brought in, fresh blankets laid out, water placed nearby, and the unconscious dryad settled as comfortably as possible considering the circumstances of how she had been found. Even asleep, she changed the atmosphere of the whole chamber. Her presence made the room feel less like a hidden guild basement and more like someone had quietly dragged a piece of some old sacred forest underground and left it there to confuse everyone.
The same six were present. Ludger. Viola. Luna. Eclaire. Jennifer. Rowan.
But this time, three more had joined them. Arslan. Yvar. And Aronia.
That last one had been unavoidable. If anyone in Lionsguard was going to understand what they were looking at beyond vague guesses and very bad ideas, it was the half-dryad healer who had already taught Ludger enough to recognize medicinal moss in the first place.
Aronia stepped into the room, looked toward the bed, and froze. For a second, she didn’t say anything at all. Then she looked at the dryad. Then at Ludger’s group. Then back at the dryad again. The sheer disbelief on her face was so complete that it almost became funny.
Almost.
Because she looked genuinely speechless, as if she had expected many things from Ludger’s group, recklessness, blood, political trouble, a monster core, maybe an ancient curse if the day was going badly enough, but not this.
Not a full dryad. Not one brought back with the same practical energy most people used when presenting a lost animal they had found in the rain.
She stared a little longer, then finally managed, “You brought back a dryad.”
No one answered immediately because there was really no version of events that made that sentence sound normal.
Aronia looked at Ludger, then at Viola, then at Luna, clearly trying to determine if anyone in the room understood just how absurd this was.
“You brought back a dryad,” she repeated, slower this time, as though saying it twice might somehow improve reality.
Viola folded her arms. “You say that like we planned it.”
Aronia’s eyes flicked toward her. “You make it look like you found a stray cat.”
Arslan, meanwhile, had moved closer to the bed, his expression much less theatrical and much more focused. His gaze shifted from the dryad to Ludger, then to the others, then back again. He was calm, but only in the way a man got calm when the amount of nonsense in front of him had gone so far past ordinary surprise that he had no choice except to treat it seriously or break furniture.
He crossed his arms and said, “You headed to a sealed labyrinth.”
His eyes rested on Ludger.
“So how, exactly, did you find a dryad there?”
That brought the room back into proper order. Questions first. Shock later. Ludger answered without trying to soften anything.
“She was inside the labyrinth guardian.”
That got a reaction from everyone, including the ones who had already heard parts of it on the way back. Aronia’s face changed first. Not confusion. Horror. Arslan’s eyes sharpened.
Yvar, who had been quietly taking in every detail in that scholar’s way of his, leaned in slightly without meaning to. Ludger continued.
“She was being used to expand the moss vegetation of the labyrinth,” he said. “The medicinal growth. The volume of it. The quality too.”
Aronia’s gaze went immediately to the dryad on the bed, then to the group, and then back to Ludger. “Used how?”
“As a source,” Ludger said. “Probably energy. Probably more than that.”
He kept his tone even.
“The guardian had her inside its chest. The moss throughout the labyrinth was too thick, too active, and too useful to be natural. You told me before that dryads can turn groves into rich forests. This looked like someone turned that into a production method.”
Aronia’s mouth tightened. She looked sick. Not physically. Spiritually. The kind of sickness that came from hearing something and recognizing at once that it made too much sense to dismiss.
Yvar spoke next, voice low and thoughtful. “So the labyrinth wasn’t just a sealed danger zone.”
“No,” Ludger said. “It was an extraction site.”
The words settled heavily.
Yvar’s gaze sharpened further at that, because unlike the others, he had the exact sort of mind that immediately started stacking implications into systems. Family control. Resource concealment. Hidden harvesting. Off-the-books production tied to underworld distribution or military supply. His face didn’t change much, but everyone in the room could almost hear him reorganizing the political meaning of the discovery in real time.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Arslan looked toward the unconscious dryad again. “And the guardian?”
Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“It was definitely from another world.”
That made Yvar blink once. Aronia frowned. Arslan stayed still, but his attention tightened. Ludger went on before anyone could interrupt. Ludger continued anyway.
“It had a deal with the family that guarded the place,” he said. “Or with the structure controlling the family. Either way, that wasn’t a random guardian left in a labyrinth. It was cooperating. It was being fed, and in return it helped maintain the resource production.”
Aronia let out a slow breath and looked at the sleeping dryad with a pained expression. “A tribute.”
“Yes,” Ludger said.
The word sat there like rot. Because once spoken aloud, it fit far too naturally. A dryad hidden inside a guardian. A noble family guarding the site. Medicinal moss harvested in quantity. A speaking creature from another world cooperating in exchange for whatever arrangement had been made.
A tribute. No one in the room liked that.
Viola, who had been letting the adults catch up for once, finally clicked her tongue and said, “There was also the part where the giant tree thing nearly flattened us and then got bigger after he pulled her out of its chest.”
Aronia turned sharply toward her. “He what?”
Viola pointed at Ludger with one thumb. “He punched through it and stole the dryad out of the middle.”
Luna corrected her without much emotion. “That is a very imprecise summary.”
“It’s accurate enough.”
Aronia, meanwhile, had moved closer to the bed. She stood over the unconscious dryad in silence for a few moments, really looking at her now. Not as a surprise. Not as an absurdity. As one of her own kind, or close enough to count in the ways that mattered.
When she finally spoke again, her voice was quieter.
“She’s exhausted,” Aronia said. “Drained. There’s stress in the life-force patterns, but not collapse. Whoever kept her in there was using her for a long time.”
That made the room colder. Not physically.
For a little while, the room settled into the kind of tense quiet that came after everyone understood the shape of the problem but not yet the solution.
The dryad still slept. The hidden room still smelled faintly of herbs, damp stone, and the remains of battle carried back on armor and clothing.
And the questions kept growing. Ludger was the one who finally asked the next one.
“Where do dryads live?”
Aronia looked up from the bed and frowned slightly, not at the question itself, but at how broad it was.
“Where they can, nowadays,” she said.
That answer carried more bitterness than explanation. She rested a hand lightly near the sleeping dryad’s wrist, checking her condition again before continuing.
“There isn’t one simple answer anymore. Some live in isolated forests. Some in old groves that survived long enough to matter. Some are hidden under protection, some in places nobody bothers to map properly because the land is inconvenient or dangerous.” Her eyes shifted briefly toward Ludger. “There is a large group north of the Velis League.”
Yvar immediately filed that away. He didn’t even try to hide it.
Aronia shook her head slightly. “But it would be better to ask this one when she wakes.”
Then her expression tightened.
“Still…” she said slowly, looking at the unconscious dryad again, “she looks fairly young. And considering what you told me…”
The room quieted further.
“There’s a chance,” Aronia said, more softly now, “that she’s been used for years and might not know where she came from.”
That landed badly. Not because it was dramatic. Because it was plausible.
The room seemed to turn colder again as the implication settled over everyone. Not just imprisonment. Not just exploitation. But long enough captivity that memory itself might have been stripped down, blurred, or never properly formed beyond the cage she had been kept in. Ludger let out a slow breath through his nose.
“That’s nasty work,” he said.
His voice stayed level, but everyone in the room could hear the edge under it.
“The kind the Empire has been doing behind the curtains.”
No one argued. Because whether the Empire itself had designed every part of this structure or whether men like Armandis had built it under the shelter of imperial power, the distinction mattered less and less the more they uncovered. The machine existed. It had been protected. It had been fed. And it had been allowed to keep running.
Viola folded her arms more tightly. “So now what? We hide her in the basement forever and hope no one notices the full dryad we somehow dragged home?”
“That won’t work,” Eclaire said immediately.
“No,” Ludger agreed.
His gaze stayed on the dryad for a second longer before shifting to the rest of them.
“We can’t keep a dryad around without creating rumors,” he said. “And those rumors will make the enemy realize who invaded the labyrinth.”
That was the problem stripped down cleanly. Not “might.” Would.
Arslan’s expression darkened. “So you’re saying time is the real resource now.”
“Yes.”
Yvar nodded once. “We need distance between the event and the conclusion. Enough noise elsewhere that a direct line becomes harder to draw.”
Ludger looked at him. “Right….”
Aronia turned from the bed, clearly not happy with any direction this conversation could take. “You can’t move her carelessly either. If she wakes in a strange place surrounded by strangers after…” Her eyes flicked to the dryad and then away. “After all that, she may panic. Or worse.”
“I know,” Ludger said.
Viola looked at him with immediate suspicion. “You sound like you already have an idea.”
“I do.”
That made Arslan’s eyes narrow.
“What idea?”
Ludger answered simply.
“I’ll keep the Empire busy to buy time.”
That sentence would have sounded ridiculous from most people. From Ludger, it sounded like a logistical note. Arslan, however, had the correct reaction. He looked worried. Not confused. Not impressed. Worried.
“How,” he asked, “are you going to do that?”
Ludger answered without hesitation.
“With money.”