When John returned to the academy, Waka was still awake.

It was always still awake somewhere. A lamp burned in one tower. A group of students crossed a bridge whispering over a forbidden bottle. From the lower kitchens came the smell of onion, yeast, and someone burning something with confidence. The vines along the walls shifted in the night wind, brushing stone with the dry sound of paper being turned.

John entered through the side gate and walked without hurry.

His body had calmed. His thoughts had not.

At the inn, Magnolia's room was empty.

That, strangely, did not surprise him.

He found her in one of the lower reading chambers, a room intended for ordinary students and therefore ignored by serious scholars. She had taken possession of a long table near the back. Books lay open around her in uneven stacks. Three candles burned low. Her hair had come loose from its tie and fell over one shoulder in a red spill. There was ink on one of her fingers and a look on her face John recognised at once.

She had found something.

"You are alive," she said without looking up.

"I try to maintain the habit."

"Did thinking alone solve the problem?"

He stopped beside the table. "No. But it made the problem less polite."

That drew her eyes up.

For a moment he thought she might ask what he meant. Instead, she smiled, quick and bright in a way that made the room seem warmer.

"Good. Then sit. I found another record."

John did not sit immediately. "Another vortex text?"

"Not exactly. That is the strange part." She turned one of the books toward him. "It was misfiled in the ordinary library. Not even under currents, ancient sea rites, Forbidden Isles, or failed expeditions. It was buried in botanical journals."

"Naturally. When one seeks blood sacrifice, always begin with flowers."

"That was my thought as well. Less sarcastically."

He sat then, though slowly.

The volume before him was narrow, bound in green cloth faded nearly grey. Pressed petals had been tucked between several pages, their colours long gone. The handwriting at the beginning was small, rounded, and full of notes in the margins. Names of flowers. Soil descriptions. Weather patterns. Observations on how plants bent toward or away from old magic.

Magnolia tapped the first page.

"Cycle Two. The author identifies himself as Moriarty. Florist by trade. Researcher by obsession, it seems."

John read the name aloud. "Moriarty, florist."

"Yes."

"That is either a harmless man or a very dangerous one."

"At first, harmless. His early entries are almost sweet. He writes about flower types near roads, ruins, grave markers, old altars. He believed flowers recorded the history of mana better than stone did."

John turned a page. The early notes were careful, even tender. One passage described pale reed blossoms that opened only after rain. Another compared two red flowers growing on opposite sides of a shrine and wondered whether devotion changed soil.

"He sounds lonely," John said.

Magnolia leaned closer. "He sounds curious."

"Those are neighbours."

She ignored that and flipped several pages ahead.

"He became interested in Reaper influence on plant growth. Not corruption in the broad sense. Specific effects. Wilting without rot. Blooming out of season. Petals darkening near places where Reaper pressure had passed. He travelled to several sites. Most were minor. Then he visited Reaper Lance Altar."

John's expression shifted.

The mountain returned to him for a moment. The road they had refused. The pilgrims. The ash on brows. The holy place they had walked away from because John had thought the better story lay elsewhere.

Magnolia pointed to a passage.

"Here. He writes about the flowers near the altar. Then nothing."

The next pages were blank.

One. Two. Five.

John turned them carefully.

"How long?"

"A little over two weeks, judging by the dates."

"Perhaps he rested."

"Read the next entry."

He did.

The handwriting changed.

Not gradually. Not with fatigue. It changed as if another hand had entered the body and kept the old name for convenience. The rounded letters became hard. Lines struck across the page at sharper angles. The margins, once crowded with gentle notes, now contained brief calculations and repeated phrases.

Currents obey fear.

Blood feeds pressure.

The sea remembers blasphemy.

John sat back.

"That is a poor recovery."

"He no longer mentions flowers except as markers for old mana disturbances. He abandons the Reaper influence study almost entirely. From that point on, he writes only about reaching the Forbidden Isles."

"After visiting Reaper Lance Altar."

"Yes."

Magnolia's excitement was difficult to miss. It was controlled, but it gave colour to her face. She had been pale that morning. Now her eyes were alive.

John noticed and felt something in himself tighten.

"You enjoy this," he said.

"I enjoy finding a path through nonsense."

"This particular nonsense involves a florist becoming a different man and writing about blood pressure in the sea."

"That is why it is useful."

He looked at her. "You have a gift for making unsettling things sound like clerical errors."

"And you have a gift for being theatrical once frightened."

"I liked us better when I was the unserious one."

That softened her. A little.

She pushed another page toward him. "Listen. Moriarty found at least three references to the vortex older than Constantine. Much older. He believed Constantine did not create it. Constantine only sealed, shaped, or redirected what was already there."

John read the passage. The words were harsh, but the idea was clear. The vortex was not a spell in the normal sense. It was a wound in the sea, old enough that later scholars had mistaken its behaviour for design.

"Ancient," Magnolia said. "Chaotic. Not a gate built by law, but something that had to be appeased because it could not be reasoned with."

"That is comforting."

"It is clear."

"Worse."

She turned another page. "He also repeats the blood requirement. Not exactly the same wording, but close enough. One hundred barrels. Human. Not animal. Not symbolic, at least not in his view."

John's mouth tightened.

"Then why are you excited?"

"Because he adds something."

Magnolia found the line and read it aloud.

"Only a force born of blasphemy may still the hunger long enough for passage. Blood is the common tool. It is not necessarily the only one."

The room quieted.

Outside the chamber, footsteps passed and faded.

John took the book from her. He read the line twice. Then the lines before it. Then the lines after it.

"Blasphemy," he said.

"Yes."

"That is a wonderfully useless word."

"Not useless. Broad."

"The favourite category of people who want permission."

Magnolia smiled despite herself. "You sound like a priest."

"I have had a difficult evening."

She leaned back, pleased in spite of the subject. "Moriarty believed the vortex responded to acts or forces that offended the natural order. Human blood was simply the clearest example. Perhaps because it carries identity, memory, mana, ancestry. Perhaps because death concentrates meaning. He was not a poet, after the change, but he understood function."

"He started sounding closer to you."

Magnolia's eyes narrowed.

John raised both hands. "Brutal efficiency. Practical. Unromantic. Mildly terrifying."

"Continue and I will assign you footnotes."

"There she is."

For one brief moment, they were nearly themselves again.

The warmth did not last.

John lowered his hands and looked back at the journal. "What happened to him?"

"Unknown. The entries end before any expedition."

"Convenient."

"Common."

"Those are not the same."

"No," Magnolia said. "But old journals rarely offer polite conclusions."

She gathered several loose copies she had made. "I spoke to two professors. One knew Moriarty only as a botanical eccentric. Another said his later work was dismissed because it was found in the wrong archive and because no one wanted to associate flower studies with forbidden passage rites. Beheehee may know more, but I have not asked him yet."

"Why not?"

"Because he will want the same thing I want."

"To pass the wall."

"To prove passage is possible."

"Again, those become the same thing with you."

She looked at him then. Not angry. Not yet.

"And what do you want?"

John had thought about that during the walk back. He had thought of Ron and Lily on the barn roof, of mana butterflies rising into the night, of Wakaku's face when the cursed Slimus moved wrong on the ground.

He had thought of Magnolia leaning toward him, and of his own gaze falling past her to the page.

"I want to know when curiosity becomes appetite," he said.

Magnolia did not answer.

The candles between them bent in a small draft. Shadows moved across the tables, over books that had no concern for the hands that opened them.

John closed Moriarty's journal with care.

The sound was soft.

It still felt final.

Next Episode, Next Monday!