The servant passage did not appear on the academy map.
That was the first reason I trusted it.
The second reason was worse.
The walls were too low for noble posture.
Every corridor in Astral Zenith had been designed to make bloodlines look taller than they were. Vaulted ceilings. White stone. Gold-veined arches. Bridges open to clouds so heirs could imagine themselves closer to heaven than the people sweeping their floors.
This passage had none of that.
It crouched beneath the academy like a guilty thought. Pipes sweated through the ceiling. Old dust clung to the stone. Thin blue safety crystals hung in wire cages, dim enough that shadows survived between them. Boot marks overlapped in layers too ordinary for glory: servants, porters, laundresses, maintenance staff, kitchen boys, healers who came through when official stairways were too slow.
A route the game had never cared to draw.
