The experimentation did not stop while he was unconscious.
He understood this when he came back to awareness in a different position, different readings visible on the boards. The apprentice wizards were still talking. The data was still accumulating. The process had continued without him.
Days passed in that rhythm.
Testing, and the threads arriving thin and steady, carrying just enough that the data kept refusing to fit. Rest, and the threads marginally clearer in the quiet hours. Another set of readings, another round of professional frustration. The logs were getting long, he could tell from the way the apprentice wizards were referencing earlier sessions by shorthand, the shorthand of people who had been in the same conversation long enough to need abbreviations.
Through the mana barriers, faint but present, the theology group was there. Not straining. Not pushing. Just the steady warmth of goblins who believed he would be alright, the same way they had believed in a clay figure for years without asking anything back from it. It cost them nothing. It was simply what they did.
He could not feel them clearly. He could feel that they were there. That was enough.
By the time the examination formally concluded, he knew several things he had not known before. The shape of Nestor's theory and exactly where it was wrong. How long the program had been running. What it had produced. The researchers were better than he had initially estimated, thorough and precise within the limits of what their instruments could reach. Those limits were significant. They simply did not know it.
He remember it all. Every piece. The data and the frustration and the conversations conducted in front of him as though he were furniture.
And underneath all of it, one conclusion he could not argue his way around: they were outmatched. Not in will, not in belief, not in what the Foundry was capable of becoming. But in organization, in power, in resources, in every practical measure that determined who controlled a situation and who didn't. Nestor had a facility, a staff, years of data, and the kind of authority that did not need to raise its voice. Matthew had forty-one goblins, a system he was still learning, and information he had collected while sedated on an examination table.
It was not enough. Not yet.
But the moment he was back with the group, that was going to change. He did not have a plan yet. He had the pieces of one, and he had the certainty that the first thing he needed to do was build something the pieces could fit into.
They needed to get out. And he was going to figure out how.
...
Nestor received the communication through Charon.
He was still reviewing the final examination data when Charon appeared at the door with the specific expression of someone who had already decided this could not wait.
"Priority transmission, sir. Through the facility communications array."
Nestor looked up. On his desk, the interplanar communications receiver had already been plugged into the array port, its projection ring lit and waiting. He reached over and activated it. A translucent figure formed above the unit, edges blurry with distance, the signal doing what signals did this far out from the core planes.
The voice on the other end was already mid-sentence when it connected, cutting in and out the way frontier transmissions always did, words dropping and returning a beat late.
"...Iron Blood Sect. Transit operation, standard corridor between..." Static. "...pulled off route. Anomaly. No warning before..." Static. "...unmapped plane. We don't know how long..."
"Slow down," Nestor said.
A pause. The signal stabilized slightly. "Apologies, Senior Nes. The Iron Blood Sect was conducting a routine transit between mapped planes. Standard corridor, established route. Somewhere in the crossing the corridor pulled them off course. An anomaly. They had no warning before they were inside it."
"Inside what."
"An unmapped plane, sir. No prior record. No classification. They came out the other side with..." The signal dropped for two full seconds. "...significant casualties. Whatever is in that plane, most of the sect didn't make it back through the exit point."
Nestor said nothing.
"Something followed them out," the voice continued. "Before the exit point could be closed. It had already taken several of them when Patriarch Iron arrived."
"The Patriarch was present."
"Yes, sir. Sixth level. Body practitioner." A beat. "He killed it. But it took his second in command before he reached it. His second in command is Fifth level, sir. That's the level we're talking about."
Charon had gone very still in the doorway.
"Environmental details," Nestor said.
"That's... yes. That's the part I was told to relay specifically." Papers shuffling through static. "High mana concentration. Outside established tier classifications by a significant margin. Flora and fauna consistent with extinction records, species that have no business being present in any living plane. And the entities..." A pause that felt less like signal interference and more like the speaker choosing words carefully. "They don't map to anything in existing taxonomy. Nothing we have on file."
The transmission cut out entirely for a moment.
When it returned: "The upper echelon has been notified. Investigators are being dispatched. The Patriarch's report is being treated as priority incident. We're required to cross-reference all prior unmapped plane incidents in the archives as part of the inquiry. That's standard procedure for..."
"I understand the procedure," Nestor said.
He handed the receiver back to Charon.
Charon took it carefully. "Should I..."
"No," Nestor said.
He looked at the examination data on the table. Matthew's results, still sitting outside every standard range. Three years of documented anomalies, still without a satisfying explanation. The question he had carried out of the unmapped plane alone, five years ago, still open.
The investigators were going to pull the archives. They were going to find his expedition report sitting in the same language as the Iron Blood Sect's, the same mana readings, the same extinction-record fauna, the same entities that did not map to anything on file. The overlap was not subtle. It was the kind that generated formal inquiries, and formal inquiries from the upper echelon were not requests.
He had more data than when he started. He had fewer satisfying conclusions. And the time he had assumed he still had was no longer a safe assumption.
Charon hovered near the door. "Sir, if the investigators reach out to the facility..."
"They will," Nestor said. "That is not the question."
He looked at the examination data one more time.
Then he picked up his notation and began writing.
...
In the theology chamber, nobody was sleeping.
That was the first thing that was wrong. The goblins slept when the light adjusted, the way they always had, the rhythm of it built into them over years of the same ceiling doing the same thing at the same time. But the light had adjusted hours ago and the sleeping areas were full of goblins who were lying down without being asleep, the specific stillness of creatures pretending at rest because rest was the only thing left available to them.
Grak was not pretending.
Grak sat at the edge of the central clearing, back straight, watching the endless wild beyond the invisible boundary where Matthew had disappeared.
Pip sat nearby, which meant Pip had not been asleep either, only appearing to be, which was something Pip had gotten very good at over the years.
"He will come back," Pip said.
Grak said nothing.
"The clay broke for a reason," Pip continued, with the patient certainty of someone who had decided this a long time ago and saw no new information that required revisiting it. "It does not break for nothing."
"The others did not come back," said a goblin near the wall. Small, younger-looking than most. Her name was Wren and she had a habit of saying the things the others were thinking but had agreed not to say out loud.
The room went quiet in the specific way it went quiet when something true and unwelcome had been introduced into a conversation.
"He is not the others," Grak said. Flat. Final.
Wren pulled her knees to her chest and said nothing further.
Niblet was the only one moving. She was sitting near the base of the empty space where the clay figure had stood, cross-legged, hands pressed flat against the ground, her large eyes open and focused on something nobody else appeared to be looking at. She had been sitting that way since they took Matthew. She had not eaten anything, which was unusual enough that three different goblins had offered her food and received no response.
"Niblet," said a goblin beside her.
"He can feel us," Niblet said. "And we can feel him."
The goblin who had spoken looked at her blankly. "How."
Niblet considered this for a moment, the way she considered most things, with total attention that moved on completely once it was satisfied. "You know the way you always know where everyone is without looking?" She gestured vaguely at the room. "That. But it goes further now. Since Matu came. It is the same thing but it reaches."
The goblin was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully: "I thought that was just us knowing each other."
"It was," Niblet said. "Now it is more."
Nobody had a response to that. But something shifted in the room, the way air shifts when a window opens somewhere, the collective attention of the goblins turning inward, testing something they had never thought to test before. Feeling for the shape of what Niblet was describing.
It was there.
Not one thread. Many. Thin and close, running between all of them, the same warmth they had always felt in the ritual, the same pull of the group toward itself. They followed those first, because they were familiar, because they were right there, because the distance between one goblin and another was something they already knew how to cross.
And then, at the edges of all of it, something else. Thin with distance, catching and losing coherence the way a voice catches in wind, but present. The faint warmth of something that extended past the endless wild, into somewhere they could not see.
That was the one they chose.
Grak felt it without moving. Without changing expression.
Then Grak closed its eyes and pushed everything it had in that direction.
One by one, without anyone deciding to, the others did the same. Not pressing hands to earth. Not kneeling. Just going still, each of them finding the thread and holding it, the particular stillness of creatures doing the only thing they had available and doing it with everything they had.
...
The thread from the theology chamber had been thin for days.
Matthew had felt it the way you feel a sound at the edge of hearing, present but unreliable, catching and losing coherence through the layers of suppression between them. During the examination sessions it had been background, something he reached for in the gaps between readings and found still there. During the sedated hours it had been the only thing that stayed consistent, faint and steady, warm in a way that the examination room was not.
It had gotten stronger in the last few hours.
Not dramatically. But enough that he noticed it clearly, the signal arriving with more coherence than the suppression should have allowed. He had not done anything to cause it.
The door opened.
Two apprentice wizards. Not the examination pair. Different ones, the rotation having shifted at some point while he was unconscious. They did not speak to him. They moved with the efficiency of people completing a task at the end of a long shift, unhurried but purposeful.
The sedation was still present, heavier than he would have liked. His body was not cooperating at all. He noted this and did not let it show on his face.
One of the apprentice wizards cast without preamble, a low, practical working, and Matthew felt the energy close around him the way water closes around something dropped into it. Not painful. Not uncomfortable. Just the complete removal of any say in where his body was going. He was carried through the corridor at a steady pace, upright enough to see where they were taking him, which he suspected was not a courtesy so much as a side effect of the spell's design.
He catalogued what he could on the way. The facility felt different at this hour, quieter, the researchers largely absent from the hallways, the hum of the mana arrays present but unmanned. He passed the observation panel beside Snagtooth's room and caught a glimpse through it without turning his head. The beast from before was gone. Snagtooth was sitting in the corner, still, in the specific way of someone who had learned that stillness attracted less attention than movement.
Their eyes did not meet. He kept moving.
The invisible wall appeared ahead.
He felt the thread strengthen the moment they crossed the boundary, the suppression releasing its hold on the signal, the theology group arriving in his awareness with a clarity he had not had access to in days. He did not react to it. He kept his face arranged into the same neutral expression it had been in since the examination room.
But he felt it.
All of them. Grak's coiled alertness, wound tighter than usual. Pip's particular quality of patient waiting. Niblet, bright and immediate, her attention already oriented toward him before he was through the door, the way a plant orients toward light before the light has fully arrived.
The mana barrier to the theology chamber opened.
The apprentice wizards did not follow him in. One of them released the energy working from the threshold, and Matthew dropped to the ground and stayed there. The center of the clearing. Close enough. The mana barrier closed behind him.
The goblins did not rush him. They were not the same creatures who had climbed on his back and poked him at irregular intervals on his first day. Something had shifted in the days he had been gone, a collective settling, the way a group settles when it has been frightened and has decided what to do with the fear.
Grak stood at the front of them.
They looked at each other for a moment.
"You came back," Grak said.
"I came back," Matthew said.
Niblet was already at his side, She pressed two fingers into his forearm.
He let her.
"Still real," he said.
She nodded, satisfied, and sat down beside him.
Around him, Thirty-one goblins looked at him in silence. Not the silence of creatures with nowhere to go. Not the exhausted quiet of the Census. Something had changed while he was gone, in the thread, in the room, in the way they were holding themselves. They had felt something through the connection and they had sat with it for days and now he was back and they were all, every single one of them, waiting.
Not for reassurance.
For what came next.
Matthew looked at their faces.
Then he sat down