The space on the other side of the door was almost like stepping into another world. In fact, it was enough like that for Sophia to pause at the edge and check to be certain that she wasn't stepping through a portal.

She wasn't. There was no sign of magic across the interface between the stark industrial space they were leaving and the open air they were entering. In fact, she could smell the plants and earth beyond before she stepped through the doorway. That was enough to make her move forward behind Sweetfire, who had already stepped forward confidently and was waiting for them to follow him.

The space beyond the door was filled with plants. Sophia could immediately see peaches, apples, peppers, mint, sunflowers, roses, blue iris, and a number of other flowers she couldn't immediately identify. Everything looked rich and healthy, either in bloom or fruiting. A path led to a rune-covered door that looked like it was set into a fence or maybe a hillside, but other than that and a few other pathways, the only signs of human presence were how well-tended everything looked.

That was the first thing that was odd; Sophia was pretty sure that all of these plants shouldn't be so perfect all at the same time. The second oddity was the time of day. She could see a moon in the sky between the trees and the fireflies that flickered in the distance. It was dark, but not too dark, closer to twilight. "Wait. Wasn't it morning when the Mazestorm hit? How is it dark out?"

"It isn't," Sweetfire answered heavily. "That's part of the problem. The moonlight's right, the time of day isn't."

He looked backwards, clearly checking that everyone was through the doorway. "And now that we're all here, I can answer questions. The door we just came through is the Parents' door. It's the reason I couldn't tell you anything before you were in here and also one of the reasons I'm sponsoring you with the Arena. If you know too much, you can't enter the Parents' door; you have to be escorted by someone with authority over you the first time you enter."

Sophia shook her head. That made no sense; there wasn't an easy way to determine who "had authority over" another person, at least not the sort of simplistic authority Sweetfire seemed to be implying. On top of that, no well-designed security system would add someone to the list of people able to authorize newcomers simply because they were escorted through a doorway by someone who was authorized.

She turned to look back at the entrance; while it was clear there was a locking feature of some sort on the door, she couldn't see it from this side with the door open. That probably also meant that it wasn't exactly meant to be secure. It made her curious what the real limitation was, but it probably wasn't worth the time and effort to figure it out right now. Sweetfire hadn't stopped talking.

"This is the Garden; it's where most of the food for Mazehold grows, other than the meat. I'm sure you all know about the Butcheries; the Garden is their counterpart and the reason we Professionals can contribute food. The surface is far too dangerous for us to harvest." Sweetfire glanced around the group, then smiled. "You probably haven't met any of the harvesting specialists. They don't spend much time on the surface, since they can come down here for all the wide open space they want. We might meet a few of them while we're here, but they're likely to be back in the deeper Garden, where the magic is stronger. Moonlight matters for harvesting, I'm told."

Sophia frowned at that. The entire Garden arrangement seemed wrong, somehow, but she knew that it wasn't completely unlike the other places she'd been. Old Kestii traded for most of their flour, which made a lot more sense when she knew that old Arryn could store the flour in his home/warehouse and bring it out as needed rather than having to carry it with him.

Casterville had fields, but a lot of what it grew came from Greenhouses like the one where they fought the corpsevines. The Skylands had hunters and a generally higher Tier of inhabitant, but Izel still pulled a lot of its produce out of its Challenges, like the apples she could still remember dodging. None of those were the planned fields she expected back home.

The Garden ought to be more like a planned field, but it wasn't. In fact, a lot of the plants looked hard to reach without stepping on other plants, even the ones that were clearly edible. She didn't know why you'd mix ornamental flowers with fruit trees and pepper plants, either; wasn't it normal to grow one thing with others like itself, to make harvesting easier? "Why is it laid out like this, then? Wouldn't it be better if the plants were all along the paths?"

Sweetfire shook his head. "The Garden is an ancient Kestii artifact. Everything that grows here is slightly magical; nothing planted by our hands will grow, not even taken from the seed of a Garden plant. The deeper Garden is more magical; that is where you find the true wonders, not simply food to eat but all the other things that we need. Many of the tempers required for what I make come from the plants of the Garden, magic refined by the hand of ancient Kestii to something far more valuable."

Sophia slowly blinked at Sweetfire. What the heck was he talking about? Mana-infused stuff was good for making things, but it didn't require the kind of work he was talking about. All you had to do was enter a dungeon and retrieve it. People did that all the time at home; she'd even done it here, in Izel's Challenges. Oh, she hadn't pulled that much out, but it was a large part of how they made their way in this strange world. She knew there were other ways to get things, too; the magical geodes that started the problem back in Casterville were shipped in as basically magical fertilizer for the plants.

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On second thought, maybe the magical fertilizer thing was closer to what he was talking about. Casterville was a low-magic region without any stable Challenges and few unstable ones; in fact, the only Challenge Sophia could remember from that entire area was the corpsevine Challenge. If they wanted magical plants to turn into "alchemicals," maybe they needed the magic fertilizer. Was it the same here? "Don't you have Challenges?"

Sweetfire shook his head. "We have the Maze and we have Hollows. Challenges don't appear near the Maze, and the surface is too dangerous for Professionals without a Called escort. If we want supplies, we have to get them here, in the Garden. Called bring back enough metal and whatnot from the Maze, but the small specialty things? We have to gather that."

"That's great," Dav interrupted softly, "But why are we here? It doesn't look like the Garden has a monster problem."

Sweetfire bit his lip, then glanced from Dav to Sophia. "I, ah, actually don't need all of you. I just need Sophia. The Garden is monitored from in there, and the door is locked. This happens sometimes after a Mazestorm, but when it does, the entire Garden starts to die. It can take months, even years, for some of the deeper plants to recover; there are some areas deep in the Garden that are barren, as if whatever's supposed to grow there is completely gone. If we can get in there, it will tell us what we need to do, but it's closed. The door will open again eventually, it always has, but it will be too late for a lot of the delicate plants. So if Sophia can open it, the way she can unlock wands…"

Sophia stared at the craftsman. He needed her to act as a locksmith. Well, a wardsmith really, but for this that meant the same thing. He needed her to open a door.

"I'll make sure you're rewarded well," Sweetfire hurried to unnecessarily reassure her. "Getting that door open so that we can see the Garden's care instructions is vital. Nothing is dying yet, but a Mazestorm always changes the magical landscape and means that we have to adjust what we do. I can source almost any grown raw material for you here, so you won't need to pay those costs for whatever you need made, and … I think I can secure some branches as a proper payment. Materials are easier than coin, but I think I can swing it."

Sophia shook her head. She wasn't that worried about the reward. She was pretty sure Sweetfire would be happier if she accepted a reward, though, so she wasn't going to turn it down. She'd just ask for the reward she actually valued. It was what Jax would want, and she was beginning to think that it might even be relevant for the trip through the Maze as well, possibly even affecting the chances for her and Dav to get home. There was knowledge here that had clearly been lost; she could probably decipher a lot of it with her Innate Communication Ability, Tiwaz's help, and her outside knowledge of how the world actually worked outside the Broken Lands.

"I think the first thing we want is information." Sophia watched carefully; Sweetfire still seemed tense. "But that can wait until after the door is open, or no. Better. You can talk to Dav and Jax and Xin'ri about it while I open the door. How does that sound?"

There was a niggling doubt in the back of Sophia's mind about whether or not she could open the door. She hadn't needed to break into any of the doors in Tiwaz's facility, since he simply opened them for her. That meant she hadn't tried. She was certain that they weren't nearly as weak as the ones in Ebayne Taarith's shop, but she wasn't sure how good they really were. They might be too good for her to get through.

Sweetfire nodded quickly several times. "Sounds good to me. The door's that one, there; you normally just push on the handle and it swings open." He hurried down the pathway and demonstrated.

Now that Sophia got a better look, she saw what he meant; the "handle" reminded her of one of the terrible bathroom locks some of her friends had in their houses. "I assume you've tried to jiggle it?"

"Yeah," Sweetfire agreed with a far more confident smile. "We've tried everything. When it's locked, nothing will move it, not even a powerful attack; you can leave scratches, but that's all. It heals, too; the marks of when we tried are long gone. The Garden wasn't as productive while the door was healing, so no one's willing to try that again; even if we did manage to find something that would break the door, it would probably be worse than leaving it closed. I'm guessing, but I'm pretty confident that bypassing the lock won't cause the same problem; there's nothing to heal, after all."

Sophia nodded; that seemed reasonable.

A good look at the handle of the door made it seem familiar; it didn't look like a mechanism she remembered from home, but she'd watched the doors as they opened for her after first Othala and then Tiwaz gave them permission to open up different areas. This looked almost the same.

That was potentially bad news; their setup was designed to be integrated into a wider security system, where the actual authorization piece was handled elsewhere. Without knowing what that authorization looked like, the system was harder to crack.

Some of the old Kestii systems had local authority backups, like the one Pelrith used to collapse Othala's entrance. That would probably be easier to break into than a remote entry system since she could see the whole thing and test things in person, possibly without any remote lockout features.

On the whole, Sophia hoped that it did go back to a central system, because that central system was probably either controlled by Tiwaz or would at least recognize the authority Tiwaz had given all of them over the "maintenance" areas.

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