Inferna did not announce when one became lost in it.

  Soliana noticed only because the corridors stopped making sense.

  She had walked them enough now to recognize patterns — where the torches burned closer together, where servants hurried and guards slowed, where doors opened often and where they stayed shut. This part of the palace did not feel forbidden. It felt ignored. No banners. No echoes of training steel. Just stone and doors that mattered to someone else.

  She stopped in front of one such door.

  It was open.

  Inside, shelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, stacked with ledgers bound in dull leather. Tables filled the center of the room, each crowded with inkpots, papers, and thin wooden markers etched with numbers. The air smelled like dust and iron and old ink.

  A woman sat at the far table, quill moving steadily. She did not look up when Soliana stepped inside.

  Soliana hesitated.

  Then, because waiting had stopped working for her, she spoke.

  “Excuse me.”

  The quill paused. The woman looked up at last — not sharply, not kindly. Just attentively.

  “Yes?”

  Soliana swallowed. “I wanted to ask… where servants report.”

  The woman tilted her head slightly. “Which division?”

  “I—” Soliana faltered. “I don’t know.”

  “That’s alright,” the woman said calmly. “Name?”

  “Soliana.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “Family?”

  Soliana hesitated again. “Flora.”

  The woman nodded once and wrote it down.

  “Status?”

  Soliana frowned. “Status?”

  The woman looked at her fully now, eyes assessing, but not unkind. “Noble. Retainer. Apprentice. Ward. Servant.”

  Soliana searched for the right word. None of them fit.

  “I’m staying here,” she said instead. “With my mother.”

  The quill stopped.

  The woman flipped through a ledger, scanning lines with practiced ease. “You’re registered as a guest.”

  Soliana’s chest tightened. “I want to work.”

  There it was. Simple. Unadorned.

  The woman did not react.

  “Guests don’t work,” she said. “They aren’t assigned duties.”

  “I can learn.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” the woman replied, already turning a page. “But guests aren’t covered.”

  “Covered?”

  “If you’re injured, we’re responsible. If you break something, we’re responsible. If you disappear, we’re responsible.”

  Soliana opened her mouth, then closed it.

  “So I can’t?” she asked.

  “You can’t,” the woman confirmed, tone unchanged. “Not officially.”

  Soliana stared at the table, at the neat rows of names and numbers that did not include her.

  “Then… what am I meant to do?”

  The woman considered her for a moment.

  “Stay where your guardian leaves you,” she said. “That’s what guests do.”

  It wasn’t cruel.

  It was correct.

  Soliana nodded once.

  “Thank you,” she said, because she had been taught that was the right response.

  The woman inclined her head slightly and returned to her work.

  Soliana stepped back into the corridor.

  It felt wider now. Emptier.

  She stood there for a moment, unsure what she had expected to feel. Anger did not come. Embarrassment didn’t either. Just a strange, hollow understanding — like realizing a door had never been locked because it had never been meant for her.

  Servants passed her as they always did.

  They did not avoid her. They did not acknowledge her.

  They moved with purpose, toward places she now knew she could not follow.

  She watched a boy carrying folded linens turn a corner without slowing. A woman with a crate balanced against her hip adjusted her grip and kept going. A steward murmured instructions without breaking stride.

  They all belonged somewhere.

  Soliana pressed her hands together in front of her, the way she’d seen others do when waiting.

  But no one came to tell her where to stand.

  Eventually, she walked back the way she’d come, retracing steps that now felt heavier than before.

  When she reached the door to the room she shared with Flora, she stopped.

  Guest.

  The word sat strangely in her chest.

  She opened the door and stepped inside.

  The room looked the same as it always had — the bed neatly made, the table cleared, the window letting in a thin strip of light. Safe. Quiet. Waiting.

  Soliana sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her hands.

  She wasn’t angry.

  She wasn’t hurt.

  She just didn’t know where to put herself.

  And that, she was beginning to understand, was its own kind of problem.