(Luna) The days between the Shifting Circle and the new moon blur together in the same restless rhythm I’ve followed since I arrived here: training, failing, trying again.
Zephyr shows up uninvited on more walks than I care to admit, always armed with some easy joke to pull me out of my own head for a few precious minutes.
Kael’s patience wears thinner every time my wolf slips away from me like water through cupped hands, though he never raises his voice, never once makes me feel smaller than I already feel.
By the time the new moon arrives, I’ve stopped expecting good sleep on any night at all.
My body has simply adjusted to running on fumes.
Tonight feels heavier than usual, like the air itself has thickened with expectation.
“New moon nights hit wolves hardest,” Sage warned me once, her voice low and serious, somewhere in that first sleepless conversation weeks ago.
“Power at its lowest, the veil at its thinnest.
Everyone’s a little more on edge without fully understanding why.” I remember nodding along, only half listening, still too new to this world to grasp what any of it meant.
I understand it now, lying in bed with every nerve wound tight, the buzzing under my skin louder tonight than I’ve ever felt it, insistent enough to make my teeth ache.
It isn’t just a buzzing anymore.
Somewhere past midnight, it shifts into something else entirely, something that isn’t quite sound and isn’t quite feeling, a pull settled deep behind my ribs that tugs in one direction only.
Down.
I grip the sheets and stare at the ceiling, counting cracks I’ve long since memorized, trying to drown the pull out with sheer stubbornness.
*It’s nothing.
Ignore it and it’ll pass, the same way the buzzing always passes.* But it doesn’t pass.
It sharpens into something almost unbearable, until lying still feels like fighting a current with my bare hands.
My whole body aches with the effort of staying put.
I lose.
I know I’m losing even as I throw back the blanket, even as my bare feet hit the cold floor.
Fear coils tight in my stomach, but the pull is louder, and some traitorous part of me wants to follow it anyway, wants to know what waits at the other end badly enough to override every warning firing through my nerves.
I walk through the dark hallway of Spiritwalker Den with my heart hammering, telling myself I can still turn back.
I almost do, twice, my hand finding the frame of my own door before the pull yanks hard enough that I gasp, my feet already moving again before my mind catches up.
The staircase appears at the end of the hall, narrow and cold, stone steps worn smooth in the center like countless feet have walked this exact path before mine.
I don’t remember it being there before.
I hesitate at the top, gripping the railing hard enough to hurt, and for one long moment I think I might actually win, might actually turn around and go back to bed and pretend none of this happened.
Then the pull surges, and I go down anyway.
The corridors here look like nothing I’ve seen at Hollowcrest so far.
No windows, no candlelight, just cold stone and colder air that raises goosebumps along my arms despite the warm night I left behind upstairs.
Every step down feels like a decision I keep making against my own better judgment.
I could stop.
I tell myself that over and over, a useless little mantra, even as my feet carry me further from the safety of my room and deeper into whatever this is.
The whisper grows louder the deeper I go, not words exactly, more like the shape of words, a language just beneath understanding that pulls at something ancient and half-asleep inside my chest.
It feels almost familiar, the way a forgotten lullaby might feel familiar, close enough to recognize but too far gone to name.
I follow it through a stretch of tunnel that feels older than the rest of the Academy combined, the air thick and wrong in a way that makes my skin crawl, until I come to a stop in front of a door.
It’s massive, carved from stone gone dark with age, covered edge to edge in runes that glow a faint, sickly silver in the dark.
Ward-runes.
I don’t know how I know that, but I do, some instinct buried in my blood recognizing the shape of a warning even though I can’t read a single symbol.
My hands tremble at my sides, torn between the urge to run and the terrible, magnetic need to stay exactly where I am.
This is the moment to leave.
I know it, standing there with every instinct screaming at me to go, and still I don’t move.
The whisper is loudest here.
Right on the other side of that door.
My hand rises, shaking, and I let it, some reckless curiosity winning out over the last scraps of my resistance.
Closer, closer, until my palm finally presses flat against the cold stone.
For one suspended heartbeat, everything goes silent, as if the whole corridor is holding its breath alongside me.
The runes flare to life all at once, blinding silver light chasing across every symbol carved into the stone, and then, one by one, they begin to crack.
Thin fractures spiderweb outward from beneath my hand, spreading fast, the light flickering and dimming as each rune breaks apart.
I yank my palm back, but it’s too late.
Whatever these wards were built to hold, I am unmaking it, symbol by symbol, and there is no version of this I can take back.
Someone sealed this away on purpose, generations ago, with intention and warning carved into every inch of stone, and I have just undone their work with nothing but a shaking hand and a curiosity I can’t explain.
I want to reach out, to press the cracks back together with my bare hands, but there is nothing left to hold.
It’s already done.
That’s when I hear it.
A breath.
Low, slow, enormous, coming from somewhere behind that cracked and failing door, like something vast has just stirred awake after a very long sleep and is only now realizing it’s no longer entirely alone.
I don’t wait to hear anything else.
I run.
I run blind through the tunnels, back the way I came, stumbling up the narrow staircase two steps at a time, my heart slamming against my ribs so hard I can hear it over my own ragged breathing.
Every shadow seems to reach for me, every sound behind me might be footsteps, might be that breath following me up through the dark.
I don’t stop running until I’m back inside my room, door slammed shut behind me, chest heaving, my whole body shaking so hard I have to sit down on the floor just to keep from collapsing.
My phone sits on the nightstand where I left it, screen lit up with notifications.
Three missed calls.
All from Jace.
My stomach drops as I grab it, scrolling past the calls to the text waiting underneath them.
Jace: Had the worst vision yet.
You were underground.
Something was behind a door.
Luna, DON’T OPEN IT.
I stare at the screen, my whole body going cold, colder than the tunnel air still clinging to my skin.
My chest tightens, throat closing around a knot I can’t swallow down.
He saw it.
From two states away, from a small house in a small town on the banks of the Pigeon River, he saw exactly what just happened to me, down to the door, down to the warning I needed and never got in time.
I don’t move.
I just sit there on my bedroom floor in the dark, phone clutched tight in my shaking hands, and stare at those words until they blur, until the boy who once knew every version of me feels like the only tether left to a life I’m terrified I’m losing for good.