(Luna) The vision from the full moon ceremony won’t leave me alone.
My parents, alive, hunted, calling out in a darkness that felt too much like the Undercroft itself.
Sage found me afterward, still shaking, and she didn’t ask questions.
“If Maren’s down there, we’re the only ones who’ll actually look,” she said, her voice flat with resolve.
I didn’t argue.
Neither of us wanted to go alone, though neither of us admitted it out loud.
My stomach twisted at the thought of descending into the Undercroft again, deliberately this time.
The Twins found out almost by accident, catching the tail end of a hushed conversation between us near the Spiritwalker Den steps.
Within thirty seconds, Ash had already decided they were coming whether we wanted them or not.
“You can’t seriously think you’re doing this without us,” Ash said, arms crossed, mock offense dripping from every word.
“We’re offended.
Deeply offended.” Alder skipped the theatrics.
He stepped past his brother and reached for the two lanterns hanging by the Den’s back entrance.
“There’s a route the guards don’t watch, past the old laundry stair,” he said, voice clipped and practical.
“I’ve used it before.
If we’re doing this, we’re doing it smart, not sneaking down the same hall the guards already caught Luna in once.” That settled it.
Once the two of them agreed on something, arguing was pointless, and some small, frightened part of me was relieved not to face this alone.
Four of us slipped out from Spiritwalker Den well past midnight, following the hidden passage behind the tapestry that had led me down here the night of my first shift.
Cold stone pressed close on either side as we descended into the dark.
My pulse hammered with every step, memory and dread tangling together until I couldn’t tell which one drove my feet forward.
The Undercroft felt different with company.
Less like something swallowing me whole, more like a maze we navigated together, though that didn’t make it any less unsettling.
The tunnels branched and twisted ahead of us, some sealed by collapsed stone, others warded with the same faint, sickly glow I remembered from the door that had cracked under my hand weeks ago.
I kept glancing at the others, gauging their faces in the low light, searching for some sign that I wasn’t the only one whose nerves felt stretched thin as wire.
“This place is ancient,” Sage murmured, her tone hushed with wonder, running her fingers lightly along the tunnel wall, careful not to touch the glowing runes scattered across the stone.
“Older than the rest of the Academy, I think.
Maybe older than the Academy was built around it.” “Comforting,” Ash muttered, his usual easy humor gone thin and strained.
We moved slowly, methodically, Ash and Alder taking point with a pair of small handheld lanterns that cast more shadow than light.
It wasn’t long before we started finding signs that someone else had been down here recently.
Footprints marked the thick dust, too small and too fresh to belong to anyone from the search party that had come through after the first lockdown.
Wax drippings pooled along a ledge, still slightly soft, as if a candle had burned there not long ago.
Scratches gouged deep into the stone at odd intervals, too deliberate to be accidental, like something had clawed its way along the wall searching for an exit that wasn’t there.
Each new discovery tightened the knot in my chest until I could hear my own heartbeat over the scrape of our footsteps.
“Somebody’s been living down here,” Sage whispered, her voice tight with unease.
“Or something,” Ash said, his voice cracking on the word, and this time he didn’t try to hide it.
Alder crouched near the scratch marks, jaw tight, studying them with none of his usual chatter.
“These aren’t old,” he said, low and grim.
“Days, maybe.
Whatever made them was strong enough to gouge stone.
We keep moving, and we keep close together.” We pressed deeper, the air growing colder and thicker the further we went, until the tunnel opened into a wider chamber.
That’s when I saw her.
Maren lay crumpled against the far wall, small and still, her skin gone pale and waxy in the dim lantern light.
For one terrible heartbeat, none of us moved.
Then I saw her mark.
The double crescent and moon on her inner wrist, normally bright with whatever color her affinity carried, had faded to almost nothing, a ghost of a symbol barely visible against her skin, as if something had drained the color and the life both straight out of her.
My throat tightened, some instinctive part of me recoiling from the wrongness of it, the same wrongness I’d felt the night the shadow wolf came for me.
“Maren!” Sage dropped to her side in an instant, fingers pressed to her throat, checking for a pulse with hands that shook despite her obvious training.
“She’s alive,” she said, breath ragged with relief.
“Barely, but she’s alive.” “We need to move her now,” I said, already crouching to help lift her, my voice steadier than I felt.
Between the four of us, we carried Maren back through the tunnels as fast as we could manage without jostling her too badly.
Sage kept one hand pressed to her chest the entire way, murmuring something low and steady under her breath that might have been a prayer or might have been the beginning of healing magic already trying to take hold.
Ash and Alder moved without their usual banter, faces drawn and serious in a way I’d never seen from either of them, and somehow that silence frightened me more than anything else down here had.
The infirmary erupted into controlled chaos the second we burst through the doors.
Healers descended on Maren in a blur of motion, questions firing at us faster than any of us could answer.
I gave what details I could, the location, the state we’d found her in, the faded mark, while Sage refused to leave Maren’s bedside no matter how many times someone tried to usher her out.
Sage didn’t wait for permission.
She settled into the chair beside the bed, both hands hovering just above Maren’s chest, and I watched something shift in her expression, focus narrowing down to a single point, her water affinity reaching out instinctively even without anyone telling her to try.
A faint blue glow gathered beneath her palms, soft and steady, and slowly, painfully slowly, some color started creeping back into Maren’s ashen face.
There was something almost sacred in watching her work, a quiet devotion that made my chest ache with an emotion I couldn’t quite name.
“Keep going,” the healer said, her voice soft with awe, watching Sage work.
“Whatever you’re doing, keep going.” I stood back near the doorway, exhausted and shaking, watching Sage pour herself into healing a girl she barely knew, watching the healers move around her with quiet, focused urgency.
Ash leaned against the wall beside me, uncharacteristically still, while Alder paced a slow, restless line near the window.
Both of them looked as shaken as I felt, even if none of us said so aloud.
My mind kept circling back to the tunnels, the footprints, the scratches gouged into stone, the faded mark that used to be Maren’s whole identity as a wolf.
Whatever did this to her was still down there.
I stared out toward the dark hallway leading back toward the Undercroft entrance.
My hands curled into fists at my sides, nails biting into my palms, and a cold weight settled deep in my chest.
This was just the beginning.
Comment it and let me know.