(Luna) Two days after we carry her out of the Undercroft, Maren finally wakes up.
Waking up doesn’t bring the answers everyone hoped for.
“I don’t remember anything,” she tells the small crowd gathered around her infirmary bed, her voice thin and rasping, exhaustion still glazing her eyes.
“One second I was walking back from the library.
Then I was here.
There’s just nothing in between.” Her hands twist the blanket into knots, like the missing memory is somehow her fault.
Her mark still hasn’t recovered either, the double crescent and moon on her wrist faded to a ghost of its former color, and her magic, according to the healers, remains stubbornly weak, like something took a piece of her and never gave it back.
Every time I visit, she looks smaller than the day before, as if whatever hollowed her out is still quietly working, even now, even here in the safety of the infirmary.
The Council doesn’t wait long to send someone.
His name is Theron.
Everything about him feels cold and efficient, from his sharp, unblinking gaze to the clipped precision of his questions, and the whole Academy tenses the moment he walks through the gates.
He interviews me twice, walking me through every detail of finding Maren with a thoroughness that feels less like concern and more like an audit.
“And you found her exactly where?” he asks, voice flat as a closed door, pen poised over his notebook.
“Deep in the Undercroft.
I already told you the passage.” “Tell me again,” he presses, not unkindly, but without room for argument.
I do, watching him carefully as I speak.
That’s when I notice it.
Every time the conversation edges toward the sealed door itself, toward the cracked runes and whatever lies behind them, Seraphina steps in smoothly to redirect it, mentioning structural instability, old collapsed passages, anything except the door I know for a fact is the actual heart of this.
“The Undercroft has been unstable for centuries,” she tells Theron, her tone warm and reasonable, the kind of warmth that makes my skin crawl.
“I’d hate for the investigation to waste resources chasing old superstition instead of the actual threat.” Theron writes something down without arguing.
I file that away with a growing, uneasy suspicion I don’t yet know what to do with.
Kael avoids me for most of the week.
I catch him watching me sometimes from across the training grounds, his expression guarded, unreadable, but the moment I move toward him he finds some excuse to disappear.
After the third time, I stop trying.
I keep circling back to the night he confessed he didn’t know how to help me, how lost he looked saying it, and I wonder if that’s grown into something heavier now, some private fear about what I am that he can’t bring himself to say to my face.
Whatever it is, he’s decided I’m not allowed to help carry it.
I replay our last real conversation over and over, searching for the moment I might have said something wrong, but I come up empty every time.
The not-knowing gnaws at me almost as much as his absence does.
Rowan notices before I even say anything about it.
He starts showing up at odd hours with food I didn’t ask for.
A sandwich appears on the bench beside me during training.
A cup of tea shows up at my elbow during a late study session in the library.
He never makes a production of it, never asks for thanks, just leaves it and goes back to whatever he was doing like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
“You forget to eat when you’re worried,” he says, matter-of-fact, the one time I actually catch him in the act.
“Figured somebody should keep track.” I don’t know what to say to that, so I just eat the sandwich, grateful in a way that goes deeper than the food itself.
There’s something steadying about his quiet attention, a kindness that doesn’t ask to be noticed.
More than once, I catch myself wondering how long he’s been watching out for people this way, long before he ever started watching out for me.
Zephyr drops the worst news of the week like it’s nothing at all.
We’re walking back from the village after another one of his ridiculous races, and somewhere between complaining about losing again and stealing the last of my fries, he says it so casually I almost miss the weight of it.
“You know there’s a sealed gateway to the Underworld under this school, right?” he asks, breezy as small talk.
“Everyone pretends it’s not there.” I stop walking.
“What?” “The Undercroft.” He shrugs, unbothered, like he’s mentioning the weather.
“Old gate, sealed centuries ago.
Everybody who’s grown up around here knows the story.
We just don’t talk about it, because talking about it apparently makes it more real or something.
I figured you already knew, given you’re the one who cracked it open.” My blood runs cold straight through my veins.
“I didn’t crack open a gateway to the Underworld, Zephyr,” I snap, sharper than I mean to.
“Sure you did.
Just a little,” he says lightly, though something more serious flickers behind the words this time.
“Look, I don’t know the details.
Nobody really does.
But that’s what’s sealed down there.
Has been for a very long time.” He changes the subject before I manage much of a response, easy as ever, but the words sit heavy in my chest the rest of the walk back.
I keep turning the phrase over in my mind, *sealed centuries ago*, wondering exactly how much cracking it can take before whatever’s behind it stops staying sealed at all.
That night, Jace calls, and the second I answer, I know something’s wrong.
“Luna.” His voice comes out shaking, rougher than I’ve ever heard it.
“I saw her.
The missing girl.
In a tunnel, something pulling the light right out of the mark on her wrist, draining it like water down a sink.” My stomach drops.
“Maren?” “I don’t know her name,” he says, breath ragged.
“There’s someone at your school doing this.
Someone you trust.
I don’t know who, I just…I felt it, Luna.
It felt close to you.
Too close.” “Jace, I don’t know what to do with that,” I say, my own voice thin.
“Just be careful.
Please,” he begs, voice cracking.
“I can’t lose you to something I can’t even see coming.” We stay on the phone a while longer, though neither of us has much comfort left to offer the other.
By the time we hang up, my hands are shaking almost as badly as his voice was.
I sit there afterward staring at the dark screen, his words circling, refusing to settle.
*Someone you trust.
Someone close to you.* I think of Seraphina first, the way she steered Theron’s questions away from that sealed door with such practiced ease, warm and reasonable and just a little too quick to have an answer ready.
I think of Kael, how he can’t meet my eyes lately, how guilt looks a lot like guardedness from the outside.
I even think of Rowan, absurd as it feels, only because he knows the Undercroft better than almost anyone and I don’t actually know how.
None of it fits.
All of it fits, a little, if I squint hard enough and let fear do the thinking for me.
I press my palms against my eyes until the names blur together, until I can’t tell suspicion from grief anymore, and I still come up with nothing solid enough to act on, only a list of people I don’t want to be right about.
I’m still sitting on the Spiritwalker Den steps, phone clutched in my lap, turning that list over and over, when Caspian finds me.
The bond pulls him toward me the same way it always does now, gravity dressed up as coincidence.
He settles down beside me without asking permission, close enough that our shoulders nearly touch.
Something in his face catches before he speaks, a flicker of hesitation gone almost as soon as it appears, and for half a second the bond feels muted, off-key, like a note played just slightly flat.
I tell myself it’s nothing.
I need it to be nothing tonight, and some small, tired part of me is almost relieved his name never made it onto the list.
“You look like you’ve had a night,” he says, gentle, studying my face.
“Something like that,” I murmur.
We sit there a while in silence before the conversation drifts, slow and easy, into something bigger.
Loss.
Belonging.
The strange, disorienting feeling of standing somewhere you don’t fully understand, surrounded by people who all seem to know something you don’t.
He tells me more about his pack, the one destroyed by shadow wolves, filling in details I haven’t heard before: the sound of his mother’s voice, the smell of the mountain air back home, the exact moment he realized he was the only one left standing.
It’s detailed and raw and painfully specific, the kind of story that couldn’t possibly be anything but true, and I find myself aching for him in a way that feels almost as sharp as my own grief.
Still, some small, quiet part of me notices how carefully he chooses his words, how his eyes drop to his hands at the moments that should hurt most.
I push the thought away before it can take root.
I don’t have room tonight for one more thing to doubt.
I lean my head against his shoulder without quite deciding to, and the bond hums warm and steady between us, golden and certain, chasing away some of the cold Jace’s phone call left behind.
For a moment, everything else goes quiet: the Undercroft, the Council, the missing pieces of Maren’s memory, all of it fading beneath the simple comfort of not being alone.
My pulse slows.
My shoulders unclench.
The knot in my chest loosens for the first time all night.
Beside me, his jaw tightens.
His fingers curl against his knee, knuckles pale.
Give me more motivation!