Astrid
The observatory turned out to be one of the oldest buildings on campus, tucked at the top of a hill that most students apparently didn’t bother climbing anymore. The stairs creaked under our weight the moment we stepped inside, and dust hung thick enough in the air to catch the last of the evening light slanting through a cracked dome overhead.
Xander wrinkled his nose immediately. "Are we sure this place isn’t haunted?"
"Ghosts would probably leave after five minutes with you," I said.
He pressed a hand to his chest, wounded. "That’s genuinely hurtful."
Reed walked past both of us without comment, already scanning the shelves like the conversation wasn’t happening.
Despite the dust and the broken telescope slumped uselessly in the center of the room, I found myself drawn toward the shelves almost immediately. Old astronomy books lined one wall, their spines cracked with age. Star charts curled at the edges in a cabinet nearby, and beside them sat a stack of hand-drawn maps I didn’t recognize, borders shifting slightly from the ones I’d seen in modern textbooks.
I lost myself in it for a while, tracing one particularly detailed map with my finger, forgetting for a few precious minutes why we’d actually come up here. There was something calming about it, running my eyes over borders that no longer existed, place names nobody used anymore, a version of the kingdom that had disappeared long before I was ever born.
"Astrid." Reed’s voice pulled me back. "The project."
Right. I set the map down reluctantly and joined him at the table, where he’d already begun sorting books into rough categories. Xander wandered off toward the back of the room, muttering something about snacks that clearly didn’t exist in a two-hundred-year-old observatory.
We worked in relative quiet for a while, Reed organizing sources, me digging through anything that mentioned bloodlines or old royal records, careful to keep my expression neutral every time a name looked even slightly familiar. Outside the cracked dome, the sky had shifted from orange to deep blue, the first stars starting to appear over the campus below, and for a moment I almost forgot what we were even supposed to be looking for.
Then Xander called out from somewhere behind a bookcase. "Found something."
I glanced up, expecting nonsense. Instead he emerged holding a stack of old leather-bound journals, dust smeared across one sleeve.
"There’s a hidden drawer back here," he said, sounding genuinely pleased with himself. "Academy journals. Might actually be useful for once."
I blinked at him. "You found something helpful."
"I contain multitudes," he said, dropping the journals onto the table with more force than necessary.
I refused to give him the satisfaction of looking impressed, though I filed the moment away regardless.
It didn’t take long for the peace to break. I glanced away for one second to check a footnote, and when I looked back, my notebook was gone, along with Xander, who was already halfway across the room holding it above his head like a trophy.
"Give that back," I said, already moving.
"Make me," he said, grinning, backing toward the shelves.
I lunged. He dodged. I lunged again, and this time nearly toppled an entire stack of star charts in the process, catching them just before they hit the floor while Xander laughed somewhere behind me.
"Both of you," Reed said, not even looking up from his notes, "stop acting like children."
"Tell him first," I said, breathless, pointing at Xander.
"I was helping," Xander said, entirely unrepentant.
"By committing theft?"
Reed’s mouth twitched, just barely, before he smoothed it back into neutral. He didn’t comment further, and Xander eventually handed the notebook back with a small, satisfied smile that told me this had been entirely worth it to him.
We settled back into the research, and it was maybe twenty minutes later that I noticed something off about the volume in front of me. Several pages near the middle had been cut clean out, the edges too neat to be accidental damage or simple decay.
"Reed," I said, sliding the book toward him. "Look at this."
He examined the gap closely, running his thumb along the smooth edge where the pages should have been. His frown deepened. "These weren’t torn. They were removed deliberately."
"Maybe moths," Xander offered, peering over both our shoulders.
I gave him a flat look. "Those are very organized moths."
Reed’s mouth twitched again, closer to an actual smile this time, though he caught it before it fully formed. "Someone altered these records on purpose," he said instead, setting the book down carefully. "That’s... interesting."
I said nothing, though my pulse had picked up considerably. Someone had gone out of their way to remove information from academy records, the same records we’d been assigned to dig through for a project about lost bloodlines. That felt like more than coincidence, and judging by the look on Reed’s face, he was thinking the same thing.
We kept working a while longer, though my attention kept drifting back to that missing section, wondering what exactly had been erased and why.
As we started packing up for the night, I noticed one of the floorboards near my chair sitting slightly higher than the others, a thin gap visible along one edge. I knelt down and pressed my fingers into the seam, working it loose until the board lifted free with a soft creak.
Underneath, tucked into the hollow space, sat a small leather journal, worn soft with age, no title stamped on the cover, no author’s name anywhere I could see.
I pulled it free and opened the first page carefully.
The ink had faded, but the words were still legible, written in careful, slanted handwriting that looked decades old.
If you’re reading this, someone finally found the truth about Moonshade Academy.
I froze, my fingers tightening around the edges of the journal.
Reed had gone still beside me, his eyes fixed on the page over my shoulder. Xander leaned in from the other side, all traces of teasing gone from his expression.
Nobody said anything for a long moment, the three of us staring down at a single line of ink that suddenly felt a great deal heavier than the dusty room around it.
Somewhere below us, a bell tolled across campus, marking the hour, distant and ordinary against the sudden weight pressing down on all three of us. Whatever this journal held, I already knew we weren’t leaving
the observatory without reading further, whether that was the wisest decision or not.