Chapter 106: Elaris

Astrid Vale

Maximus led me away from the dining hall and deeper into wherever this place actually was, walking at an unhurried pace like he had nowhere else to be. I kept my guard up the entire time, my fingers brushing occasionally against the hairpin hidden at my side. I still hadn’t forgotten that I’d woken up here with no memory of how I’d arrived, and nothing about a shared meal had changed that.

"You’ll want to see this properly," he said, gesturing ahead as though he were showing off something he was genuinely proud of.

I said nothing, just watched everything around me as carefully as I could manage.

At first I assumed we were simply moving through a large compound, some sprawling estate built for whatever purpose these people served. Then the corridor opened into something else entirely, and I stopped walking for a second without meaning to.

It wasn’t a compound. It was a town.

Streets stretched ahead of us, lined with buildings that served purposes I could only guess at. People moved between them carrying baskets, tools, bundles of fabric, going about lives that looked disturbingly ordinary. Some structures looked like shops. Others looked like homes. This wasn’t a hideout. This was a functioning society, built and maintained by however many people lived here.

"How many people are down here?" I asked.

"Enough," he said, which told me nothing at all.

The longer we walked, the more details settled into place that I hadn’t fully processed before. There was no sunlight anywhere, only artificial light spilling down from fixtures set into a ceiling that curved too high above us to be any ordinary building. The air felt close despite the size of the space, pressing in around the edges even as the town stretched on.

I looked up again, studying the structure of it, and understanding hit me slowly.

We weren’t inside a building at all.

We were underground.

I noticed the people too, the longer I looked at them. Many of them were unusually pale, some almost colorless, their skin carrying none of the warmth I was used to seeing on people who spent even a little time in sunlight. I wondered if that was simply what happened after generations spent away from it. They didn’t look surprised by their surroundings, didn’t glance up searching for sky the way I kept doing. This was normal to them. This was simply life.

That realization unsettled me more than almost anything else so far.

Then a more pressing thought crept in, one I couldn’t shake once it arrived. If we were underground, how was anyone breathing down here? I scanned the space above us, searching for vents, shafts, anything that might explain how air reached this deep. I found nothing obvious. My mind started spinning through questions faster than I could organize them. How far beneath the surface were we? How long had this settlement existed? How did an entire population survive indefinitely without access to open sky?

"The ventilation isn’t visible from here," Maximus said, "but I assure you, it exists."

I froze. I hadn’t said any of that out loud.

He glanced at me, unbothered, as though answering an unspoken question were the most natural thing in the world. My stomach turned uncomfortably. I made a conscious effort to guard my thoughts more carefully after that, though I had no idea whether that was even possible against whatever he was doing.

Instead of pressing on my discomfort, he began explaining, his tone settling into something almost lecture-like.

"Generations ago," he said, "our people were caught in a war that nearly destroyed us entirely. My ancestors believed remaining on the surface would only lead to our extinction. So they made the decision to bring our people underground, to build something that could keep us alive when the surface no longer could. And they named it Elaris. Generations later, the Elarisi people are still alive."

"And you just... stayed?" I asked.

"What began as survival became permanent," he said. "Generations have been born down here since. None of them have ever seen the sky."

I let that settle for a moment before he continued.

"There was another reason we could never simply return," he said. "Before the war, the Moon Goddess expected our packs to honor her. My ancestors refused. They believed themselves beyond needing her blessing." His expression didn’t change as he said it, but something in his voice hardened slightly. "She cursed the air above us for it. Anyone of our bloodline who breathes the surface air unprotected dies from it. What began as our own choice became a punishment none of us can undo."

Something about the story tugged at a memory I couldn’t quite place, some fragment buried too deep to surface properly. The Moon Goddess. A curse passed down through bloodlines. An old mistake punishing generations who’d never made it themselves. I couldn’t connect it to anything specific, so I let it sit, filed away for later, and said nothing.

I looked at the people around us again, at children weaving between adults, at an old woman sorting through a basket of vegetables near what looked like a market stall. My fear hadn’t disappeared, but something else crept in alongside it. Sympathy, uncomfortable and unwanted. None of these people had chosen this. None of the children running past us had any say in a war fought before they were born, or a curse laid down by ancestors they’d never met. An entire population, condemned by one decision made generations ago.

It didn’t mean I trusted any of them. It just made everything feel more complicated than simple fear would have allowed.

"You’ve built farms," I said, noticing rows of cultivated growth stretching along one section of the settlement, illuminated by lights clearly meant to mimic something the sun would have done naturally.

"We’ve adapted," he said. "Everything we need, we’ve learned to provide for ourselves. No one from our bloodline survives the surface without protection. So we made sure we’d never need it."

I turned that over in my mind as we kept walking, but one question refused to let go of me no matter how much I learned about this place.

"How did I get here?" I asked. "I remember walking into the east wing at Moonshade. I remember expecting to find my friend. Then nothing."

"A patrol found you," he said. "We send teams to the surface periodically, to monitor for changes, for development, anything that might affect us. They wear protective masks, given what the air does to us. They found you during one of those searches and brought you back."

"I don’t remember any of that," I said. "I don’t remember being found. I don’t remember being carried anywhere."

He didn’t offer an explanation for that gap, and I didn’t push further, though the absence of it sat wrong in my chest. He’d explained how I’d physically arrived, but not why anyone had bothered bringing me here in the first place, out of everyone they could have simply left behind.

We kept walking, and I stayed lost in thought, trying to piece together everything he’d told me, when a scream tore through the corridor ahead of us.

I froze instantly. The sound was sharp, unmistakable, carrying something raw underneath it that I recognized immediately.

Pain. Not surprise. Not simple fear. Pain.

I turned toward the direction it had come from, every instinct in me demanding answers. "What was that?" I asked.

But even as the words left my mouth, something strange happened. The memory of the sound itself began slipping away from me, blurring at the edges the harder I tried to hold onto it. I knew I’d heard something. I remembered the feeling it had left behind, cold and immediate. But the actual sound, the pitch of it, the exact shape of the scream, dissolved the moment I reached for it.

I looked around, unsettled in a way I couldn’t fully name. Maximus continued walking beside me, unbothered, as though nothing had happened at all.

I knew someone had screamed.

I just couldn’t remember what I’d heard anymore.