Chapter 117: The Ruins

Reed

I’d been staring at the same page of our bloodlines project for so long the words had started to blur together, but something in it wouldn’t let me close the file and walk away. The assignment had felt purely academic when Astrid, Xander, and I had started it weeks ago, a tedious requirement about old Lycan royal bloodlines and territorial alliances. Now, sitting alone in the archive well past midnight, it felt like something else entirely.

Buried in an older section of records, references kept surfacing to a version of Moonshade that shouldn’t have existed. The current academy’s founding date was well documented, unambiguous, taught in every first-year orientation. But these older documents mentioned an earlier settlement bearing the same name, research tied to royal bloodlines conducted there, disappearances that were never fully explained, a sealed section, and a phrase that appeared twice without context.

The lower passage.

I didn’t let myself assume anything yet. But something about it sat wrong enough that I couldn’t stop reading.

Xander found me there sometime after one in the morning, dropping into the chair across from me with the particular exhaustion of someone who hadn’t slept properly in days.

"You look like hell," he said.

"We don’t have nothing," I said, sliding the pages toward him.

"We have plenty of nothing," he muttered, but he took the papers anyway, scanning them with less patience than I’d had. "This is another dead end, Reed. Old academy history. What does this have to do with Astrid?"

"Keep reading."

He did, and I watched his expression shift the further down the page he got. The records described disappearances, plural, generations back. Not one student vanishing under mysterious circumstances but several, students and apprentices and what the documents vaguely called young wolves connected to the academy. Some names had been struck through entirely. Entire pages were simply missing from the archive’s binding. And repeatedly, where an explanation should have existed, the record offered only a single word.

Transferred.

"There’s no transfer record," Xander said, flipping back through what remained. "Where would they even transfer to?"

"I don’t know."

"This is her," he said, tapping the page. "This has to connect to her."

"We’re looking for a connection," I said, "not creating one." I meant it as much for myself as for him. It would have been easy to bend every strange detail into proof of whatever I wanted to believe, and I refused to let grief do that to either of us.

Further into the records, we found an old map, hand-drawn and nothing like the current academy layout, but I recognized enough of the terrain to place it. A section of Moonshade’s grounds that no longer existed on any modern map, labeled in faded ink as Old Moonshade, East Foundation.

"That’s close," Xander said, studying the coordinates against what he remembered of the current grounds. "That’s maybe a twenty-minute walk from where we are right now."

We left before sunrise, bringing Eliza and Criston with us.

The ruins sat in an overgrown stretch of land past the academy’s official boundary, half swallowed by roots and undergrowth that had clearly been left untouched for decades. Broken stone walls rose unevenly out of the earth, corridors collapsed into rubble, carvings worn nearly smooth by time. Newer construction sat visibly layered on top of parts of the older foundation, and standing there, I understood something that hadn’t fully landed until this moment.

Moonshade hadn’t simply been built near this place.

It had been built over it.

Eliza crouched near one of the exposed walls, running her fingers along a series of symbols carved into the stone. "These aren’t lycan markings," she said after a moment.

"What are they?" I asked.

"Witch markings," she said. "Old ones. Older than anything I’ve studied properly." She traced the shapes carefully. "This one’s for protection. This one, containment, I think. And this one," she paused over a symbol partially scratched away, "passage, maybe. Or sealing. I can’t be entirely certain, because someone’s deliberately damaged it."

"Deliberately," I repeated.

"Someone didn’t want this part of the inscription read," she said.

Criston moved further into the ruins while we talked, his hand hovering near the broken stone the way it did when he tried to pull something from residual emotion. He stayed like that for a long moment before finally shaking his head.

"There’s nothing here," he said. "Not nothing like it’s faded. Nothing like it was never allowed to exist in the first place."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Usually old places hold something," he said. "Fragments. An echo of fear, or grief, whatever happened here. This place feels wrong. Not evil. Just blank. Like something scraped it clean."

"Could someone have erased it deliberately?" I asked.

"I don’t know," he admitted. "I’ve never come across anything this empty."

I went back to the documents while Eliza continued examining the carvings, cross-referencing the symbols against the older records we’d brought with us. One entry, buried between two unrelated passages, referred to residents of this section who had "departed beneath the earth" following some unspecified conflict.

"Beneath the earth," Xander said, reading over my shoulder. "That’s literal, right? There’s a tunnel somewhere?"

"There’s no record of a tunnel," I said. "No evacuation route documented. Nothing explaining where they actually went."

Another page mentioned a war, vague on details but clearly significant enough to have affected the surrounding territories. Whatever this older section of Moonshade had been used for during that conflict, the records didn’t say plainly. What they did say, repeated across several contradictory entries, was that the section had been sealed afterward.

One note claimed it was sealed for safety. Another, more troubling, stated the survivors must remain undisturbed. A third page that should have explained further was missing entirely, torn cleanly from the binding.

We found the physical entrance an hour later, tucked behind a section of collapsed stone that Eliza cleared enough to expose properly. It wasn’t dramatic, no glowing seam or obvious magical barrier, just an old doorway carved directly into rock, covered in the same style of markings scattered throughout the ruins. I ran my fingers along the stone, searching for some mechanism, some seam that might give under pressure.

Nothing. No opening. No obvious way through.

"Whatever sealed this," Eliza said, crouching to study the markings more closely, "it’s magic far older than anything the current academy teaches. I wouldn’t know where to begin undoing it, even if we wanted to."

I stood back and looked at the ruins spreading out around us, and then up, toward the direction of the academy proper, close enough that I could see the edge of one of the newer buildings through the trees. Students were walking to breakfast right now, complaining about assignments, falling in and out of love, entirely unaware that something ancient and deliberately silenced sat buried beneath the ground they walked across every single day.

Astrid had disappeared from that same academy. Fake messages. The east wing. A trail that vanished without explanation. Supernatural interference sophisticated enough to block a mate bond entirely.

And now this.

I didn’t let myself leap to the conclusion sitting right at the edge of my thoughts. I didn’t have enough to connect any of it directly to her, not yet, and jumping there on instinct alone would only cloud whatever came next.

As we prepared to leave, I went back through the documents one final time, and one line near the bottom of a damaged page caught my attention.

After the war, the passage beneath Moonshade was sealed. None shall open it again.

Below it, a second line had been damaged badly enough that most of it had crumbled away entirely, leaving only a fragment legible.

...until the way above...

The rest was gone, whatever context had once completed it lost to time or deliberate destruction.

"What does it say?" Xander asked, watching my face.

I didn’t answer right away.

We finally had something more than a missing-person investigation stretched thin across dead ends and rumors.

There was an ancient passage beneath Moonshade. It had been sealed deliberately, after a war nobody had bothered to fully record. And somewhere, at some point long before any of us were born, someone had apparently believed that passage might, someday, be opened again.