Chapter 119: From Both Sides

Reed

We went back to the ruins the following afternoon, the three of us this time, Eliza carrying a bag of supplies I didn’t fully recognize and a stack of copied pages tucked under my arm from the archive. Xander walked ahead of us the entire way, his frustration radiating off him with every step.

"So what’s the plan?" he asked, once we reached the collapsed stone entrance again. "We just stare at the door some more?"

"We understand what it is before we try to do anything with it," I said.

"We don’t have time to understand things, Reed. We have a location. Old records. And apparently magic. What we don’t have is Astrid."

"I know what we don’t have," I said, sharper than I intended. "That’s exactly why we’re being careful. If this connects to her at all, and we destroy something we don’t understand trying to force it open, we could lose whatever chance it gives us."

He didn’t argue further, though his jaw stayed tight the whole time Eliza crouched near the sealed entrance and began her examination.

At first she moved her hands slowly over the stone without touching it, murmuring something under her breath. "The magic here feels almost dead," she said. "Worn down to almost nothing."

Then she pressed her palm flat against the surface.

Something shifted, faint but unmistakable, a pulse traveling outward through the carved markings like a heartbeat catching for just a moment before fading again. Eliza pulled her hand back immediately.

"It’s not coming from the door," she said, staring at her own fingers like they’d betrayed her.

"Then where?" I asked.

"Behind it," she said. "Something’s still active back there. The door itself is just the seal. Whatever’s generating that pulse is on the other side."

That distinction settled uncomfortably in my chest. This wasn’t a dead artifact we were examining. Something behind that stone was still alive, still functioning, decades or generations after whatever had happened here.

Eliza moved closer to the carved symbols surrounding the frame, tracing individual marks with careful fingers. "These are fragments of an old witch spell," she said. "I recognize pieces of it, but it’s incomplete. Some of this has worn away naturally. Some of it’s been deliberately damaged."

"Damaged how?" Xander asked.

"Scratched out. Chiseled away in places where the weather wouldn’t have touched it." She sat back on her heels, studying the pattern as a whole. "What I can reconstruct points toward containment. Separation. Protection. Boundary. A passage, sealed deliberately."

"Containing what?" I asked.

"I don’t know," she admitted. "But I don’t think this was built to keep people from entering." She looked up at both of us. "I think it was built to keep something from getting out."

Xander went very still beside me.

I stepped closer to the stone itself, examining the structure with fresh eyes. There were no hinges anywhere along the frame. No handle, no visible mechanism of any kind that suggested this had ever functioned as an ordinary door.

"This was never a door," I said slowly.

"No," Eliza agreed. "It was a passageway. Somebody closed it with magic, not carpentry."

"Can you open it?" Xander asked immediately.

"No," Eliza said, firm enough that he didn’t push. "The spell’s too damaged. If I try to force something this old and this fragile, I could destroy whatever’s left of it entirely, and we’d lose any chance of understanding what’s actually back there."

I pulled out the copied pages and spread them across a flat section of stone nearby. "The disappearances," I said, running my finger down the timeline I’d reconstructed the night before. "They happened during the same period this passage was sealed. Around the same war."

Eliza leaned over the pages, comparing the terminology against what she’d found carved into the stone. "The language matches," she said after a moment. "Containment, boundary, passage, these words appear in both places."

Then my eyes caught on a line I’d read a dozen times without fully absorbing it. People who "departed beneath the earth."

"You think they went through here," Xander said, understanding arriving in his voice before I’d even said anything aloud.

"I don’t want to assume that," I said, though the possibility sat there regardless of what I wanted. "But it’s not nothing. If people vanished from Moonshade around the same time this passage was sealed, and the records describe them going beneath the earth specifically, that’s not a coincidence I can easily dismiss."

It meant, if it was true, that whoever had disappeared from this academy generations ago hadn’t simply vanished into nothing. They might have gone somewhere. Somewhere beneath us, sealed away deliberately, and left there.

Eliza went quiet for a while after that, running her fingers over the markings again, slower this time, more deliberate. Her brow furrowed.

"This is strange," she murmured.

"What?" I asked.

"These markings don’t form one continuous spell," she said. "There are two separate sets of inscriptions here. This one," she traced a pattern near the top of the frame, "was clearly carved from this side. But this one," her fingers moved to a lower section, angled differently, cut at a slant that didn’t match the first, "was carved from the opposite direction."

"That’s not possible," Xander said. "There is no opposite direction. It’s sealed stone."

"I know," Eliza said, and something in her voice had gone careful, almost hesitant. "But this second set wasn’t added afterward. It’s part of the original sealing. Which means whoever closed this passage wasn’t only working from the Moonshade side."

"Someone was standing on the other side too," I said, the weight of it settling into me slowly.

Eliza nodded.

I stood there letting everything realign in my head. The missing students, generations back, whose disappearances had never been properly explained. The ancient war referenced obliquely across half a dozen damaged records. This sealed passage, built not to keep intruders out but to contain something within. And now this, proof that whatever had happened here hadn’t been a one-sided act at all.

Someone hadn’t simply abandoned this place and locked the door behind them.

Someone had intentionally cut off whatever existed beyond it, and the people on the other side had helped seal themselves in just as deliberately.

I didn’t know why. I didn’t know whether whatever lay beyond that stone represented victims of that ancient war, or a threat everyone had agreed needed containing, or something entirely different that the surviving records simply hadn’t preserved clearly enough to say.

Eliza crouched down again, brushing dust away from the base of the frame where the stone met the earth, and went quiet for a long moment.

"What?" Xander asked, noticing the change in her before I did.

She didn’t answer right away. Her fingers moved carefully over something beneath the layer of grime, clearing it slowly until a second, deeper layer of carved symbols emerged, distinct from everything she’d shown us so far.

"What is it?" I asked.

She looked up at both of us, something unsettled behind her eyes.

"It wasn’t destroyed," she said quietly.

She ran her fingers along the newly uncovered markings.

"It was sealed."

A beat passed.

"From both sides."