Chapter 121: The Door Beneath Moonshade

Xander Ashwood

Astrid was alive. That should have been enough to calm me. Instead, it made every second we spent standing there unbearable.

We’d been in the ruins for hours, and every new discovery told us something about what had happened here decades or centuries ago, never a single thing about where she was right now, tonight, while I stood uselessly beside a wall of dead stone. I kept catching myself reaching for the bond, chasing that faint pulse of her fear from days ago, and finding nothing there but silence every time.

"We’re wasting time staring at this wall," I said, pacing a tight line in front of the sealed entrance.

"We’re not wasting time," Eliza said without looking up from the markings. "I found something."

That got my attention. "What?"

She crouched lower, tracing a line of symbols with one careful finger. "I misread these earlier. I thought they were a warning, or maybe a historical record marking what happened here. They’re not. They’re spell fragments."

"A spell to open it?" I asked.

She didn’t answer right away, and that hesitation set my teeth on edge.

"Not exactly," she said finally. "This isn’t a spell built to create a passage. The passage already exists. What’s carved here is meant to activate something that’s already there, not summon something new."

Reed crouched beside her, studying the same stretch of wall. "So the door isn’t a dead end."

"No," Eliza said. "It’s an entrance. Somebody shut it down deliberately, and thoroughly, but it was never meant to stay closed forever. Not based on how this was built."

That single distinction lit something in my chest I hadn’t felt in days. A door meant to be an entrance was a door that could, theoretically, open again.

Eliza kept working, her fingers moving over sections of the carving with more focus now. "There’s witch magic threaded through this. Old, structured, the kind that requires real skill to cast properly." She frowned. "But parts of it have deteriorated. Centuries of exposure, maybe deliberate damage in places. Some of the words are gone entirely. Other symbols are worn enough that I can’t be certain what they originally meant."

"Can you fix it?" I asked immediately.

"I don’t know yet," she said. "Maybe. There’s residual magic still clinging to the stone even where the visible carving has worn away. If I’m careful, I might be able to reconstruct pieces of it from that residue alone."

Might. Maybe. I hated every uncertain word coming out of her mouth, even though I understood, somewhere underneath the impatience, that she wasn’t holding back information out of caution for its own sake.

"Then do it," I said. "Now."

"Xander—"

"We don’t know how long she has," I said, my voice rising before I could stop it. "We don’t know where she is. We don’t know what they’re doing to her right now while we stand here reading old rocks. If there’s a door, and it opens to wherever she is, I want it open."

Reed put a hand on my shoulder, and I shrugged it off harder than I meant to.

"I want her back too," Reed said, steady in that way that usually grounded me and right now only made me angrier. "But we need this passage intact. If we force it—"

"I don’t care if we force it."

"You should," Eliza said, standing now, meeting my eyes directly. "This magic is ancient, and it’s incomplete. If we try to brute-force an activation without understanding what’s actually written here, the passage could collapse entirely. It could rebound on whoever’s standing near it. Worse, if it opens at all, it could open somewhere completely different from what we’re expecting. We could send someone through and lose them entirely, with no idea where they ended up."

I wanted to argue with her. I wanted to tell her that any risk was worth it, that I’d walk through blind if it meant even the smallest chance of finding Astrid on the other side. But some smaller, quieter part of me understood that walking in blind and getting myself killed, or trapped somewhere no one could follow, wouldn’t help her at all. It would just mean two of us lost instead of one.

"Fine," I said, the word tasting bitter. "Fine. Do it carefully. But do it fast."

Eliza nodded and went back to work.

While she traced and re-traced the markings, I looked around the ruins properly for the first time since we’d arrived, taking in the collapsed walls, the roots threading through broken stone, the layout that clearly predated anything currently standing above ground. Moonshade hadn’t simply grown up near this place by accident. Someone had built the current academy directly on top of it, layering something modern over something ancient like they were trying to bury it under daily routine and ordinary noise.

That meant our stupid bloodlines project, the one Astrid had been quietly annotating with questions none of us had taken seriously enough, hadn’t just been academic busywork. We’d been circling the edges of an actual buried civilization the entire semester without realizing it, filling out research checkpoints about royal Lycan history while sitting directly above whatever this place had actually been.

Eliza made a small sound, sharp enough to pull my attention back to her.

"What?" I asked.

She’d cleared away a thin layer of dirt and stone dust from a section of the carving I hadn’t noticed before, revealing several symbols that had somehow survived better than the rest. She read them slowly, like she was translating as she went.

"The way between the two worlds," she said.

"What two worlds?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I don’t know. The rest of that section is too damaged to read."

Reed frowned, studying the symbols himself now. "Surface and underground, maybe. Or something else entirely, living and dead, this world and some other one. Without more of the inscription, there’s no way to know for certain."

I stared at the wall, that phrase turning over in my head. Two worlds. Not one place hidden beneath Moonshade, but something that implied an entire separate existence, connected to ours only through this single sealed doorway.

Eliza’s fingers stayed pressed against the stone, and something in her posture shifted, her attention sharpening on a detail I hadn’t caught yet.

"Xander," she said quietly.

I stepped closer, following where she was looking.

There, along the base of the frame, barely visible beneath centuries of grime, were markings that clearly didn’t match the ones above them. Different in style, cut at a different angle, carved by a hand working from a direction that made no physical sense given the solid stone surrounding it.

Two sets of inscriptions. One matching the spellwork Eliza had been reading on our side of the passage.

And another, entirely separate, carved from what could only have been the opposite side.

Someone had written the spell from this side.

Someone else had finished it from the other.