Chapter 130: The Portal Opens

Xander Ashwood

Reed sent the message to everyone the night before, short and direct. Come prepared. Bring what you can carry. We’re going to get her back.

They arrived within the hour of us reaching the ruins the next morning, one by one, until the old stone corridor was crowded with people who’d stopped treating this like an academy investigation days ago.

Eliza came with a bag of supplies I couldn’t fully identify. Criston came quiet, focused in a way that told me he’d already braced himself for whatever waited on the other side of that wall.

Josh, Camilla, Martha, Roshan, Damien, all of them carrying whatever they could reasonably justify bringing, weapons half-hidden under jackets, expressions set in the kind of grim determination that told me nobody here was doing this for the thrill of it.

We were going to get her back. That was the only thing that mattered anymore.

I was checking the straps on a pack when it hit me, fast and hard enough that my knees nearly buckled. Not words. Not anything clear. Just fear, raw and overwhelming, exhaustion pressing down like a physical weight, and underneath all of it, something that felt like Astrid trying desperately to hold herself together.

"Xander." Reed’s hand caught my shoulder before I hit the ground.

"I felt her," I said, my voice barely steady. "Reed, I felt her."

"Alive?"

"Yes." I forced myself upright. "Scared. In pain. But alive."

Something in his expression shifted, relief and dread tangled together in equal measure. "Then she’s close enough for the bond to reach," he said. "Closer than it’s been since she disappeared."

That gave me something to hold onto through the rest of the preparation, a thread pulling tight enough now that I could almost trust it.

Eliza knelt at the sealed passage, running her hands over the markings one final time before turning to face the group. "I’ve reconstructed as much of the activation spell as the residue would let me," she said. "It should work. But I need everyone to understand something first."

"What," I said.

"This passage was sealed from both sides," she said. "Deliberately, by people who clearly believed it needed to stay closed. Once I open it, I don’t know how long it will remain stable."

"How long," Reed asked.

"I don’t know," she said, and the honesty of that answer settled uncomfortably over the group. No convenient countdown, no clean number to plan around. Just uncertainty, and the understanding that whatever window we got, we needed to use it fully.

Criston stepped closer to the stone, closing his eyes, reaching the way he had at the east wing weeks ago. He stood like that for a long moment before his brow furrowed.

"There’s more than one mind," he said slowly.

"What do you mean?" Reed asked.

"I’m not getting Astrid clearly," Criston said. "I’m getting too many people. A lot of people. This isn’t an empty tunnel or a hidden room." He opened his eyes, something unsettled behind them. "Whatever’s on the other side of this wall, there’s a population there. A real one."

That landed heavier than I expected. We weren’t walking into some abandoned hideout where a handful of kidnappers were holding Astrid and Ivy. We were about to step into something far bigger than that, something with structure, with numbers, with whatever systems a real community required to function.

Reed absorbed that without visible reaction, though I knew him well enough to see the calculation happening behind his eyes. "Then we stay disciplined," he said, turning to address everyone gathered around the passage. "Find Astrid. Find Ivy. Nobody splits off unless it’s absolutely necessary. We don’t assume everyone we encounter is hostile, not until we have reason to believe otherwise. If we run into resistance, we protect the group and keep moving toward our objective."

"And if someone has Astrid," I said, "we’re getting her back. However that has to happen."

Nobody argued with that. Nobody needed to.

Eliza turned back to the sealed stone, pressing both palms flat against the carved markings, and began speaking words I didn’t recognize, low and steady, her voice building in intensity as she went. The symbols along the frame began to glow faintly, then brighter, pulsing in a rhythm that matched something ancient waking after a very long sleep.

The stone didn’t simply swing open the way an ordinary door would have. Instead, the space within the frame began to distort, the air itself bending and rippling like heat rising off summer pavement, except colder, wrong in a way that made the hair on my arms stand up. Eliza’s whole body strained with the effort of holding the spell together, sweat beading along her forehead despite the cool air of the ruins.

"Almost," she gritted out.

The distortion deepened, folding in on itself, and for one terrifying second I thought the whole thing might collapse entirely. Then it split open.

Light poured through from the other side, artificial and steady, nothing like sunlight. Beyond the opening stretched something none of us had been prepared to see, despite everything Criston had already warned us about. An entire city, buildings carved into stone, streets lit by fixtures set into a ceiling that curved impossibly high overhead. Movement in the distance. People.

An entire hidden world, buried beneath the ground we’d been standing on for months without knowing it existed.

"Go," Eliza said through gritted teeth, still holding the spell steady with everything she had. "I don’t know how long this stays open."

Reed moved first, stepping through the shimmering opening without hesitation. I followed immediately behind him, the others close on my heels, weapons drawn, adrenaline replacing whatever exhaustion had built up over the last several sleepless nights.

The moment I crossed through, the bond slammed into me with a force that nearly dropped me to my knees a second time.

Astrid. Not faint anymore. Not a fragile, uncertain thread I had to strain to feel. Close. Real. Present in a way that hadn’t been true since the night she disappeared from the east wing.

I turned toward the city stretching out ahead of us, every instinct in my body pulling in one direction.

"She’s here," I said.