Chapter 140: Her Story

Astrid Liora Vale

I woke with far more strength in my limbs than I’d had the day before, the soreness still lingering but no longer as overwhelming as it had been. Before I’d even fully opened my eyes, my hand slid beneath my pillow, fingers searching until they found the small folded paper still resting exactly where I’d left it.

"You do that every morning now," Ivy said from her chair, watching me with a small smile tugging at her mouth.

"Do what?"

"Check that it’s still there," she said. "Like it’s going to sprout legs and walk away overnight."

"It’s important," I said, tucking it back carefully.

"I know," she said, and something gentle in her tone told me she wasn’t actually teasing me, not really.

I sat up properly, my mind already moving toward what Reed, Xander, and I had discussed the night before. "We’re going to put Elaris into our presentation," I told her. "The bloodlines project. Everything we found in the ruins, the history, the curse, all of it."

Ivy’s eyebrows lifted. "Aldric’s actually going to let you present that?"

"We have the evidence," I said. "The ruins, the records, the inscriptions Eliza reconstructed. And we lived it. That’s not something Aldric can simply dismiss as speculation."

Reed and Xander arrived not long after, both of them carrying stacks of papers and folders that immediately spread across every available surface in my room. Reed had the original academy materials we’d collected weeks ago, the old maps and historical references that had started this whole investigation. Xander had his own scattered notes, half of them barely legible, though he insisted every word mattered.

"You’ve got terrible handwriting," I told him, squinting at one particular page.

"It’s efficient," he said. "I write fast because my thoughts are fast."

"Your thoughts are fast because you never finish one before starting the next."

Reed’s mouth twitched with something close to amusement as he organized his own materials beside mine, and for a moment, watching the three of us huddled together across scattered papers, something in my chest eased into a feeling I hadn’t expected to find so soon after everything. This felt normal. Ordinary, even, in a way that nothing had since I’d been dragged into that east wing.

We started piecing everything together methodically, laying out what we actually knew rather than what we assumed. The ancient civilization that had thrived above ground once, generations before any war had scarred their history. The conflict that had forced them underground, whatever its true origins, still mostly obscured by damaged and missing records. The curse laid down by the Moon Goddess, punishing an entire bloodline for a choice their ancestors had made long before any of the current generation had been born. Their survival beneath the earth, an entire functioning society built out of desperate necessity. The sealed passage beneath Moonshade itself, connecting their world to ours in ways nobody above ground had understood until now. Their desperate, generations-long hope of someday returning to the surface.

There was still so much we didn’t know, gaps in the history that no amount of careful research could fill, and something about that incompleteness felt right rather than frustrating. We weren’t pretending to understand everything about Elaris. We were simply telling the truth of what we’d actually found.

"There needs to be a section for Liora," I said, once we’d organized the broader history into something coherent.

Reed and Xander both looked at me, waiting.

"Not as a tragedy," I continued. "Not as the girl who died helping us escape. I want people to know who she actually was."

I pulled a blank page toward me and began writing, my handwriting steadier than I expected given how much my hands still trembled some mornings.

Liora. An Elarisi girl training to become a doctor, determined to help her people survive the curse that had shaped every generation before her. Curious about the surface she’d never been allowed to see. Fascinated by stars she’d only ever known through old drawings. She believed, above everything else, that her people deserved to be remembered as more than a myth or a mistake.

I read it over once, and something in my chest eased slightly, the first genuine smile crossing my face since I’d woken up in this room days ago.

Ivy leaned over my shoulder to read it, and after a moment she pulled out a sketchpad from somewhere in the pile of materials scattered across my bed. "We should include drawings," she said. "The ruins, maybe a recreation of what Elaris might have looked like based on everything you described."

"You can actually draw that well?" I asked.

"I can draw well enough that you’ll be impressed," she said, already sketching rough outlines of the underground streets I’d described to her the day before.

"That looks nothing like the market stalls," I said, peering over at her progress.

"I’ve never seen the market stalls, Astrid. I’m working from your terrible descriptions."

"My descriptions were excellent."

"You said ’stone buildings, but underground, but also kind of like a town.’ That’s not a description, that’s a riddle."

We bickered over the details for a while, arguing about colors and layout and whether the artificial lighting she’d drawn looked convincingly similar to what I remembered, and somewhere in the middle of it, I realized how effortlessly we’d slipped back into our old rhythm, the same easy back-and-forth we’d always had before any of this happened.

I lost track of time completely, absorbed in cross-referencing dates and rewriting sections that felt too clinical, until Reed’s hand appeared and gently pulled the stack of papers out from under me.

"That’s enough for today," he said.

"I’m fine," I protested, reaching for them again.

"You’ve been sitting up for three hours straight," he said. "You need rest."

"For once," Xander said, holding up his hands, "I’m completely on his side."

"You two are conspiring against me," I accused.

"We’re keeping you alive," Xander said. "There’s a difference."

I grumbled, but let Reed set the papers aside on the desk instead of arguing further, my body genuinely more tired than I wanted to admit even to myself. Before settling back against my pillows, I glanced over at what we’d accomplished that afternoon, the beginning of something real taking shape across the scattered pages.

At the top of the first page, written in Reed’s careful handwriting, sat a title.

ELARIS, THE CITY BENEATH THE MOON

Beneath it, in smaller letters I’d added myself, a single line.

A forgotten people whose history deserves to be remembered.

I reached beneath my pillow and touched the edge of Liora’s note without pulling it out, letting the shape of it settle beneath my fingers. I couldn’t bring her back. I couldn’t undo what had happened, or change the fact that she’d died beneath a sky she’d only just discovered.

But for the first time since returning to the surface, I didn’t feel entirely helpless against her absence.

I could make sure the world knew Liora had existed.