Lunaria
TWO
The cottage was exactly what she’d expected—functional, small, clearly maintained at bare minimum for decades by people who didn’t care about it.
Dust coated every surface in a thick gray film.
The furniture was basic and impersonal, chosen for durability rather than comfort.
The kitchen looked like it hadn’t seen a proper meal in ages, the cabinets bare except for a few cracked plates and a mug with a faded Haven Shores logo.
Perfect.
She left her bags by the door. Didn’t bother unpacking—she never did, not fully. The suitcases stayed zipped. The boxes stayed sealed. She kept her belongings ready to move because she stayed ready to move.
The main room was open-plan, combining a sparse living area with the sad excuse for a kitchen.
Hardwood floors worn smooth by decades of footsteps creaked under her boots.
A stone fireplace dominated one wall, the hearth cold but structurally sound.
She could imagine fires crackling here once, warmth spreading through the cottage while someone read celestial charts by the light.
Deia Tullio, probably. The witch who’d lived here. The witch who’d died here.
The skylight in the bedroom caught her attention.
A ladder led up to a small platform positioned directly beneath it—a stargazing loft, clearly designed for celestial observation.
Through the clouded glass, she could see the first stars emerging, pinpricks of light punching through the deepening purple of twilight.
Don’t. Don’t start reading charts. You’ll just see the blank space again.
She climbed the ladder anyway.
The platform was small, dusty, and perfect.
She lay on her back and stared through the skylight at the darkening sky.
The stars here were different than anywhere else she’d been—brighter, more present.
More aware. The ley lines beneath the town must amplify celestial visibility, bending the light in ways that defied normal optics.
Her magic stirred without permission, reaching automatically for the familiar patterns the way a pianist’s fingers might find keys.
There. Her constellation—the arrangement of stars that corresponded to her birth, her life, her fate. She traced it with practiced precision, reading the positions, calculating the trajectory—
She let her magic fall away, exhausted, bone-deep.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Junie: Leo’s getting your truck. Don’t eat the leftovers in the fridge, they’re from 2019. Also, there might be a ghost, but she’s friendly.
Lunaria almost smiled. Left that last part out of the tour, did you?
She climbed down from the loft, paced the cottage’s cramped rooms, and tried to convince herself that the prickling sensation at the base of her skull was just exhaustion.
Just the stress of another move, another town, another set of strangers who would become familiar right about the time she left.
Not the gardens calling her. Not the magic in the soil reaching for her, coaxing her the way roots seek water.
By midnight, she gave up pretending.
The gardens at night were a different creature entirely.
Moonlight filtered through the tangled canopy of dead branches and overgrown vines, casting shadows that moved wrong—too fluid, too intentional, the darkness itself seeming to breathe.
The pathways were cracked, broken, swallowed by decades of invasive growth.
What had once been carefully manicured beds had become wild tangles of thorns and weeds, nature reclaiming the space that human—or witch—hands had shaped.
But beneath the chaos, the bones of beauty remained.
Lunaria walked slowly, her boots finding purchase on stone that should have been invisible under the debris.
The gates had closed behind her when she passed through—swinging shut on their own, silent as they’d been when they opened—but she didn’t let herself think about what that meant.
Didn’t let herself think about anything except the path in front of her and the thrum of power beneath her feet.
The ley lines pulsed with every step. Seven currents, interwoven, forming a network of power unlike anything she’d felt. The magic here was old. Patient. Hungry in a way that wasn’t quite malevolent but wasn’t entirely benign either.
Waiting.
Waiting for what?
She found the Celestial Pavilion by following the pull.
A circular structure of weathered stone, its domed glass ceiling cracked and clouded but miraculously intact.
Every surface was carved with intricate patterns—star charts, planetary alignments, celestial mathematics rendered in rock that must have taken decades to complete.
This was the heart of the gardens. The place where Deia Tullio had done her most important work.
The place where Deia Tullio had died.
A stone bench sat near the pavilion’s entrance, simple and worn. A plaque had been set into its back: She Watched the Stars So We Could Sleep.
Lunaria’s chest ached. She knew that feeling. The burden of seeing too much, of watching futures unfold while everyone else slept peacefully, unaware of what the sky was telling you.
She knelt at the pavilion’s edge, where the flagstones met the overgrown earth. Her fingers brushed the soil—cool, damp, thrumming with dormant potential. Six decades of waiting, condensed into a single heartbeat of sensation.
This is a terrible idea.
She closed her eyes and let her magic reach down.
“Wake up,” she whispered. Not a command. A request. “Please. Just a little. Show me what you need.”
The response was immediate.
Light bloomed in the darkness.
Not the harsh glow of artificial magic but softness, light alive—moonflowers unfurling beneath her fingertips, their petals catching starlight and holding it captive.
They hadn’t bloomed in sixty years. They bloomed now, pale silver-white, spreading out from her touch in a cascade of awakening that rippled outward.
Lunaria’s breath caught in her chest.
More flowers followed. Constellation orchids with petals that seemed to hold the shapes of distant star systems, their centers glowing faintly with patterns she recognized from her charts.
Night jasmine releasing a fragrance so sweet and heady, it made her head swim.
A carpet of luminescent moss creeping along the broken pathways, painting them in soft blue-white light, guiding her deeper into the garden’s heart.
The gardens weren’t dead.
They were sleeping. Waiting. Starving for celestial magic, the way parched earth craves rain.
And now she’d fed them.
Too much, part of her whispered. You’re giving them too much. Pull back. Control it.
She couldn’t stop.
The magic flowed out of her in a rush, channeled through the ley lines, spreading through the garden’s network of dormant life.
The Celestial Pavilion’s cracked dome began to glow softly overhead, starlight filtering through the clouded glass in patterns that hadn’t been visible in generations—the same charts carved into the stone, now burning gently in the sky above.
She was dimly aware that she was on her knees, both hands pressed flat to the earth, her magic pouring out of her in a torrent that would leave her exhausted for days.
She didn’t care.
And then—
Chiming.
Clear, high notes ringing through the night air. Not bells—flowers. Somewhere deeper in the garden, climbing vines with blossoms shaped like tiny bells were swaying without wind, producing a sound that made the hair rise on Lunaria’s arms.
Warning Bells.
She’d read about them—flowers bred by celestial witches to detect approaching danger, to sing when threats drew near. They shouldn’t be blooming. They shouldn’t be capable of blooming after decades of dormancy.
They only chimed when danger approached.
Lunaria pushed to her feet on legs that trembled, her magic still pouring into the soil despite her attempt to rein it in. Out of control now. The gardens were drinking her dry, and she couldn’t make herself care because they were so hungry, so desperate, so alive—
The moss at her feet flickered—luminescent tendrils crawling along the stones, spreading toward a bed of plants she didn’t recognize. They looked almost like ferns, but their fronds were thick and spongy, covered in a fine iridescent fuzz that caught the light.
Memory Moss.
She’d studied it in theory but never seen it in practice—plants that absorbed and stored images, sounds, moments. Living recording devices, preserving everything they witnessed with perfect fidelity.
This moss had been recording for six decades. Every sunrise. Every storm. Every creature that passed through. And one death that the official records said was natural.
As she watched, the tendrils began to glow brighter, patterns forming in the luminescence—shapes that resolved into shapes almost recognizable.
A face. A woman’s face, middle-aged, with features too distorted by fear to read clearly.
Her mouth was open in a scream that produced no sound, her hands raised in a defensive gesture.
The image flickered, fragmented.
A voice—barely audible, more suggestion than sound: “—can’t let him—”
Another flicker. Darkness pressing in from the edges of the image, not natural darkness but a force that moved with purpose, hungry. The woman’s face distorting as the darkness approached—something the moss couldn’t fully capture—existing more as absence than presence.
“—the Convergence—”
The vision shattered. The moss went dark. The Warning Bells fell silent so abruptly that the quiet seemed to ring.
Lunaria stood in the suddenly still garden, her heart slamming against her ribs, her magic finally settling back into her body in a painful rush. The flowers she’d awakened still glowed faintly around her, but the frantic energy was gone. The garden had shown her what it wanted to show.
Now it waited to see what she would do.
That was Deia. That was Deia Tullio, the night she died.
Natural causes, the records said. Peaceful death in her sleep.
The records were lying.
Lunaria looked around at the garden she’d partially awakened—the moonflowers still glowing softly, the constellation orchids still pulsing with captured starlight, the Warning Bells swaying in anticipation of a threat she couldn’t see or name.
In the distance, a bed of roses caught the light, their petals so dark, they appeared black even in the moonlight.
Void Roses. Blooming black.
Violence had happened here. Secrets buried for six decades, preserved in moss and memory, waiting for someone with the power to listen. Waiting for a celestial witch to come and wake the gardens that had witnessed a murder.
She should leave. Pack her bags, get in her truck, drive until Haven Shores was nothing but a fading memory.
The woman in the memory—Deia—had been screaming a warning. Trying to stop disaster. The Convergence.
A threat that might still be coming.
She didn’t leave the gardens until dawn began to pink the horizon, bleeding across the sky in shades of coral and gold that should have been beautiful.