NINE LUNARIA
NINE
LUNARIA
The moonflower came back first.
Lunaria had her hands buried wrist-deep in soil when she felt it—a thin thread of green life pressing upward through compacted earth, reaching toward the pale morning light. She held her breath, feeding the thread a careful pulse of celestial energy. Not too much. Just enough.
The stem broke the surface and unfurled in a long, slow exhale.
There you are.
She knelt in what had once been the Entry Gardens, the earth practically vibrating beneath her fingers.
Power thrummed up through her palms, into her arms, settling somewhere behind her sternum.
The gardens weren’t just responding to her magic—they were drinking it.
Absorbing every drop of celestial energy she could spare and begging for more.
Easy. She pulled back slightly, rationing her power. I can’t restore you if I’m passed out in the dirt.
The soil seemed to shiver with disappointment.
Around her, evidence of the past week’s progress spread in every direction.
Pathways that had been choked with invasive weeds now lay clear, the ancient stones gleaming pale in the morning light.
Flower beds that had been tangles of dead vines now sprouted with life—moonflowers unfurling their pale petals, constellation orchids stretching toward the sky, sun-roses tracking the dawn with botanical determination.
The Celestial Pavilion emerged more fully each day, its cocoon of overgrowth falling away to reveal intricate stonework carved with star patterns.
Lunaria had spent an hour yesterday tracing the constellations etched into the pillars.
Whoever had built this place had understood the heavens in ways that made her own knowledge feel like a child’s scribbling.
She sat back on her heels, wiping dirt from her cheek. Her muscles ached. Her magic reserves felt scraped thin. She hadn’t slept properly in days, hadn’t eaten a real meal since—
Since you left that note on his desk like a lovesick teenager.
She shoved the thought away. The note had been practical. Straightforward. She’d found a discovery, and as mayor, he had a right to know about developments in a significant municipal project.
The fact that she’d mentioned his shoulders was... well. A minor lapse in judgment.
The fact that Junie had apparently told him about the shirt indecision was mortifying on a level Lunaria refused to examine.
She pushed to her feet, brushing soil from her overalls. The sun was climbing higher, burning off the morning mist that clung to the overgrown sections of the garden. Somewhere deeper in the grounds, the Warning Bells chimed.
They’d been chiming for days now. Not the urgent clangor she’d heard that first night, but a steady, persistent tone. A reminder. A warning that hadn’t stopped since she’d arrived.
The gardens are trying to warn me.
The problem was that she couldn’t figure out what.
She’d explored most of the accessible areas over the past week. The Entry Gardens. The Fate Lily Pond, its glowing lilies pulsing gently whenever she passed. The Warning Bell Bower, where climbing flowers chimed their endless alert.
The Memory Moss Grotto had been particularly unsettling.
The moss lining the small cave had flickered with images when she’d approached—fragmentary, distorted, impossible to decipher.
A woman’s face, terrified. A figure approaching.
Darkness consuming light. The same damaged recording playing on loop, corrupted by time, perhaps worse.
But there were still sections she hadn’t reached. Paths too overgrown to navigate. Structures too collapsed to enter. And the Celestial Pavilion itself, which she’d circled a dozen times without finding a way inside.
Today, she was determined to change that.
She made her way along the now-clear main pathway, past the Void Rose Garden—and up the gentle slope toward the pavilion.
The roses were sentinel plants, she’d learned in her grandmother’s texts: naturally deep crimson, bred by celestial witches to blacken only in the presence of void entities.
They had not been red since she’d arrived.
The structure sat at the heart of the gardens, a circular building with a domed glass ceiling that caught the morning light. Through the grimy, cracked panes, she could see hints of what lay within. Shapes. Shadows. A large mechanism at the center.
The door was sealed. Not with locks—with magic.
Lunaria pressed her palm against the weathered wood and felt the wards beneath. Old. Incredibly old. They’d been powerful once, designed to keep intruders out and secrets in. Cracks ran through the magical structure, gaps where the protection had simply given up.
She pushed her celestial magic against the cracks. Gently. Carefully.
The wards crumbled.
The door swung inward, releasing a breath of stale air that smelled of dust and dried flowers and another scent. Familiar, though she couldn’t quite place it.
Inside, the pavilion was stunning.
Weak light filtered through the dome overhead, illuminating a circular space dominated by an orrery, she realized—a model of the heavens made entirely of living plants.
Dead plants, now. Withered flowers drooped from delicate armatures, their stems brittle, their petals long since fallen to the stone floor.
The whole thing had frozen in place, celestial bodies locked in whatever position they’d held when the last caretaker died.
Star charts covered the curved walls. Not painted—grown. Vines had been trained into the shapes of constellations, their leaves marking individual stars. The patterns were beautiful and precise and familiar in a way that made Lunaria’s breath catch.
This was her magic. Her gift. Whoever had built this place had practiced celestial arts at a level she could barely comprehend.
She walked slowly around the perimeter, trailing her fingers along the vine-charts. Power hummed beneath her touch, dormant but not dead. The pavilion wanted to wake up. It had just been waiting for someone with the right magic to ask.
Later. She’d come back with more energy, more time. Right now, she needed to understand what this place was trying to tell her.
At the far end of the pavilion, partially hidden by a collapsed shelf of star-mapping instruments, she found the stairs.
Stone steps leading down into darkness. Sealed with wards so old they’d nearly dissolved entirely—just threads of power clinging to the entrance, barely visible to her magical sight.
Her heartbeat quickened.
A hidden cellar.
She descended.
The stairs were narrow, steep, carved directly into the bedrock beneath the pavilion. No windows. No light except what filtered down from above. By the time she reached the bottom, she was navigating by touch and the faint glow of her own magic, summoned instinctively to push back the dark.
Her celestial light illuminated a workshop.
It was small, cramped, and absolutely stuffed with sixty years of undisturbed research.
Star charts covered every available surface—not the elegant vine-grown variety upstairs, but paper charts, hand-drawn with meticulous precision.
Journals stacked in precarious towers on a cluttered desk.
Dried flowers pressed between glass plates, labeled in a flowing script.
Instruments she recognized and instruments she’d never seen, all coated with dust but arranged with obvious care.
At the center of the room, on a small table that had been cleared of everything else, sat a single book. Open. Waiting. As if someone had set it down sixty years ago and expected to come right back.
Lunaria approached the table.
The book was a journal. The pages were filled with writing in a script she recognized instantly—celestial cipher. A code based on star positions, shifting with the heavens, readable only by those who knew how to translate astronomical data into language.
Her mother had taught her the basics. She’d learned more during her years of wandering, picking up tricks from other celestial witches she’d encountered. She could read this.
It would just take time.
She pulled the journal closer, studying the open page. The star positions encoded in the text dated from sixty years ago—autumn, based on the constellation references. Whoever had written this had been working on vital information. Urgency.
The first word she decoded was Convergence.
Her heart stuttered.
She’d read about Stellar Convergences in her grandmother’s books.
Celestial events that occurred once every one hundred twenty years, when the stars aligned in patterns that thinned the barriers between realms. Powerful.
Dangerous. The kind of cosmic event that celestial witches trained their entire lives to predict.
The last Convergence had been 120 years ago.
Which meant the next one was—
Soon.
She worked faster, her fingers tracing the cipher, her mind translating star positions into letters, letters into words. The entry took shape slowly, each phrase a small victory.
The Convergence approaches. I’ve tried to warn the Council, but Cornelius blocks me at every turn. He’s hiding the truth. I can feel it in the void roses—they bloom black every time he visits.
Lunaria sat back, blood rushing in her ears.
Cornelius. She didn’t recognize the name. But the void roses—she’d noticed them this morning. An entire garden of roses that should have been red, blooming in shades of absolute black.
They bloom black every time he visits.
The roses had been black every day since she’d arrived. Which meant whatever was visiting them, it was still here. Still present. Still triggering the same warning that had alarmed the witch who’d written these words.
She flipped back through the journal, scanning entries, decoding fragments. The author’s name appeared on the first page: Deia Tullio. The celestial witch who’d maintained these gardens until her death.
This journal didn’t read like the work of a woman at peace. It read like the desperate research of someone who’d discovered catastrophe and was racing against time to stop it.
The Holt family, one entry mentioned. Five generations of loss. The pattern is too precise to be coincidence.
Cornelius’s deal, another fragment read. The binding required a sacrifice. He chose them without consent.
The entity feeds on potential, a third entry warned. Not magic. Not life force. Futures. It consumes the bonds that could have formed, leaving its victims unfinished.
There was a fourth entry she could only partially decode. The star positions encoded in it were unfamiliar—an older dialect of the cipher, or perhaps a different hand entirely. Three phrases surfaced clearly before the rest dissolved into positions she couldn’t map:
...the crossing window...forty-two seconds, no more...
...only at the moment of transit, not before, not after...
...if the anchor holds...
Lunaria stared at the fragment. She had no frame for it—no context that made the numbers cohere. She set it aside and moved on. There was too much else that needed translating.
Lunaria’s hands shook.
Hux. The shadow on his star chart. The darkness sitting directly on his fate line, consuming potential that should have been there.
Someone stole his future, she’d said to the witches at Girls’ Night. Your potential for a fated bond.
This journal suggested that someone had done exactly that—stolen the Holt family’s potential and fed it to an entity that lived in the void between stars.
She needed more information. The journal was crucial, but the entries were scattered, the timeline unclear. She needed historical records. Council minutes. Family documents.
She needed access to archives that were definitely not open to the public.
Damn it.
She knew exactly who could provide that access. The same infuriating, clipboard-wielding, unfairly attractive man she’d been trying not to think about all week.
Lunaria closed the journal and tucked it into her bag. The workshop could wait—she’d come back for the rest of the materials once she understood what she was dealing with. Right now, she needed answers that only the mayor’s archives could provide.
She climbed back up the stairs, emerged into the pavilion, and made her way out of the gardens.