15. Lunaria
FIFTEEN
LUNARIA
The routine had become dangerous.
Days in the gardens, coaxing flowers back to life, watching the orrery’s dead mechanisms twitch with returning power.
Evenings in the archives with Hux, shoulders brushing in narrow corridors, his scent wrapping around her while they pored over documents by flickering fluorescent light.
Nights alone in her cottage, decoding Deia’s journals until the stars wheeled toward dawn.
And somewhere in between—the moments she couldn’t stop replaying. The warmth of his hand in hers. The way he’d looked at her in the Fate Lily bed, vulnerable and wanting. The cheek she’d kissed three nights ago, still burning in her memory like a brand.
Dangerous. This is exactly how you get hurt.
But she couldn’t seem to make herself care.
The journal entry took shape slowly beneath her fingers, star positions translating into letters, letters into words that made her blood run cold.
The binding was performed during the Convergence of 1904. I’ve traced the ritual documents to Cornelius Marsh’s personal papers—hidden, of course, but the void roses led me to them. What I found defies belief.
The entity that tried to cross over—the Hollow King, as the old texts name it—required an anchor to bind. A living anchor. One with futures to consume. Cornelius volunteered the Holt family as that anchor.
His wife’s family.
Without their knowledge. Without their consent.
For years, the Holts have been feeding this thing. Their capacity for fated bonds, their potential for love—consumed before it can form. Generation after generation of loneliness.
Lunaria set down her pen.
Cornelius had sacrificed his wife’s entire bloodline to save his own skin. To keep Haven Shores safe from an entity that would have consumed them all.
A warlock who had bargained with something older than memory—and been rewarded for it. The Hollow King had extended his life as part of the deal, keeping him alive long past any natural span. Long enough to silence Deia. Long enough to make sure no one ever found the truth.
Noble, in its way, some might argue. A necessary sacrifice.
But it wasn’t Cornelius who’d paid the price. It wasn’t his descendants who’d spent generations wondering why they couldn’t feel complete. It was the Holts—the family he’d married into, then betrayed.
Hux. Isandro.
She turned to the next entry, desperate for more information.
I confronted Cornelius today. Showed him the evidence. He didn’t deny it—just smiled that cold smile and asked what I intended to do about it.
I told him I was going to expose everything. Break the binding. Free the Holts from their cage.
He laughed.
“The binding can’t be broken,” he said. “Not without destroying the anchor. And if the anchor is destroyed, the Hollow King crosses over. Is that what you want, Deia? To trade generations of Holts for every soul in Haven Shores?”
He’s wrong. He has to be wrong. The old texts speak of another way—theories about chosen love, about bonds that form through will rather than fate. I need more time to research.
More time to find an answer.
But Cornelius’s eyes when he left... I don’t think he’s going to give me that time.
The entry ended there.
Lunaria flipped to the next page. Blank. And the next. And the next.
Three days later, she was dead, according to the council records she and Hux had found.
Murder, Lunaria thought. She was murdered for knowing too much.
She pushed back from her desk and stood, needing to move, needing to think. The cottage felt too small, the walls pressing in. Dawn was still an hour away, but she couldn’t sit here any longer, staring at the last words of a dead woman who’d tried to do the right thing and been silenced for it.
The gardens called to her. They had been calling since the moment she’d arrived in Haven Shores, and now she understood why.
The Memory Moss Grotto waited in the northeastern corner of the gardens, tucked behind a stand of constellation orchids that had only recently bloomed.
Lunaria had visited twice before, but each time the moss had shown her only fragments—distorted images, garbled sound, the magical equivalent of damaged film.
Tonight, she came prepared.
She knelt at the grotto’s entrance, pressing her palms against the cool stone. The moss covered every surface inside—soft, luminescent, pulsing with stored memory. Sixty years of recording. Sixty years of waiting for someone who could watch.
“Show me,” she whispered, and fed her magic into the earth.
The moss responded instantly. Light bloomed across its surface, images flickering into view—
A woman with dark hair and kind eyes, arranging flowers in the pavilion. Deia, younger than in any photograph Lunaria had found. Laughing at a joke off-screen.
The same woman, older now, face drawn with worry, writing frantically in a journal. Candles burning low around her. The scratch of pen on paper.
A figure approaching through the gardens at night. Male, from the silhouette. Moving with purpose toward the pavilion.
Deia looking up, startled. “Cornelius. I didn’t expect—”
The image fragmented. Darkness pressing in from the edges. A scream, cut short. And then—
Nothing. The moss went dark.
Lunaria sat back on her heels, breathing hard. Her heart was racing, her skin clammy with sweat. The fragment she’d seen—Deia’s face, the terror in her eyes, the scream that had been silenced—
Murder. Not just suspected anymore. Confirmed.
Cornelius had killed her. Walked into these gardens, found her in the pavilion, and silenced her forever. And someone had covered it up, made it look like natural causes, buried the truth so deep that sixty years had passed without anyone knowing.
Someone. Or some entity.
The Hollow King. The entity that had been anchored by the Holts’s sacrifice. Did it have the power to influence events? To protect the secret of its own existence?
She needed more information. Needed to talk to someone who’d been there, who remembered Deia as more than a name in historical records.
Someone who might have been silenced too.