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 liliespulsing 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.
