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.
