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 MossGrotto waited in the northeastern corner of the gardens, tucked behind a stand of constellation orchids that had only recently bloomed. Lunaria had visited twicebefore, 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.
