Blood moon academy

BENEATH THE STONE

*Arwen's POV*

I try to unfeel it for approximately six hours before I accept that unfeeling it is not an option.

It's there when I sit down for dinner — the awareness of it pressing up through the floor like heat from something that runs too deep for temperature to explain. It's there when I walk the hallways, when I climb the stairs, when I sit at my desk trying to read a chapter of Supernatural Theory that I've now attempted four times without retaining a single sentence. Every time my attention goes quiet for more than a few seconds, the thing beneath the academy is there. Vast and dark and breathing in a rhythm that I'm starting to recognize the way you recognize a song you didn't know you'd memorized.

It responded to my power during the session with Zara. That's the part I can't stop returning to. Not a passive presence, not something simply existing below the stone. When my power opened and reached during the grounding exercise, the thing beneath shifted its attention. The way a sleeper turns toward sound without waking. The way a lock responds to the specific shape of its key, some old mechanism engaging after years of nothing.

It knows what I am.

I find Maya in the library after dinner. She's at the table we've started treating as ours — corner position, sight lines to both entrances, far enough from other students that conversation doesn't carry. She looks up when I sit down and reads my expression with the efficiency of someone who has been paying close attention for weeks.

"What happened?" she says.

I tell her everything. The grounding session, Zara's stones, the caught surge, and then the thing beneath — the size and the darkness and the specific quality of its breathing. I keep my voice flat and precise because the only way to say this without it sounding like a breakdown is to say it like a report.

Maya goes pale before I'm halfway through.

She doesn't interrupt. She waits until I've finished and then she is quiet for long enough that I can hear the student three tables over turning pages.

"The Hunger," she says finally. Not a question.

"The prison," I say. "What's inside the prison."

"You felt it directly."

"It felt me directly." I keep my hands flat on the table. "Maya, it responded. Not randomly — it oriented toward me specifically when my power opened. Like it recognized what I was."

"The prison is built from Blackthorne power," she says slowly, working through it. "The binding responds to bloodline presence by design. Which means The Hunger inside it — the entity the binding contains — is also exposed to that recognition signal. Every time the prison acknowledges you, the thing imprisoned inside it gets the same information." She meets my eyes. "It knows you're here. It's known since you arrived. Every power surge you've had has been a signal."

"Like a knock on a door," I say.

"Like a key testing a lock." She closes her book. "Arwen, you need to tell Draven."

"Not yet."

"He has pack archives. His mother's research. If Selene was connected to your bloodline, she might have documentation about the entity that the academy doesn't have access to. He could have information you need."

"I know." I look at my hands. "I will tell him. Not tonight. Tonight I need to sit with it first." I look up. "Don't tell anyone else yet. Not even Zara, beyond what she already knows."

Maya holds my gaze for a moment. Then nods.

I go back to the dormitory at nine and lie on my bed fully dressed, staring at the ceiling while Elena sits at her desk writing letters home. The sounds of the room — Elena's pen, the distant hallway noise, the particular creak of the radiator in the corner — are comforting in the simple way of the familiar, and I focus on them deliberately, the way Zara taught me, keeping my attention in the room and not in the dark below it.

I fall asleep without meaning to.

The dream arrives immediately.

I am in a place that is not a place — no ceiling, no floor, a space that exists as atmosphere rather than architecture. It is not dark here but it is not lit either, existing in some visual register that doesn't map cleanly to waking experience. And there is a voice.

It speaks in a language I have never studied. The sounds are not like any language I've heard — not European, not tonal, not constructed from any phonetic system I recognize. But I understand it. Not the words exactly, more the current running beneath the words, the intention and the meaning carried in a channel that bypasses whatever part of the brain handles vocabulary.

The voice is saying: *remember remember you were made from this remember it has always been here remember remember.*

I try to see who is speaking. There is no who. The voice is the atmosphere itself, emanating from the dream the way warmth emanates from stone that has been in sun all day — residual, stored, released slowly.

*Remember,* the voice says. *The door is yours. The key is yours. Remember.*

Then I am awake.

The room is dark. Elena's lamp is off and the window shows the specific black of deep night, somewhere between two and four in the morning. The radiator has gone cold.

I lie still for three seconds before I notice the floor.

Frost. Spreading from directly beneath my bed outward in lines that are not random — not the chaotic crystal patterns of normal frost but deliberate, structured lines forming shapes. Letters. A word, written in frozen water across the dormitory floor in a script I don't recognize from any language I've seen, the characters curved and precise and clearly intentional.

I stare at it for a long moment. One word. I don't know what it means. I don't know what language it's written in. But looking at it produces the same feeling as the dream voice — not understanding through vocabulary, understanding through something older.

I reach for my phone to photograph it.

And become aware that I am not alone in the room.

Elena is standing at the foot of my bed.

She is not in her bed. She is standing completely still in the dark, two feet from where I'm lying, her eyes open and her arms at her sides and her face turned toward me with an expression that is not Elena's expression. It is Elena's face wearing a blankness that doesn't belong to her, empty in a way that sleep doesn't produce.

She is watching me sleep. Or she was.

I sit up slowly, keeping my voice completely level. "Elena."

She blinks. Once. Twice. Something comes back into her eyes like a light returning after a power cut — gradual, then all at once, and then she is Elena again, blinking in the dark with the confused disorientation of someone surfacing from deep water.

"I—" She looks around the room. At her own bed, across the room and clearly slept-in. At the frost on the floor. At me. "I don't — I was in my bed. I was asleep." Her voice is unsteady. "How did I get over here?"

"You were sleepwalking," I say carefully.

"I don't sleepwalk." She looks down at her feet on the frost-covered floor. "Arwen, I've never sleepwalked in my life."

The word on the floor glitters between us in the dark.

I keep my face completely still.

"Go back to bed," I say gently. "It happens sometimes in new places. You're okay."

She goes, confused and apologetic and pulling her blanket up with shaking hands.

I sit in the dark and look at the word on the floor and do not sleep again until morning.