We went down anyway.
Arthur closed the passage enough so anyone walking past wouldn’t notice, but left a wedge so we could open it from the inside.
The stairs were worn smooth, their stone edges rounded by centuries of use. They spiraled downward in a tight coil, the walls opening up into an unexpectedly large cavern.
I misjudged the last step.
My foot slid, my balance tipped, and for one humiliating second, I was acutely aware of gravity’s personal vendetta against me. Arthur caught me quickly, as if he had anticipated this exact betrayal.
Fartie motherfucking Artie.At it again.
Arthur didn’t comment or tease, and as soon as I’d regained my balance, he let go of me.
Clearing my throat, I continued down.
The space at the bottom seemed much older than the building above it. The room was enormous,yet at the same time, it made me claustrophobic. There was no furniture to speak of, no attempts at making the place comfortable.
Maps covered the walls, layered so densely that coastlines overlapped and bled into one another. Some were parchment. Some vellum. Some so paper-thin that they had gone nearly translucent with time. Notes were pinned directly into stone, corners curling, ink faded but legible. Symbols appeared wherever there was space: scratched, etched, painted on.
It was an ancient conspiracy board, meticulously curated by people who had expected to be interrupted by history and had prepared anyway.
I stepped forward slowly, careful where I placed my feet, afraid of disturbing something important even though everything here had already survived centuries.
“Oh my god,” I whispered.
Arthur had stopped near the center of the room, his attention fixed on a symbol carved directly into the stone wall.
“My ancestor was here,” he said with complete certainty.
I moved to the opposite wall, drawn not to the symbols but to the writing. The margins were crowded with notes. References pointed to other pages. Corrections layered carefully instead of erased.
“This was written by an academic. Percy’s ancestor, probably,” I muttered.
Arthur nodded once. “My and Percy’s ancestors worked together at some point, and there are gaps in both our histories. It’s not happenstance.”
We stood there, the shape of it settling in. Two different kinds of minds occupying the same space for a reason that had demanded secrecy and patience.
I found a journal opened to a marked page.
“Latin,” I said.
Arthur lifted another nearly identical book from a nearby shelf. “Draconic.”
We read at the same time.
“Ab profundis ad astra,” I said.
“Through the depths to the stars,” Arthur said.
The floor clicked.
We froze.
A section beneath the central map slid open, revealing a recessed compartment. Inside sat a puzzle box. Dark wood reinforced with metal, its surface etched with a dragon motif that wrapped around the sides.
“Oh,” I said on an awed breath. “I like this.”
The top of the box was divided into six shifting panels. The upper three showed a dragon flying over an ocean beneath different skies—bright daylight, twilight, and night. The lower three were all ocean, but the waves didn’t align.
