Moonstruck

𝓼𝓮𝓿𝓮𝓷 | The Beta

The west wing was a single building complex embellished with intricately carved cornices and topped with a pointed tile roof. Its ivy-covered red brick walls were inlaid at regular intervals with rectangular niches, each containing a stark-white marble statue of Aurelia. All of them stared sternly down at Ellie in united disapproval, their regal—almost imposing—beauty offsetting the quaint elegance of the building itself.

Once again, Ellie had spent the entire morning reading in the library. She had combed through shelves upon shelves of werewolf lore, scouring books of every shape and size for any mention of Illunis and her shadows. Almost every book had begun with the same story: Illunis was Aurelia's soulmate turned nemesis, and over the millennia as their relationship changed for the worse, each had become the other's downfall. Thanks to Aurelia's sacrifice, Illunis and her reign of darkness had fallen—never to rise again.

But there was one book that claimed Illunis could be resurrected. It was an ancient leather-bound tome, parchment pages yellow with age, illustrations painstakingly painted with the same vivid iridescence as stained glass window panes. Everytime Ellie flipped a page, dust would spiral into the air with a muffled floomp!, and Ellie would crinkle her nose at the musty odor and read on.

Mulling over the thought that Illunis could be resurrected, Ellie scanned the dense cursive text with the focus of a laser beam. And then she suddenly stopped. She scanned the entire page as if an additional paragraph could be hidden in the margins, flipped to the next page: "Under Aurelia's spiritual guidance, the first mortals blessed with the gift of shapeshifting formed an order known as Dijon, which later became the Dijon Pack—the first official werewolf pack in history." She flipped to the next section— "Very rarely, two souls are blessed with a spiritual bond unlike any other"—and after that— "The ingestion of small quantities of wolfsbane has effects on werewolf physiology similar to those of stimulants on humans"—but there was nothing. Nothing at all about who or what could resurrect Illunis.

Ellie spread the book wide open and peered carefully into its creaky spine. She thought she saw a thin white line—a sign that someone had carefully torn out a page from the book in its entirety. Could it be that someone was collecting information on Illunis for their own purposes? Could it be that they wanted no one else to know that they were doing so, as well as stop anyone else from doing the same?

Blinking these musings out of her mind, Ellie entered the building and walked down a large, well-lit hallway. Its linoleum floor shone dully up at her as her footsteps echoed throughout the empty space, compelling her to tread more softly. She hated to admit it to herself, but she didn't quite know where she was going—she simply felt it. It was almost as if someone invisible were walking beside her, silently but strongly willing her to take action upon the whims she thought she had dreamt up on her own.

Ellie walked and on and on through the seemingly endless hallway, something inside her growing warmer and warmer as she passed by various open rooms and closed entrances, until she finally found herself standing before a huge set of double wrought iron doors. She hesitated, and then placed a hand lightly against the cool metal surface. To her shock and relief—thank Aurelia—the ponderous doors swung open with astonishing ease.

Ellie stepped into an elegant study. It had a lofty wood-paneled ceiling from which a mini-chandelier hung and shone upon a cluttered oak executive desk in the center of the room. A floor-to-ceiling bookshelf occupied the entire wall behind the desk, crammed with books and strange, delicate-looking silver instruments that reminded Ellie of vintage measuring scales.

With a start, Ellie realized that this must be Caleb's private office. She went to the desk and shuffled through the papers strewn upon its surface, rummaged through its drawers. Again and again, city names popped out at her: Merlot, Sangria, Cerul, Lazuli. The last two were cities within Azure territory, protectorates of the Azure Pack. She scanned through a stack of drafts of battle plans, rifled through reams of notes on the Pack's military budget. One piece of paper, covered and crammed with elegant, spidery handwriting, seemed to debate the pros and cons of attacking Lazuli versus Cerul—what Ellie understood to be an ongoing quandary.