Lissa! Lissa lissa lissa!

Alisa rolled over and bopped Zen on the nose. Was this going to become a regular thing now, him waking her in the middle of the night? Even weeks after finalizing their bond, he still never seemed to lose his enthusiasm. She squinted at him in the dark. What is it?

I found something! You need to come see!

It’s the middle of the night.

Zen frowned, emanating deep sadness and a hurt sense of rejection.

Alisa groaned. “Fine. But does it have to be right now?”

NOW! Now now now now, and as he spoke he started to fly in little pretzels and spirals, bouncing off the walls and ceiling - he really was getting too big for her room.

“Okay,” Alisa rubbed at her eyes, and reluctantly flopped her blankets off, exposing her to the chill night air. “Urgh.” She dressed quickly, Zen’s excited babble a steady stream in her mind, making it hard to think. She splashed some water on her face in case that would help wake her up. It did not. She thought she could probably sleep if she so much as sat down.

“I don’t think this is a great idea,” she said slowly.

It is! It is, it is, it is, come you’ll see!

He unlatched the window with a quick, well-practiced bite, pushed it open with his tail, and flew sinuously out into the moonlight.

Alisa did not jump after him, as she had no desire to fall from the second story. She closed the window behind him and headed downstairs, where she crept out by the proper exit.

A glint of moonlight on silver scales provided her only sign of Zen, flying rapidly toward the ruined remnants of the library. People had been trying to salvage what they could from the basement which had remained largely intact, and the work crews had been removing the ruined walls and burnt remains for several weeks now. It was beginning to look more like a pile of rubble than a destroyed building.

This doesn't look safe.

It is! Come come come come!

Alisa followed as Zen squirmed through a tiny hole and into the pile of rubble.

You know I'm not going to fit through there, right?

He poked his nose out reproachfully. Of course. Follow me!

She shook her head, yawning as she wished for her bed, but followed. He very rarely got this insistent about anything and if he thought she had to see something then, well, she wouldn't go so far as to say she trusted his judgment implicitly, but he tended to not do absolutely insane things any more.

Well, not as often, anyway. He still ate flowers and tree branches for no clear reason. Sometimes they even made him sick, and that was never fun.

But when it came to poking around the ruins of a destroyed library, Alisa had to admit that she was less hesitant than she normally would. There was the chance something had survived, escaped notice of the earlier salvage teams, and she and Zen could rescue an ancient manuscript of forgotten secrets!

Okay, unlikely, but it was the only thing keeping her going right now. Zen didn't know what he was looking at, so needed her to appraise it. It could be anything from a neglected homework assignment to a particularly fancy vase.

Do you know how to read? Alisa asked, realizing suddenly that it had never occurred to her to ask.

A little. I don't like it. It makes my head dizzy. Over here!

She followed his mental voice and saw a section of floor. It had been partly cleared, but bricks and half-burnt beams lay atop it.

What am I looking for here?

*thump thump thump*

She followed the sounds and saw a faint line in the floor. "Oh," she said, surprised, and started clearing away the rubble. It took several minutes and she had to break some of them apart or move them with spells to make any headway. Zen kept thumping and mentally encouraging her to hurry up.

"I'm coming as fast as I can," she whispered, irritated and out of breath. At least the cool air and exercise had finally woken her up; she no longer felt like she'd collapse at a moment's notice. "Can't you just tell me what it is?"

No nonono, you must see!

She tried to curb her imagination, but visions of long forgotten treasure rooms or vaults of secret texts lingered behind every obstacle cleared. The outline in the floor was faint, so faint she could hardly follow it, and several times she started to think that she'd made a mistake imagining it at all. It was partially covered by the floorboards, she realized as she cleared more of them away, built into the foundation of the library itself. This hadn't been accessible for years, at the very least. Possibly longer.

The imaginings grew stronger. What kind of secret chamber would be buried beneath the library? She broke the remaining floorboards off and cleared the area, fully exposing the faint outline of the door, then frowned down at it.

"Now what? I don't see a latch or anything to open it with."

Push it up!

"How? I can't get any..." she trailed off, looking at the thin lines. They were wide enough to fit magic into, if not her fingers. She traced around them, then drew her stylus and reached for the edge of the door. No, wait. She might not want to draw attention to it. She put the writing implement away and started casting by hand instead. A quick spell that wouldn't linger. She built decay into it, focused its nature and form on the crack, and pushed. The power slipped down inside, then began to expand as she fed more into it.

The stone lifted slowly, smoothly against the power, soundless.

Zen's head poked up and he slithered up and out, wings tucked back, coiling around her legs smugly.

"Yes, you are very clever," Alisa said, adding a second spell to assist the first. The original spell wouldn't lift it more than a few fingers, intended to make a gap, not move it completely.

The slab was hinged on one side, so the power hadn't moved it evenly. She could take advantage of this now that she understood its nature, and the second spell easily pushed it up in the correct angle.

Once it was open enough for her to descend, she added two more blocks on either side to hold it open until she came back, then made a quick light and started down. Zen sneezed, lavender flame flaring across the ground, and she felt his affront at being neglected.

Do you really want to act as a candle?

He climbed up onto her arm, then raised his head and let out a thin stream of flame that flickered steadily.

"I guess you do."

She set the light spell on his head. He turned a reproving gaze on her as she giggled, but then he caught sight of his glinting scales in the steady light and turned this way and that, admiring himself. Then he abruptly remembered what they were doing and resumed his candle impersonation.

She was actually impressed by how he maintained it so smoothly, breathing in through his nose in a steady rhythm while he exhaled through his mouth, the flame never faltering.

"That is really good," she told him aloud, and he mentally flexed in enjoyment. She patted his back, which there was a great deal more of these days. Much longer, and he wouldn't be able to fit on her arm at all, no matter how many times he looped around.

She descended the dusty old steps into the dim interior, and was initially disappointed. It was an empty storage room, not very large at all, and contained nothing but some questionably useful equipment for things like digging or farming. She wasn't familiar with the tools herself, but they looked generally in that vein and rusted into near unusability.

"What are we here for?" she whispered, poking at the decrepit tools with her foot. They looked like they'd been here a hundred years.

This way. He turned his head to direct his flame toward the rightmost corner, and she followed the lead of his glowing head. Giggling internally. His little glowing magic hat made him look simultaneously regal and ridiculous and she loved it.

"You want me to see a spider?"

Zen huffed, the flame flickering and dancing wildly for a second, then nodded his head downward.

She crouched down and stared into the dim corner, trying to see what Zen was so excited about. Lots of dust, the aforementioned spider scurrying away from the movement…

Then she saw it. A tiny circle on the floor. Impressed into it, perfectly formed, ready to be filled with magic to activate it.

See? Zen thought smugly. I thought you'd be interested.

Alisa stared at it. She didn't recognize any of the shapes. It was an array, three circles linked to each other, with a larger one surrounding them all. One circle vaguely resembled an elemental nature, but it didn't look quite right for that. An advanced nature derived from wind? Not one she’d ever seen before. The circles looked completely wrong, but clearly purposeful.

"How old is this place?" she wondered aloud, tracing the array with one finger. She didn't put magic into it yet, and wasn't sure she would.

Oh, who was she kidding, of course she'd activate it. But first she pulled her notebook out of her pocket and copied it down exactly. It was simple enough to copy, even if some of the strokes required to form the shapes were unfamiliar to her.

"I wonder what it does?" she mused.

Zen's impatient curiosity echoed back to her. He was wildly curious, insanely eager to know what it did. He'd seen enough magic circles to know what they meant, but this one was different.

"So you like circles but not reading?"

Yes. Reading is small and silly. Circles make sense.

"Do you know what this one means?"

Zen shrugged, the light moving as he leaned closer. Authorization for something, but I don't know what.

"Authorization?" She frowned. That sounded ... unusual. If it was some sort of lock, then perhaps the different circles weren't an array, but a trap. Perhaps she was only supposed to activate part of it, not just blindly trace the whole thing.

Looking at it from that perspective, was there anything she could do to change the form or function of anything in the circle? If she traced only this line, or only that one, left out that loop, chose this circle over that one...

No, if it was a puzzle, she didn't know where to begin solving it.

"You should stay back," she said, taking the light spell off his head and sticking it to the wall with a second spell to provide light. "In case something goes wrong."

Zen nodded and backed up to the far end of the room.

"If it does anything weird to me, go get Sadie."

Zen nodded, and she felt his eager, do it do it, do it!

She grinned, just as curious.

She ran a hand across the array, filling it indiscriminately with magic, pressing it down into all the cracks, then stepped back and let it activate. She felt it snap across her hand, then something stung her wrist like a bee.

Alisa yelped and jumped back, swatting at it instinctively, looking around for whatever had stung her as she backed well away. The spider was still high up on the wall nowhere near her. And it hadn’t felt like a bite, exactly. It felt like the spell itself had lashed out at her.

Are you safe? Should I go?

"I don't think anything's wrong," Alisa said, as the pain faded quickly. "I don't know what it did to me. Come here, I want to look."

Zen turned his flame back on and flew over, tilting his head so he could look with one eye without accidentally scorching her with his active fire breath.

A tiny circle lay inscribed onto the inside of her wrist, just where her palm transitioned to arm, a thumb-sized mark whose details were far too intricate to be made out in this lighting. It was faint, red and irritated now, but she suspected that when it had some time to recover it would be barely noticeable.

"Authorization for what?" she wondered aloud.

Something fun? Zen stopped flaming and came closer to see.

She held out her wrist. “Not sure. I’ll have to look at it closer in daylight.”

He poked at the mark with his nose, staring closely, then crept toward the circle. He licked at it, then jumped back with a hiss and yip of displeasure.

"Zen! Can’t you be at least a little careful?"

It bit my tongue! See?

He flicked it out toward her, and she saw the same tiny mark across it.

"Congratulations, you proved the circle does the same thing to people and to dragons."

It hurts!

"Don't be a baby. It'll stop hurting in a minute."

Zen licked at the wall, as though to rid himself of a bad taste, softly whimpering.

Alisa shook her head at him. “That’s what happens when you poke at unfamiliar spells. If you don’t want to get hurt, be more careful.” Then, ignoring her own advice, she crossed back to poke at the circle some more.

The array’s complexity pointed to there being a secondary purpose beyond simply adding the mark to anyone activating it. That was one branch off one conditional, but there were several others as well.

She examined it more closely, double checking any part that looked familiar and trying to parse the unfamiliar sections at least into their composite elements even if she didn’t know what those elements were. The connections were mostly intuitive, conditional and linked circles, though a few seemed to lead nowhere.

Alisa frowned. There was a connection point here that actually didn’t go anywhere at all. It had a conditional attached to it, but the portion it was supposed to be reading from didn’t exist.

She glanced at the mark on her wrist. It would line up, if she rested her hand directly on the array. That was an odd mechanism to build into a spell array, first giving the mark, then checking for it? But she’d already come this far.

"Stay over there, again, run for help if something goes wrong,” she told Zen. Then she placed her hand fully atop the active circle, rotating it until she felt it click into place, the circle on her wrist lining up with one of the points on the circle in the floor, and the whole thing activated.

Magic flicked through her, using the tiny mark as a conduit, and she felt very strange. She'd never had her body used as a conduit before. It felt like a soft brush against her skin, but inside. Was this how the bond had felt to Zen?

Not quite, but similar.

Then the entire circle went dark and inert, its power spent.

She stared. "What did that do?"

Over here! Zen said excitedly. There's a new door!

"How in the world did anyone hide all these underground rooms?" Alisa asked, but she crossed to the new doorway. A whole section of wall had opened in a perfect rectangle, leaving a doorway into darkness.

Alisa stepped carefully through, blinking as her vision reoriented. Everything was bright yellow?

Zen flew ahead of her, bobbing like an eager floating lantern on a string.

Glowing fungus crawled up the walls in vast patches, leaving almost no surface untouched. The floor was a solid carpet of the stuff, pale yellow and bright enough that it felt more like a sunlit field than a cave.

"What is this stuff?" she asked, leaning down to poke at it.

Zen, of course, promptly tore up a patch and chewed it thoughtfully. Then he spat it out, hissing. Ew! Ew ew ew, not nice. It's fuzzy.

"Okay, fuzzy moss, good to know. Is it safe to walk on?"

Probably, Zen confessed. But don't eat it. It tastes like greenlight.

Alisa raised her eyebrows. "Life magic, you mean? That's useful for some things, I'm sure."

She'd never much cared for alchemy, but using plants as catalysts was a thing. It would make sense to have alchemical ingredients growing under an academy of magic, but the alchemical branch had been decommissioned long before she or her parents were born.

Something about a scandal and ritual sacrifices and necromancers, if the student rumor was to be believed. She wasn't sure they were to be, but couldn't rule it out. After all, secret rooms in the basement? Suspicious as anything. The activation circle was so small, if Zen hadn't pointed it out to her she'd never have noticed it.

"I wish we knew what went on here," she murmured, gently stroking the soft glowing moss of the wall. "But I don't think we'll be able to guess. It's been too long."

She stared out at the near-limitless bounty of what was likely a valuable alchemical ingredient.

It was worth exploring. Zen declared. Even if the moss at the end tastes awful.

Alisa shook her head and turned to leave, only to discover a serious problem. The doorway had vanished. The blank patch of wall behind her was as covered with moss as the rest of the cavern, with nothing to indicate that a door had ever been present.