Virelight Trilogy - Book One - The Witch of Westwood Lane

Moony trots ahead, nose twitching furiously. "That Vault smelled like old curses and broken promises," he says with a shiver. "I hated every second of it. Let's never go back."

"Seconded," Rowan mutters, agreeing with the snarky familiar. His voice was hoarse….too many words unspoken. Too many truths unearthed.

Elara glances over her shoulder. 

The Vault door now stands ajar, its runes flickering faintly like the last embers of a dying fire.

It hadn't sealed behind them.

Which meant...it wasn't done with them yet.

She pockets the key, her fingers brushing the worn grooves left by her aunt. "There's more to find," she whispers. "But first, we need to understand what we just saw."

A heavy silence falls between them...weighted. A knowing kind of quiet. The kind that says: everything has just changed.

When they reach her aunt's house, the scent of clove, old wood, and lemon biscuits wrap around them like a protective charm. The lingering spells still loop through the walls, playing the same enchanted tune…a safehouse melody woven by Isadora herself.

Inside, Elara moves towards the kitchen table and sits down wearily.

Rowan remains standing, arms crossed, watching her with guarded interest.

Moony jumps up onto the window seat, curling like a sullen gargoyle.

"All right," she says, cracking her knuckles. "Let's recap."

"Your aunt tampered with the Council's seal," Rowan starts, "and might have done it to protect what's in the Vault instead of destroying it."

"She trusted me to finish what she started," Elara continues. "And you...You knew her. More than you let on."

He doesn't deny it.

"She didn't just break the seal," Rowan adds, rather than admit Elara's statement as fact. "She planted something. A spell, maybe. A memory seed. She knew the Vault would test whoever came in after it."

"And she made sure I'd pass," Elara whispers, thinking of the key and the choices she had to make.

Again, silence descends as each one remembers the past few hours and the trial they had gone through.

Outside, thunder begins to rumble low in the distance. A stormy wind tosses leaves across the porch. 

And then...

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Three hard knocks at the door.

All three of them freeze at the unexpected noise.

Moony's ears twitch. "It's not a neighbour. Their footsteps aren't polite enough."

Elara crosses to the front door and opens it…cautiously.

A figure stands in the rain-soaked dusk: lean, tall, handsome, boy next door type, dressed in a long wine-coloured coat, with silver hair swept back like moonlight and a crooked smile full of unreadable charm.

A man. Mid-thirties. Hands gloved. Boots polished. Eyes unnaturally violet. The kind of violet that doesn't exist in nature…like glass that remembers fire.

"Elara Finch," he declares warmly and charmingly. "You look exactly like your aunt. Except with more sarcasm."

Elara blinks in surprise. "Do I know you?"

"You will," he responds cryptically, stepping inside uninvited. "Name's Valen Graye. Friend to the Great Isadora Finch. Curse breaker. Former lover of secrets."

He sweeps off his coat dramatically, shaking out his hair like a cat, and offers Rowan a lopsided grin. "And you must be the brooding muscle. I love the scowl. Very mid-century tragic."

Rowan doesn't move. "Why are you here?"

Valen's smile doesn't falter. "Because the Vault flared, and I felt it halfway across the leyline."

He leans back on the kitchen counter, flicking a tiny coin of glowing silver into the air, and then catching it, adding on:

"And because her aunt left me a message. Hidden in the spell signature of her Vault trigger."

He turns to Elara, suddenly serious. His eyes gleaming like stars glimpsing through smoke.

"She wanted me to find you."

Valen's presence is unsettling…not openly threatening, but wrong in the way the mirror smiles before you do. He moves like a man who has never questioned whether he belonged in a room…because he was always two steps ahead of it.

His fingers tap against the counter in an odd rhythm, like code.

"That wasn't just a key. It's a cipher."

Elara crosses her arms. "How did you know about the key? And what kind of cipher?"

"The hidden spell your aunt left for me." He reminds her indulgently, carrying on his explanation. 

"A cipher designed to respond to magical resonance. Specific frequencies…emotion, memory, bloodline. That kind of thing. And it's pointing to something else your aunt left behind."

"More secrets?" Rowan grumbles, arms still folded.

Valen winks. "Oh, darling, everything about this family is a secret."

He reaches into his coat and withdraws a folded map…aged, sealed with wax, and pulsing with a low golden light.

Elara recognizes the seal instantly: her aunt's. The sigil was a swirling glyph surrounded by moths, their wings forming around the shape of an open eye.

Valen holds it out. "She warded this to unlock only when the Vault was opened by someone she named Keeper. That's you."

Elara takes the map with shaking hands. The wax is warm under her touch, pulsing faintly like a heartbeat.

As she breaks the seal, moths…real and made of light…burst from the parchment, fluttering around the room before vanishing into smoke.

The map unfolds itself, rippling across the table like water spilling in reverse.

It showed not just Westwood, but a network of forgotten places, sleeping wards, and long-sealed places. An entire world connected to Westwood in some way or another, going through the town like a secret circulatory system.

And right at the centre?

A symbol. The same one that glowed on the Vault pedestal.

Rowan leans in. "That's... not areas the Council knows about."

Valen nods in agreement. "Which is why we'll need to get there before they do."

Elara's fingers tighten on the parchment. 

Her voice barely above a whisper. "So Isadora knew these places existed."

"Or rather she kept it a secret for a reason," Valen responds. "And perhaps feared it getting into the wrong hands. The annotations on the back of the map…" he flips it briefly, revealing flickering glyphs that shift between languages "...suggest she believed something was buried deeper than even she understood. Something older than the Vault."

Moony stretches and hops off the window seat. "I'm going to regret this, but I'm in for whatever you are planning next. Someone has to keep you all from dying tragically and leaving me to inherit nothing but dust and trauma."

Elara smiles faintly, but her mind is racing.

Whatever her aunt had found beneath the town…it wasn't just a backup Vault. It was something older. Something deeper. A truth buried in magical bedrock.

She looks at the map again. The symbols pulsing faintly beneath her fingertips.

"Looks like we have our next mystery," she murmurs lowly.

Valen tilts his head. "I hope you're good at solving them. Because this next one? It's not a riddle. It's a warning of things to come."

Far away, in a chamber lined with black stone and starlight, the Council reconvened.

The image of Elara, Rowan, and Valen flicker in the mirrored pool.

Another step to solving the mystery.

And now Elara has a map to guide her on her quest.

The soot-robed Councillor's voice is flat. "Graye has reappeared and has made contact with them. That was unexpected."

"He should not have survived," the youngest Councillor declares, enraged. "We should have ended him then."

"Too late now," says the silver-masked leader. Her voice is silk wrapped in steel. "They're ahead of us. And worse…they're learning."

The pool shimmers with residual magic. The map. The key. The moment of awakening.

"Graye should have been ours," an old voice rasps from the shadows. "Until he vanished when we captured the creature."

A long silence follows.

Then the silver-masked leader raises a gloved hand. "Begin Phase Two."

"Do we intervene directly?"

"No. Let them dig. Let them find the truth. But mark them all."

Her gaze narrowed. "Especially the girl."

"And Rowan?"

"He will follow her into ruin. That is his curse."

"And Graye?"

"He knows too much. But not everything. Watch him."

The pool dims.

And far below the Council chamber, in a deep black basement, beneath the capital, something stirs.

Not awake.

Not yet.

But listening.