Alisa tore clumps of moss free of the wall, revealing the stone behind. The wall resisted any effort to force it open, rough and unbroken by brick or crack, regardless of how she pushed. If there had been a door, she couldn’t find it.

"Great." She stared around the glowing-moss cavern, uncertain what to do. She suspected 'lie down to take a nap and hope I think of something when I wake up' was the wrong answer. But right now, she didn't have anything better in the way of solutions. She was still very tired, even if the exhilaration of finding secret rooms and magical doors was a big boost to her energy, it didn't last against the exhaustion.

"Zen, can you explore a bit?" Alisa drew a few light spells and stuck them to the wall, then affixed another to her chest to provide light wherever she walked. The glowing moss illuminated the cavern sufficiently to see, but it was still dim compared to her proper light.

Zen flew eagerly down the cavern, disappearing into a moss-covered passage at the end. Alisa followed more slowly, walking hesitantly on the carpet of moss, but it gave no sign of being dangerous. No acid melting through her feet, no spores or fumes rising up, nothing at all.

She pulled up another clump from the wall to examine, but it seemed to be largely the same as ordinary moss. The only difference being its sickly yellow glow. She rubbed her hand against it absently, enjoying the soft fuzziness of it, then shook her head and tossed it aside. The moss may be comfortable, but it was also magical and glowing.

'There are more rooms,' Zen said. 'Three of them.'

Alisa started toward him, the moss muffling her footsteps completely. She couldn't even hear a drip of water or the breath of wind. The only sounds were her own rustle of clothing, her beating heart and unsteady breaths, Zen's wing beats and the soft hisss of his flame breath.

She picked her way down the mossy hall, uneven ground shifting beneath her feet as though the moss were grown over a pile of tumbled rocks. The passages were obviously semi-intentional, but not regular enough to have been carved. More like a natural tunnel that had been widened in a few key points to allow access.

Moss covered everything, floor, ceiling, and walls, so completely she had a hard time figuring out the shape of the cavern. She wondered how long it had taken for it to grow over the place so entirely, and what was feeding it. Magical beings drew their power from somewhere, magical plants thrived on magic already brought into existence. It was one reason spent spells were gathered and used for catalysts by farmers. They could help certain types of plants obtain magical properties.

Zen circled in the second room, up near the ceiling, trying to find any cracks or crevice to slip through, not finding anything. Alisa had the uncomfortable thought that they might be stuck here indefinitely.

Don't trigger unknown spell circles without checking them over first. Got it.

The third and fourth rooms were equally dull. Moss grown over everything, lumpy floors, uneven walls, solid ceilings with no exit. And that was it. Four connected rooms, the passages that went between them, and moss everywhere.

"I'm sorry, Zen," she said. "I think I may have made a terrible mistake."

Zen hissed and flew around the cave, lashing out at the moss in every direction. He tore it from the walls, ripped it from the ceiling, dropped it and shredded it and threw it in every direction. He attacked it indiscriminately, missing some patches entirely, decimating others completely. His rampage was so comically overwrought that Alisa stared bemused.

"Zen you alright?"

'I need to find something.'

He continued to tear the moss from the walls at random, clearing larger and larger sections of the stone cavern walls beneath, poking into every crack that showed itself, invariably disappointed when none of them were anything but superficial. He growled in annoyance and flew around and around in a circle, then attacked the ceiling again.

Once he'd cleared that completely, dirt and moss raining down in every direction, he continued on down the hallway, destroying the moss on that ceiling and walls, then the next room. She lost sight of him, but heard the scrape of his claws on stone in rapid succession as he carried out his moss vendetta.

Even if he did find a crack to slip out through, it wouldn't be big enough for her too. She'd need to find her own way out. Or wait for him to remember to come back and open the door for her, but knowing Zen that could take a while.

Then she caught sight of something, half visible in a patch of cleared wall, and almost smacked herself. Another circle, this one carved into the wall, originally hidden by the moss but now exposed by Zen’s rampage.

“Good work Zen! I found something!”

He flew back, leaning forward to look, then sneezed and hissed. 'It’s different. I don’t think it will work.'

“That’s pessimistic. Won’t know until we try.”

Despite her impatience, Alisa forced herself not to rush. She turned to a new page and copied down the new circle exactly, parsing it out into its component pieces. It had the same basic layout as the other one, but the details were much simpler. The entire section for granting authorization didn’t exist, and the one for checking it didn’t match up.

'You can fix it? You draw circles all day.'

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

She grimaced. "I do, but not like this."

'Change the authorization.'

"I don't know how."

'Here, this one.' He nudged at a portion of the circle with his nose, and Alisa frowned at it. It did look different than the one in the other room.

She pulled out her notebook and compared. Yes, there were three places where the circles diverged, though they were identical in all other respects. This one included an extra complicated layer affixed to the outside, a secondary effect behind a different set of circles, which the original had lacked. There was also a blank space where the circle that linked with her wrist brand had been.

"Good thing I wrote this down," she muttered, drawing her stylus. "You sure this will be alright?"

Zen shrugged, a complicated motion with his lower wings and upper arms. 'It's got different authorization.'

Alisa nodded and carefully, using the tiniest bit of power she could, carved the matching circle into the blank space. Her dragon magic was too thick for detail work like this, and she held her breath as she moved with careful precision. The slightest mistake would ruin the whole thing.

Or, as it turned out, her power simply wouldn't fit in the provided space. Two of the lines blurred together into one, leaving a single double-thick line in their place. The spell quickly lost its integrity, the power sliding away and lumping together into an unshaped blob.

"It's no use, Zen. I can't do it."

Then she stared at the circle on the wall. The outer door opening array had worked perfectly well despite her dragon magic. She just needed to duplicate the array with the changed parameters.

"Is there any reason not to duplicate the original array exactly?" Alisa mused quietly aloud.

'No, but it might not function as you expect.'

"I'm alright with that as long as it opens the door." She held up her notebook with one hand and started duplicating the door trigger from the other side, scaled up so she could draw it even with dragon magic.

The smaller version was too tightly packed to be replicated, but fortunately scale was one of those things in magic that could be safely altered without much in the way of side effects. If you drew a spell too large, you started to introduce minute fractures or tiny imperfections which would have been overlooked by a smaller scale circle, so the general rule was that the smaller the spell the more stable it would be. But this was still well within the range of reasonable.

She copied it out carefully, exactingly, pushing the power into the stone of the wall as she went. Several times she lost the scale of it, drew a line a little wrong or tried to put them too close together, and had to start over.

But she had steady hands, plenty of wall to work with, and the patience to keep trying, so finally finished one properly.

The spell clicked into place and activated. The wall didn't open.

Alisa looked around to see what had happened instead, and found a flat black rectangle hovering in midair in the middle of the room. She stared in shock.

"Zen, is that... a magical doorway?" she whispered in awe.

Zen flew into it, then abruptly collided with Alisa's back as he came out of nowhere behind her. 'Yes it is.'

She stared at the doorway, then the blank wall where her dragon had emerged. then back at the doorway.

"It goes to a set location," she said. "This circle, goes to this location. It's not a door opening spell. It's a door creation spell. So that means the part in this spell ..." she went back to the other spell, the one she'd ruined by trying to add her authorization token, "this spell has the settings to go back."

Alisa slashed her pen through the new circle she'd drawn, scribbling past the resistance until the doorway disappeared and the now-innert magic slid free of its former imprisonment.

She copied the second spell onto the wall at the same expanded size so she'd have room to fit in her authorization. Then she carefully added the section linking to her wrist's mark, and activated the spell. The doorway opened a few steps into the room, the offset matching that between the original spell and the wall, but blatantly wrong for pretending to be an ordinary opening.

Alisa stepped through, and emerged in the tiny secret room under the ruined library. She exhaled in relief, then the implications of this began to hit her and she laughed aloud.

She couldn't believe her good fortune. This was far, far more valuable than any secret treasure or magic tome. She could make a door to the secret cave from anywhere! She'd need to study the spell circles to figure out how to come back to anywhere but the room under the library, if she wanted to truly make it her personal hideout, but it was obvious no one else had used the place in a very very long time.

Zen flew out beside her, and she could feel his own excitement echoing back to her.

"I think we should destroy this circle," Alisa said, gesturing to the tiny, concealed circle in the corner. "If we leave it, someone else might find it. I've already got it copied down, and if we need to use it again we can always draw it again."

If the teachers got their hands on it they'd probably do something boring with it like insist that it be used as a resource for gathering life-magic aligned moss. Or find a way to weaponize it, if The Traitor found out. No thank you. But now she thought of it, she could probably sell the moss for its magical properties.

She reactivated the circle and stepped back through the door into the cave, stuffed her pockets with as much of the moss Zen had torn from the walls and ceiling as she could fit, then stepped back out into the original room.

She stared at the circle for a long time, trying to work up the nerve to actually destroy it. She wished there were a way to take it with her physically, it felt like a horrible desecration to ruin something so old and probably one-of-a-kind. But even if she could carve it out, it would be a liability to have around, so she set stylus to stone and scribbled through the circle to break the spell's integrity. The door vanished immediately, but she continued drawing across the circle until its form was completely indistinguishable.

She returned up the stairs, scribbled out the spells holding the top door open, and gently lowered it back into its place. She shoved a few beams painstakingly back across it to make it less of an obviously-cleared patch, but there was a good chance someone would find it anyway.

She shrugged. It wasn't like anything she did could keep the discovery secret forever. And worst case scenario, she still had the circles to study. Only luck had allowed them to be the first to find it. Well, luck and Zen’s insatiable curiosity.

Alisa grinned and scratched Zen under the chin. "You've done well. Though, I’m curious. How did you get inside there in the first place?"

'Pipes,' he said, as though crawling through ancient pipes were a commonplace activity for him.

"And you're not afraid you'll get stuck?"

'I do not get stuck,' Zen said haughtily, trying to conceal several brief flickers of thought that clearly implied he had, in fact, gotten stuck more than once and just didn't want her to know.

She smiled and pretended not to have overseen. "Just be careful. I don't want to lose you."

'I will not be lost,' he said confidently. 'Now you may return to your excessively long nap.'

Alisa chuckled as he uncoiled and flew off to nose around in the ruins some more. It wasn't how she'd have imagined spending the night, but it was certainly interesting.

Zen was still investigating when she woke, but emerged dust-covered and excited when she walked by on her way to class, taking his place behind her.

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