The air shifted.
Larissa felt it in her bones—a sharp tug, like a string being pulled taut behind her ribs. The pool in the cathedral began to ripple, even though no wind stirred and no stone had dropped to disturb it.
The question still lingered.
Will you bind me again, or will you set me free?
Larissa opened her mouth to speak, but the words caught in her throat. Her voice no longer felt like hers—it was wrapped in centuries of silence, heavy with names she had never known but somehow remembered. Women who had made promises beneath this very stone. Men who had broken them.
She wasn't just Larissa anymore.
She was all of them.
Lukyan stepped back as the pool began to glow, its inky surface now shining with a soft silver light that pulsed with the beat of the house's buried heart.
Boom.
Boom.
BOOM.
The water rose. Not like a wave—but like a wall. And in it, a door formed.
Carved entirely from shadow and root, it pulsed with life. Ancient symbols flickered across its surface, rearranging themselves in spirals and constellations. Larissa reached out—then froze.
She remembered the last door.
The one in her dreams.
The one her mother told her never to open.
"This is the first," Lukyan whispered beside her. "The original threshold."
"The first bargain," she echoed.
"Yes." He sounded hollow, frightened. "And the last."
She stepped closer to the door.
The air around it buzzed. Static prickled her skin. From behind the threshold, she could feel something watching. Not malevolent—but vast. Hungry. Curious.
Ready.
She glanced at Lukyan. "If I go through—"
"You won't come back the same."
"I already didn't."
He nodded.
Larissa placed her hand on the door.
And it opened—not with a creak, but a gasp.
A sudden exhale of the house's true breath.
Inside was not another room.
It was before rooms. Before time. A space unformed, built from thought and memory and choice. Floating pathways stretched out like spider silk across a void of stars. Threads of possibility.
At the center was a tree. Not a tree of bark and leaf—but of bone and song. It glowed softly, each root a memory, each branch a future.
Larissa stepped in.
Above – The Manor Fractured
Dimitri walked through a hallway that no longer obeyed physics.
The chandelier lay in dust behind him. The Volkov portraits had burned away, leaving only scorched outlines and silence. The doors whispered now. They tried to mislead him. Confuse him.
But he was no stranger to betrayal.
He stopped before a mirror—one of the few that hadn't cracked.
In it, he didn't see himself.
He saw her.
Larissa, walking the impossible thread toward the root-tree. Her outline shimmered with silver fire. Her eyes were no longer human.
A goddess was being born beneath the floorboards.
And Dimitri…
He smiled.
He would make sure she remembered who he was when she woke.
Below – The Threading
The moment Larissa stepped onto the thread-bridge, time unraveled.
She saw herself as a child—hands bloody from the frost, screaming for a mother who could never come. She saw Anya standing above the broken cradle. She saw the first queen, crown of thorns on her head, binding herself to the house with blood and grief.
Each step was a thread she had to claim.
A path she had to own.
And behind her… something followed.
An echo, dragging behind her like a cloak of ghosts.
Anya.
The broken throne.
Lukyan's uncertainty.
The door remained open.
The tree waited.
She reached the center.
The tree pulsed, branches trembling, and a voice unlike any she had ever heard—deep, eternal, like thunder beneath the sea—spoke:
"You have cracked the heart."
Larissa nodded. "It was never whole."
"You have woken the memory."
"It was always awake."
"And now—will you shape me, or set me free?"
She didn't answer right away.
Instead, she placed her hand on the tree's trunk.
And it burned her.
Pain flooded her mind—images, names, languages that hadn't been spoken in a thousand years. She saw the first sacrifice. The first betrayal. The true purpose of the Manor.
It had never been a sanctuary.
It had been a womb.
A place to grow the weapon the world would one day need.
Larissa stumbled back, gasping.
She turned—and the doorway she had walked through… was gone.
Only the threads remained.
And behind her, the sound of branches breaking.
Someone else was coming.
Someone the house remembered.
Someone who had died to keep it bound.