Dmitri stood frozen, staring into the abyss of the forest where Vasilisa had disappeared. Her words still echoed in his ears, twisting in a way that felt like a curse settling deep within him. "I will give you a gift."
He couldn't shake the image of her eyes—voids of sorrow and rage—locked on him as she promised his great-grandfather would return. He knew, with a chilling certainty, that she was not speaking figuratively. There was something beneath the ground, something ancient, waiting.
He turned and ran toward the Orlov Estate, every step deeper into the trap. The gate loomed ahead, frozen shut, like a beast's jaw locked around its prey.
As he crossed the threshold, the cold in the air grew more suffocating. The house seemed alive now, breathing with a pulse of its own. The walls groaned under the weight of years—of secrets too dark to be spoken aloud.
Dmitri hurried through the halls, his footsteps echoing like a death march. He reached his father's study, where the family records were kept—tomes of history, of bloodlines. He ripped through them, hands shaking, desperate to find anything that could stop what was coming. But there was nothing. Not a single thing to explain why Vasilisa had chosen now to return, to wake the bones of the past.
Then, as his fingers flipped through pages worn with age, a map fell from one of the books. It was old, drawn in ink that had faded with time. At the top, it said one word: Cemetery.
Not just any cemetery.
The Orlov family burial grounds.
Dmitri's heart skipped a beat.
The map was simple—leading to an isolated corner of the estate, away from the main grounds, where the family tombs were said to be buried. The old stories told of forgotten graves—those who had never been marked, those whose deaths were kept secret. "The bones beneath the ice," he thought. Vasilisa's gift.
His blood ran cold as he made his way to the back of the estate, past the crumbling gardens and statues that had long since fallen into disrepair. The snow was heavier here, as though the earth itself was burying something.
He found the entrance—a large wrought-iron gate, half-buried in the snow. The air around it was thick with the smell of damp earth and decay. The tombs were older than any of the others, their stones cracked and covered in moss. Dmitri took a deep breath, stepping into the frozen silence.
At the far end, near an old oak tree, the ground was disturbed. The earth had been recently moved, and through the cracks in the surface, he saw bones—pieces of a long-forgotten skeleton, exposed to the bitter cold.
Something was calling to him from beneath the earth. He could feel it.
Then, as if by some twisted fate, a gust of wind swept through the cemetery, and the ground shifted. The bones moved, groaning as they shifted and reassembled.
Dmitri's heart pounded in his chest. He couldn't move. He couldn't breathe. Something was rising. Semyon Orlov—his great-grandfather. He could feel the presence of something ancient, something evil, clawing its way out of the earth, yearning to return.
He stumbled backward as the earth cracked open, revealing a hand—long, bony, covered in centuries of soil. The hand grasped the edge of the tomb and began to pull itself upward. Dmitri fell to his knees, his vision spinning as the air thickened with the weight of history, of vengeance, of things better left buried.
The figure that emerged from the ground was not human—not anymore. It was skeletal, its skin stretched too tight over bones, its eyes empty and void of life. Yet, there was something haunting in the way it moved. A presence. A soul that refused to die.
Semyon Orlov stood before him, a hollow shell of a man, his jaw hanging loosely as if it had never fully healed after death.
Dmitri's voice barely rose above a whisper. "You're… you're alive?"
Semyon's lips curled into a grin that was nothing short of terrifying. The dead man's voice rasped through the air like the sound of cracking ice.
"I was… waiting…"
The wind howled again, and Dmitri's blood froze. He knew—he knew—this was Vasilisa's doing. She had promised him a gift. And this… this was her gift. Not death. Not vengeance.
A return.
The past had never left.
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