The door wasn't locked. It simply refused to open.
Thalric found it after his second aimless excursion—half-limping, half-dragging himself past faded tapestries and shuttered galleries. He wasn't looking for anything. But the silence always led him places the staff no longer cleaned.
It was a narrow hallway beyond the west parlour, half hidden behind a dusty standing mirror. The air grew colder with each step. Columns of cracked paint flaked from the crown molding. Mice had carved routes through ancient wainscoting. And at the very end: a warped, ivory-handled door.
He turned the knob. It groaned but didn't give.
Behind it, he felt it: stillness. Heavy. Old.
He pressed his ear to the wood.
Nothing.
Then—faintly—the sound of something scraping. Slow. Rhythmic. Like fingers brushing paper.
Thalric didn't recoil. Just stood, listening. The sensation wasn't fear. Not exactly.
It was memory.
He went back the next day. The knob still wouldn't move. Nor the third day. On the fourth, he brought oil. Patience. The key he'd slipped from the steward's forgotten ledger drawer.
The door opened with a sigh.
Dust bloomed in the air, thick enough to choke on. He covered his mouth, blinking into the dark.
The room beyond wasn't just abandoned. It was buried.
Furniture shrouded in yellowed sheets. A child's desk, its legs splintered at one edge. A hearth long cold, bricks blackened with past fires. One slipper, far too small, tucked beneath a cracked bookshelf.
A portrait hung crooked over the hearth.
Percival.
Younger than the other one. Much. Six, perhaps seven. Rounder cheeks. Smiling too brightly. A wooden sword held proudly in hand. Paint chipped along the edges, as if someone had scraped at it out of spite.
There were more.
Under a sheet: a wooden horse. In the drawer: a broken flute.
Letters, again—but these ones to himself. Scribbled in a child's hand. Some proud. Others smeared with something Thalric didn't want to identify.
"Today Father said I was brave."
"I don't think I'll ever be king, but that's all right. I like watching clouds more."
"I tried not to cry when they took the sword away."
A room forgotten, not because it was unneeded, but because it made them uncomfortable to remember it had ever mattered.
Thalric didn't sit. Didn't touch the walls.
He simply stood there, in the silence of a boyhood locked away like an illness, and whispered:
"They buried you long before you died."
A floorboard creaked behind him.
He turned—slowly.
But there was no one there.
Just the long hallway, waiting.