Elara awoke with the word burned into her mind: Evermore.
It pulsed behind her eyes like fire, echoing with every heartbeat. Even after shredding the parchment where it had been scrawled in her own hand, the letters still lingered inside her skull, black and unyielding.
She sat up, trembling.
"No more," she whispered. "No more."
The sound of her defiance startled even herself. For a moment, she thought she heard the house stir wood settling in its beams, the faint groan of a floorboard far down the hall. As though the manor had heard her and did not approve.
But she refused to take it back.
By evening, she had forced herself into her mother's abandoned study.
The key had been hidden beneath the hearthstone in the kitchen, as Elara had long suspected. Agnes must have believed her too timid to search. But Elara had grown past timidity. The terror had curdled into something sharper: resolve.
The study was a tomb of dust and lavender. Curtains drawn, journals stacked, the air stale with secrets left to rot. Her candle flame quivered in the heavy silence.
She opened the journals one by one.
Much of the writing was ruined—water stains, fire marks, whole sections blackened into nothing. But what remained was enough. Strange symbols inked in spirals, words in shifting tongues. Records of sacrifices. Names of daughters who had come before her. A bargain struck in blood.
And in her mother's hand, scribbled between two pages nearly burned to ash:
If blood binds, blood must unbind.
Elara's pulse quickened. At last, something to fight with.
She pressed her hand to the page as though it might open wider, reveal more, but the rest was unreadable. Only fragments survived: a circle. A knife. And one warning, scrawled harshly at the edge:
The house yawns when it is denied.
Elara snapped the book shut.
"Then let it yawn," she muttered.
That night, she prepared her circle.
The chalk lines quivered under her unsteady hand, but she forced them steady. Around and around, until the floor bore a pale ring, enclosing her bed and desk. She lit every candle she owned, until the walls glowed golden and the shadows skulked into the corners.
The knife was small, borrowed from the kitchen. It trembled in her grip. She pressed the blade to her finger and watched a bead of blood bloom. It fell into the circle, spattering the chalk.
The manor groaned.
The sound was deep and wide, as if the house itself had drawn a breath. The floorboards swelled under her feet, beams creaked, walls stretched. A yawning sound rolled through the chamber, vast and hollow, like jaws unhinging.
"Elara…"
Her mother's voice drifted from the darkness beyond the candles.
She gritted her teeth. "Blood bound me. Blood frees me."
The chalk line trembled. The flame nearest her bent sideways, as though tugged toward the circle.
She raised her bleeding finger higher. "I am not yours. I am not..."
The walls answered.
A chorus of whispers dozens, hundreds rose all around her. The voices of women, layered and overlapping, weaving her name into a chant. Elara. Elara Veyne.
The flames guttered. The chalk circle bled dark as though soaked in shadow.
"Elara," her mother's voice cut through, clearer now, sharp as broken glass. "Do you think you can sever what was promised?"
"I will," she said, forcing strength into her voice, though her knees shook. "I will break it."
Silence fell.
Then one voice calm, heavy, close as breath spoke from the shadows:
"If you are not ours… then whose are you?"
The window cracked.
Glass splintered into a web of fractures. Feathers burst inward, black and slick. A raven crashed into the room, its eyes glowing silver, its wings scattering every candle. Darkness swallowed her.
The bird thrashed, croaking not with its own throat, but with another voice.
Agnes's.
"Elara," it rasped, perfectly in the housekeeper's tone. "You should not have tried."
Her stomach clenched. "Agnes?"
The raven flapped once more, scattering more feathers, and then dropped lifeless to the floor.
Elara's candle flame sputtered back to life on its own.
On the wall, scratched deep into the plaster, words gleamed faintly, as though etched by invisible claws while she had watched the raven die:
"She will tell you nothing."
Elara stared, her breath shuddering.
The curse was not just in her blood. It was in the walls. In the servants. In everything.
And now she knew: if she wanted answers, she would have to tear them out of the living.