I woke to silence. Not the peaceful kind that comes before dawn, but the thick, suffocating sort that pressed on my ears and chest until I thought I might shatter beneath it.
The first thing I noticed was the scent—old varnish, velvet gone to dust, and something faintly metallic that clung to my tongue like rust. I couldn't breathe properly. My lungs moved, but the air refused to warm inside me.
Something rough brushed my fingers. I blinked, though I couldn't see anything yet. Wood, polished but splintering. Cloth stretched taut above me. My hands rose of their own accord, found the lid, and pushed.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a dull crack, the world split open. A streak of light—thin, cold, and silver—cut through the dark like a knife. The coffin lid shifted just enough for my fingers to curl through the gap, prying it wider.
I sat up.
The sound that escaped my throat wasn't a gasp; it was more like the first breath of something long starved. Air moved through me without comfort. My body felt too light, too still. When I touched my own wrist, there was no pulse.
The chamber around me glowed faintly blue from runes etched into the marble floor. Candles, half-burnt and long-forgotten, lined the walls. The air shimmered faintly with magic—protective wards, maybe. My eyes adjusted quickly, unnaturally so. Shadows resolved into detail: sigils scratched into stone, silver cords, old family crests carved into the wall.
And the coffin. My coffin.
Inside, I had lain on velvet the color of spilled wine. The name engraved on the brass plate glinted faintly in the light.
Daphne Isolde Greengrass.
The letters meant nothing—until they did. The sound of the name bloomed inside my skull, a whisper that wasn't mine. Daphne.
It rang in my blood like a bell.
I pressed my hand to my forehead. Images flared behind my eyes: a girl laughing beneath summer trees, a wand flashing green, a cold floor and the taste of iron. Then—something else. Flickering screens. A world without magic. My world. I was certain of that much.
Somehow, impossibly, both were true.
When I tried to stand, my legs trembled. The stone floor was colder than I expected, the chill climbing through me as if eager to find a home. My reflection caught in a broken mirror across the room. What stared back wasn't me—or not entirely.
A girl of ten years, though her gaze was older. Skin like porcelain glazed with moonlight. Lips bloodless. Hair pale gold, luminous in the half-dark, as if the moon itself had spilled across her head and stayed there.
She was beautiful in the way statues are: precise, cold, untouchable.
I touched my cheek. The skin gave, smooth and cool. My fingers trembled. "This isn't…" I began, but my voice broke, dry as parchment. I swallowed nothing and tried again. "This isn't possible."
The mirror didn't answer, but the air did. Something stirred, faint as a sigh, threading through the room's silence.
Greengrass blood remembers.
I flinched and turned. The words seemed to crawl from the cracks in the wall, half-spoken, half-remembered.
Footsteps followed.
The door opened without sound. A man stepped in—tall, severe, dressed in mourning robes dark as ivy. A wand in his hand glowed faintly green. His face, pale and sleepless, twisted between disbelief and grief.
"Daphne?" he whispered.
I wanted to answer that he was mistaken, but the word rose to my lips unbidden—Father. The moment it formed, his expression crumpled.
"You're awake," he said softly. "Merlin help us."
He lowered the wand slightly, though his hand still shook. "Three months," he murmured. "We waited. The curse has never taken this long."
The curse.
He stepped closer, careful, as though I were a wild creature that might bolt—or bite. The air between us thickened, heavy with magic I hadn't summoned. The candles guttered. Shadows pooled at my feet, moving with the slow rhythm of my breath.
"Stay there," he warned, eyes darting to the floor where silver wards circled my coffin. "You've crossed the threshold already."
"What—" My voice rasped again. "What happened to me?"
His jaw tightened. "You were meant to rest."
He spoke like a man delivering a eulogy.
"Then why am I here?" I whispered.
His gaze flicked to the sigils that had begun to fade. "Because Greengrass blood is stubborn." He hesitated, pain clouding his eyes. "The curse grants a cruel mercy—sometimes, the vessel walks again before the soul is entirely gone."
I didn't understand, not yet. My mind split between two selves: the modern one who understood words like curse and ritual only from books, and the other—Daphne—whose memories hovered at the edge of consciousness like ghosts behind a curtain.
He stepped back toward the door. "If there's any part of you left, fight it. Do you understand me? Before dawn."
"Fight what?"
His answer came like a confession: "Your own blood."
Then he was gone. The door sealed itself behind him with a sound like a breath being drawn and held.
I stared at it for a long time, unsure whether to scream or laugh. I did neither. The hunger in my chest grew instead—not for food, not even for air, but for something else. The thrum of magic in the walls. The slow, rhythmic beat of a heart not mine, echoing somewhere above.
I wandered the chamber, fingertips trailing along the sigils. Each one thrummed faintly at my touch, as though remembering who had drawn them. The protection wards—they were meant to contain whatever I had become. I could feel the intention soaked into every carved line.
I found the family crest hanging over the altar: a serpent wrapped around a moonlit rose, etched in obsidian. Beneath it, an inscription:
In tenebris, lux sanguinis.
In darkness, the light of blood.
The words pulsed faintly as I read them aloud. A warmth—or something like it—stirred under my skin. My vision sharpened, and the candlelight brightened until it hurt. I stumbled backward, catching my reflection again.
This time, the girl in the mirror smiled first.
I stared, frozen. The reflection's lips curved, a perfect imitation of mine, except the eyes—her eyes—were older, ancient, glimmering with the kind of knowledge no child should have.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
Daphne Greengrass, the mirror mouthed, though I hadn't.
Then, faintly, another voice, overlapping, deeper.
And something more.
I reached toward the glass; my fingers met ice. The reflection's hand overlapped mine perfectly. For an instant, a spark ran up my arm—bright, burning, familiar. Not heat, exactly. More like memory, rekindled.
Flashes again: the taste of metal, a mother's scream, the pull of something vast and unseen. And beneath it all, a whisper of another life entirely—mine, before this.
The vision shattered when the candles flared, spilling wax and smoke. The mirror cracked from corner to corner. The girl inside fractured into a dozen pieces.
I collapsed to my knees, gasping, though I didn't need breath. My chest ached anyway. Tears wouldn't come—only dry tremors that racked a body that wasn't meant for me.
When I finally looked up, a single phrase had appeared on the mirror's fractured surface, etched by something unseen:
REMEMBER.
I rose unsteadily. The hunger inside me had sharpened, its edges clearer now. I could feel every sound in the manor—the creak of beams, the scurry of a mouse behind stone, the faint pulse of something warm and living above the crypt.
And in the midst of it all, I heard it again:
Greengrass blood remembers.
Only this time, the voice was my own.
….
The first rays of false dawn crept across the cracks in the ceiling, gray and soft. I watched them without moving. They burned faintly against my skin—not pain, but resistance, like touching a live wire.
So the old tales were true, then. Light and blood did not mix well.
I turned back toward the coffin. Its interior was stained where I'd lain, dark and faintly shimmering in the half-light. The wards around it had gone out completely. Only silence remained now. Heavy, expectant.
I stood there for what felt like hours, counting the beats of a heart that wasn't mine. The manor groaned with age above me; I could feel it waking too, as if the house itself remembered me.
Footsteps echoed, faint at first, then closer. Steady. Measured. Familiar.
The door creaked open, and the same man from before—the one whose grief had carved hollows beneath his eyes—stood framed in the threshold, clutching a lantern whose flame flickered green in the half-light.
Lord Elias Greengrass.
The name rose unbidden from Daphne's fading memories, and the sound of it made something in me ache.
His gaze fell to the coffin first. Empty.
For a heartbeat, he didn't breathe. Then his eyes found me standing beside it.
He froze. The lantern trembled in his hand, throwing broken light across his face. His mouth opened once, twice—no words. Then, softly, a single sound escaped him, rough as torn parchment.
"Daphne…"
I said nothing. What could I say? I didn't even know if I was her anymore.
He set the lantern down, hands shaking so violently the glass clinked. For a long moment, he just looked—really looked—like a man trying to reconcile faith with the impossible. Then the tremor in his shoulders broke into quiet sobs he tried and failed to contain.
When he finally spoke, it was not to me, but to the shadows.
"It's happened again," he whispered. "The blood remembers."
He stepped forward until he stood just outside the circle of extinguished wards. His face was lined and pale, streaked with tears. "Do you know what that means, my child?"
I didn't answer. I couldn't. My throat felt dry as ash.
His eyes glistened in the half-light. "By the old ways," he murmured, voice breaking, "I should end it now. Spare you… spare us all."
He reached inside his robe. The glint of silver caught the dawn. A knife—ritual, ceremonial, older than the manor itself. Its blade was etched with runes I almost recognized.
My body tensed without command. The shadows behind me stirred like breath, eager, ready. My instincts—her instincts—wanted to flee, or fight.
Elias stared at the blade a long time, then dropped it to the floor. The sound of it clattering on stone echoed like a curse breaking. He sank to his knees beside it, shaking his head.
"I cannot," he said, voice raw. "I cannot kill my own daughter."
The silence that followed wasn't peaceful—it was charged, sacred, heavy with consequence. He covered his face with one hand, the other reaching toward me but stopping short, trembling.
"Your mother would have told me to do it," he whispered. "But I can't. Not you. Not again."
The lantern light trembled. I could see the grief carved deep into the lines around his mouth—the kind of grief that wasn't new, but old and familiar, worn smooth by years of loss. He looked so human, so heartbreakingly mortal, that for the first time since I'd awoken, I felt a flicker of pity.
Or hunger. I wasn't sure which.
"Father…" The word escaped before I could stop it. It sounded strange, foreign, and it made him flinch.
He looked up sharply, eyes bright with tears. "You remember?"
I hesitated. Then, quietly, "Enough."
He closed his eyes, shuddering. "Then I have truly damned us both."
He rose slowly, gathering the blade again—but not to use it. He pressed it into my hand instead. The metal stung faintly, not from heat, but from holiness. The runes glowed faintly red where they met my skin. I didn't drop it.
"If there's anything of you left," he said, voice hoarse, "you'll need this more than I."
"Why?"
"Because the world will not forgive what you've become."
The weight of the knife grounded me in ways the coffin hadn't. It was cold, but it felt real. The kind of real that stories never manage to convey.
He took a step back, his expression a strange mixture of fear and love. "I'll keep the others away. For as long as I can. But if the hunger grows…" His voice caught. "Don't let it be them."
And then he was gone—turning, the lantern's light trailing behind him like a dying star. The door sealed shut once more, leaving me alone with the whispering dark.
For a long time, I didn't move. The knife glowed faintly in my palm. Its runes pulsed to the rhythm of that same impossible heartbeat somewhere above.
I raised my gaze to the mirror one last time. My reflection had changed again—the cracks across her face no longer raw but traced in faint silver light. Her lips curved, the same haunted half-smile I'd seen before.
"You should have killed me," I whispered to the empty room.
But even as I said it, I wasn't sure which part of me meant it—the man who mourned the loss of his humanity, or the girl whose blood sang with power too old to be undone.
And somewhere deep within the manor's bones, beneath its wards and silences, I could swear I heard my father weeping.
Not a warning.
A command.
Greengrass blood remembers.