Hollowmere Manor rose from the earth like a thought the land wished to forget.
Its stones were the colour of old ash, stitched together by moss and time, and the windows stared without curiosity, as if they had already seen everything worth seeing. The iron gate sagged on its hinges, surrendering to Lenora Blythe with a sound like a tired breath.
She entered not with courage, nor with fear, but with a quiet inevitability as though some sentence written long ago had finally reached its period.
The air smelled of damp soil and something colder: grief that had learned to keep still. Beyond the manor stretched the graveyard, its headstones leaning like conspirators, their inscriptions softened by years of rain and neglect. A banyan tree stood at the centre, roots clawing the ground as if attempting escape, its branches braided with shadows.
Lenora paused beneath it.
She had come to Hollowmere seeking silence. The world beyond had grown too loud with expectations, with futures that did not fit her shape. Here, she thought, the dead might be kinder than the living.
Her foot caught on a root.
The fall was brief, inelegant. Pain flared along her palm and knee, sharp enough to pull a breath from her chest. As she pushed herself upright, brushing dirt from her skirt, a voice rose from the dark between the graves.
"Careful," it said gently. "The ground remembers its dead."
Lenora froze.
The figure stepped forward, pale as moon-washed stone. He was neither solid nor smoke, but something held in between by an old, stubborn will. His eyes carried the patience of centuries and the sorrow of a promise never fulfilled.
"I am Edric Morwen," he said, inclining his head as though manners still mattered. "And you have stumbled into a place that does not forgive attachment."
Lenora should have fled. Instead, she felt an unaccountable warmth settle in her chest recognition without memory, intimacy without cause.
"Oh my lord," she whispered, not knowing why the words chose him. "What am I without you?"
Edric's expression flickered pain, wonder, hope before discipline smothered them all.
"Leave before night deepens," he said softly. "This ground takes more than it gives."
But Lenora Blythe had already been claimed by the silence between his words.
And the graveyard, patient as fate, closed its gates behind her.