The shape beneath the gravepond shimmered like a memory submerged in oil. It moved with no wake, no ripple, as if the water itself refused to acknowledge its presence.
Elara backed away from the window slowly, as if whatever watched her might forget she existed if she just stopped being interesting enough.
Behind her, the totem pulsed once more.
The effigy of ashwood — pale, knotted, and whittled into the shape of a long-faced thing with antlers and a slit where a mouth might be — jostled forward from its resting place inside the totem. It wanted out.
Or worse — it wanted in.
She turned to Valen, who had stopped pacing and now stood like a statue carved from both reverence and regret.
"So... the Hearth of Bone?" Elara asked. "Do we have a floor plan with that marked, or is it one of those ask the walls and hope you don't get swallowed situations?"
Valen hesitated, then offered a slight smile — the kind that always looked like it had to claw its way up from grief. "East Wing. Past the Gallery of Hung Saints. Through the Bleeding Clockroom. Left at the stairs that shouldn't exist. You'll know it when you see it."
Elara exhaled. "Right. Casual."
Persephone padded forward, tail curling like smoke around her ankles. "You'll want salt. And a lighter. And perhaps a knife. Just in case the fire grows teeth."
Elara blinked. "That... happens?"
"Once," Persephone said, nonchalant. "Maybe twice."
Balthazar meowed with something between smugness and warning before curling back up atop the totem, wrapping his body protectively around the effigies.
Valen grabbed a bundle of something wrapped in old velvet from beneath the fainting couch. Inside was a glass vial of coarse salt, a tarnished silver lighter, and a small dagger shaped like a thorn. He handed them to Elara. "This won't make it safer. Just survivable."
"Oh good," she muttered. "I love when my odds improve from 'none' to 'probably screaming.'"
---
The manor led her, again.
The East Wing wasn't as changed as the corridor had been — not yet — but it pulsed with anticipation. Paintings turned their eyes as she passed. Doors opened before she touched them, and some hissed when she did.
She passed the Gallery of Hung Saints, where portraits swayed gently even though there was no wind. The saints had no faces — just crowns of thorns nailed where their features should be.
Through the Bleeding Clockroom, she tiptoed across a floor of glass panels beneath which dozens of stopped clocks lay ticking anyway, bleeding fine red sand that spelled out words she didn't want to read.
Left at the stairs that shouldn't exist — they folded impossibly upon themselves like origami made by a mad god — she reached a long hallway tiled in black bone.
At the end, the Hearth.
---
It wasn't a hearth in the traditional sense. There was no chimney, no stone mantel. It was a raised dais made of what looked like ribcages fused together, their hollows forming a crude bowl the size of a table. Ancient ash lined the basin — thick, gray, and humming faintly.
She approached slowly. The pendant beat against her chest in rhythm with something deeper, older, beneath the ash.
Elara placed the ashwood effigy into the center of the hearth. It didn't sit. It planted itself — its tiny base growing small tendrils that clung into the ash like roots.
She sprinkled salt in a wide circle around the hearth, the grains vanishing into the cracks between bones as if swallowed by thirst.
Then, the lighter.
She held it to the center.
Nothing caught.
Then a second flare — the salt ignited first, casting greenish smoke, and the effigy's carved mouth opened with a dry pop, like a piece of wood cracking in a fire.
Her heart stopped.
The flame leapt up, curling into emerald tongues.
She waited.
The ink in her journal had said: Speak the name when the fire turns green.
But what name?
Her pendant seared against her chest. Her head rang with whispers.
> "T'alvyr."
The name wasn't hers.
But she said it anyway.
---
The fire screamed.
Not crackled. Screamed.
It rose in a column that touched the ceiling, burning cold and green, casting dancing shadows shaped like hunts and huntsmen, of beasts taller than towers and women wearing pelts of memory.
From the center, a figure emerged.
Taller than Valen.
Antlers of white bone curling from its brow like a crown.
Its face was wrong — not monstrous, but unfinished. As if someone had started sculpting a god but quit halfway to weep instead.
Its limbs bent oddly. Its skin was the color of bruised fog. It wore nothing but ash.
And when it opened its mouth, it did not speak — it howled.
Not in pain.
But in return.
The hearth cracked.
Elara stumbled backward.
The creature stepped down — not out of the hearth, but through it, as if it had never truly been contained.
"Caller," it said at last. Its voice was splintered wood and rotted silk. "You wear the house's name."
"I don't know what that means," Elara admitted.
"You will."
It extended a hand — wrong-jointed and long-fingered — and touched her brow.
---
The vision wasn't a vision.
It was a memory.
Not hers.
She saw through its eyes. Through T'alvyr's.
Running through the forest. A forest older than war. Chasing not prey, but promises.
Seeing the manor rise from the mist the first time, bones and brick and weeping wood.
And bowing.
To her.
To a woman who wore Elara's face but bore a crown of crows.
The First Caller.
The one who'd struck the pact. Who'd sewn the Bound into the foundations of the house. Who'd whispered to death and asked it to wait.
Elara gasped.
When the vision broke, the creature — T'alvyr — was kneeling.
Waiting.
"I called you," she whispered.
"You remembered me," it said. "So I am."
---
Valen arrived again — too late, again — breathless and furious.
"You summoned it?"
Elara pointed at the creature kneeling before her. "I guess? I followed the instructions."
Valen's jaw clenched. "That's T'alvyr. The Hunt That Forgot the Forest. Bound in ashwood for over four hundred years. I didn't think he'd be the first."
T'alvyr rose and regarded Valen. "You stink of shame, revenant."
Valen's eyes darkened. "And you stink of rot, old god."
Elara stepped between them. "Okay! Let's not start a supernatural bar fight. We've got bigger problems, like... what happens now?"
T'alvyr turned to her. "The others will come. Some will kneel. Some will bite."
"Lovely," Elara muttered. "A dinner party with eldritch consequences."
---
Back in the study, Elara sat in front of her journal again.
It was writing itself once more.
> The first has returned. The ash awakens. Speak the second name only after the salt is gone and the blood is fresh.
She swallowed hard.
"Blood?" she asked aloud.
The pendant didn't answer.
But the totem pulsed again.
Another effigy — the one of salt bone — began to tremble.
The Bound were stirring.
One by one.
Elara stood, the air suddenly colder than before.
"Valen," she said quietly. "What happens if we summon all six?"
Valen leaned against the doorframe, his eyes shadowed with centuries.
"The house stops dreaming," he said. "And starts remembering."
Persephone appeared on the desk, tail twitching nervously. "And trust me, darling — some things are better left in dreams."
Elara looked down at her ink-stained hands.
They were trembling.
But not with fear.
With purpose.
She didn't know what the house remembered.
But she would make it remember her.