The manor knew she was coming.
Each step Elara took echoed longer than it should have, trailing behind her like whispered warnings in an empty cathedral. Her gloves — thick leather stitched with silver thread — creaked as she tightened them around the petrified rosewood effigy. It squirmed, slightly. Or maybe she imagined it. She hoped she imagined it.
"The Briarcrypt lies beneath the western conservatory," Valen had said, handing her a map drawn in sepia ink on what looked suspiciously like cured skin. "Don't follow the stairs until the third lantern goes out. If you descend before that... you'll enter the wrong garden."
"Elaborate," she had demanded.
He hadn't.
Now, she clutched that map in her other hand, winding her way through the house's twisting halls. The Briarcrypt — what a beautiful name for a cursed place. Every corridor she passed had vines stretching through the plaster like veins, and petals fell from invisible blooms, caught on the breeze of memory.
Persephone perched on her shoulder now, tail wrapped around Elara's neck like a living scarf. "When you enter, don't speak. Not even to me. The roots listen for sound. They drink it. They grow hungry from it."
Elara nodded grimly.
She was growing used to rules that felt like they belonged to fairy tales written by unhinged morticians.
They reached the conservatory doors just as the third lantern flickered and died.
Beyond the doors: green glass panes veiled a dead jungle. Moss-covered statues lounged in crumbling repose. Thorny branches wove together in patterns too intricate for nature, more like lace spun by the desperate hands of the mad.
The air was rich — wet, fungal, and suffocating.
In the center of the floor, a circular grate was choked with ivy. A spiral pattern had been worn into the stone.
Of course.
Another spiral.
Without being told, Elara knelt and placed the effigy on the grate. The seeds in its eye sockets vibrated softly, like breath hitching before a scream.
The ivy recoiled.
The grate clicked.
And the floor opened.
They descended into the Briarcrypt.
---
The stairs wound down farther than should have been possible. Dirt seeped between ancient bricks. Thorned roots pushed through the cracks, pulsing faintly as if alive — or dreaming.
When the last step gave way to soft soil, Elara found herself standing beneath the earth in what could only be described as a garden mausoleum. Tombstones were half-swallowed by black moss. Iron trellises arched overhead, supporting desiccated vines and roses that bled ink when brushed.
"This is where failed Callers were buried," Persephone whispered.
Elara dared not ask how many.
A narrow path, lined with crushed bone instead of gravel, led to the center — a circle of wilted rosebushes, tangled and enormous, like a nest built for grief itself.
Elara stepped into it.
At once, the ground trembled.
Roots lashed upward, but not to harm her. They wrapped around the circle, forming a crude altar. In its center — a stone basin lined with teeth instead of carvings.
"Speak nothing. Bury it," Persephone said.
Elara removed the rosewood effigy from its wrappings and knelt.
She dug with the copper spade Valen had given her. The soil wasn't just rich — it was ancient, and wrong. Fragments of bone cracked beneath the blade. Once, she unearthed what she swore was a tooth with writing etched along its surface.
She buried the effigy in the center and pressed her gloved hands over the soil.
Silence fell.
Thick.
Then: breathing.
Not hers.
Not Persephone's.
From beneath the garden, something was awakening.
A bloom of decay cracked the soil. A rosebud — thorned and black as sin — pushed upward, slow and steady. The petals peeled back.
Within them was a face.
Mouth sewn shut with thread made of hair.
Eyes wide.
Alive.
Or at least... remembering.
Elara recoiled.
But the soil gripped her.
"You called me," a voice whispered. It didn't come from the rose. It came from her own mouth.
The effigy was speaking through her.
"You called me from the rot. From the root. From where the dead clung and begged and I would not answer."
Elara's vision blurred.
She saw herself in a mirror that wasn't there. But she was older — no, younger? No. Different.
The Third Caller.
She was standing in this very place, holding her own child's bones. She buried them. And from that grief, she bound the third.
"Name me," the voice demanded.
The petals trembled.
The spiral on Elara's palm glowed.
The ink in her veins burned.
And she spoke, unbidden:
"Thornweald."
The moment the name left her lips, the roots screamed.
Not in sound — in feeling. Like the earth itself sobbed.
The rosebushes burst into bloom, black and crimson, all at once.
And in the center, the rose-face pulled itself free, body unfolding like a cursed flower.
It stood tall, wrapped in veils of thorn and petal.
Where it walked, the soil died anew.
"I remember you," it said. "I remember the mother. I remember the bargain."
Elara's legs gave out.
Persephone caught her head before it struck the stone. "Easy," the cat hissed. "You gave too much."
"I don't—" Elara coughed. "I didn't mean to give anything."
"You did," Thornweald said. Its voice was not cruel. It was gentle, like a gardener weeping over a blight he could not stop.
"You gave sorrow," it added. "You gave pain. You gave root."
It touched her spiral-marked palm.
The mark deepened. Thorned vines etched into her skin.
"Three are returned," it said. "Three remember."
And then it was gone.
No flash.
No shimmer.
Just vanished — into the roots, into the blood, into the memory.
---
They climbed back to the conservatory in silence.
When Elara emerged into the light, she saw that the once-dead vines now bloomed.
Ink-dripping roses.
Sickly, beautiful, impossible.
Valen met them at the door.
He didn't speak. Just helped her inside and to the study.
The journal was already shaking.
Words bled onto the page like a scream given form:
> Three return. The fourth waits where mirrors see what was never there. Speak not its name — reflect it.
Elara collapsed into the chair by the hearth.
Valen poured more of that necrotic wine and handed her the cup.
She drank.
It tasted like stars drowning in regret.
"How are you still standing?" she asked him.
He gave her a grim smile. "I've died once. You get used to certain pains."
Persephone curled into her lap, for once silent.
The fire flickered.
But there was no warmth.
Only names.
And memories.
And something else — moving deeper, heavier.
The house stirred again.
Paintings blinked.
The walls shivered.
And far, far beneath the floors...
A door unlocked itself.
No one heard it.
But they would.
Soon.