The fog clung to the earth like flesh to bone, thick and unyielding. In the valley where the sun had long since stopped rising, a house stood buried in shadows. No maps bore its name, no roads led to its threshold. Yet every decade, without fail, someone found it.
This time, it was a girl.
She came barefoot through the trees, blood dried to her ankles, her breath shallow with the weight of whatever hunted her. Her name was Mira, though she had not spoken it in years. Not aloud. Names had power where she had been, and too many things knew hers already.
The forest behind her groaned like a living wound, its trees warped and trembling. A foul wind whispered her name through dead leaves. She kept walking.
The house saw her before she saw it.
A crooked gate opened of its own accord. Vines moved aside like curtains drawn back by unseen hands. She hesitated, but she had nowhere else to go. Behind her, the forest was rotting in fast-forward — trunks sagged, mushrooms bloomed black and bloated in seconds, and the air smelled like iron and endings.
The house wanted her.
Its windows were blind eyes. The shutters fluttered like breath. The roof sagged in places where time had gnawed too deeply. But the steps were clean. Polished, even. As if waiting.
Inside, nothing waited but silence, and a fire that had already been lit.
She stepped over the threshold. The door closed.
Behind it, something smiled.
The room was warm. Not comforting, but aware. Shadows hung like cobwebs above her, twitching softly. A chair sat by the hearth, angled to face her. Empty. Dust motes hung frozen in the air like suspended ash.
She did not speak.
Somewhere deeper in the house, floorboards creaked. Not under footsteps — not quite. More like a heartbeat.
She walked slowly, every board beneath her toes whispering stories in a language of groans and sighs. Each hallway led to another. The walls leaned inward. Photographs hung skewed on rusted nails, their subjects blurred or scratched out. One of them looked like her. Or what she used to be.
Something moved behind her.
She spun, heart pounding. Nothing. Just her own breath echoing louder than it should.
She turned back. The hallway was different.
Longer. Darker.
Mira took a step. Then another.
A whisper passed near her ear: "You're home."
She froze. The air was thick. The walls pulsed.
She ran.
Doors blinked open and shut on either side of her. Stairs curved impossibly upward. The house flexed. Shifted.
Then—silence. Stillness.
She stood in a room she hadn't entered. A nursery. Empty crib. Mobile turning slowly, despite the lack of wind.
Her name was scrawled across the wall.
Not once.
But hundreds of times.
She backed away.
The floor gave out beneath her.
She didn't scream.
She landed softly. On soil. The basement smelled like earth, wet and rich.
And breathing.
In the darkness, something old exhaled.
She was not the first.
She would not be the last.