The candlelight flickered, stretching shadows across the stone walls like reaching fingers. Outside, the wind whistled through the skeletal trees, scraping against the windowpanes of the old house as though something — or someone — wanted in.
Ellen sat cross-legged in the attic, surrounded by forgotten trunks and cobwebbed books, a child no more than eight. Her face was pale, eyes wide and distant, her voice no louder than a whisper as she spoke into the quiet night.
"I just want someone who sees me," she said. "Someone who won't go away."
No one answered. Not her parents — long buried. Not the housemaid who only spoke when she had to. Not the town children who called her strange and walked the other way.
So Ellen kept speaking to the air, her breath turning visible in the cold. "I don't care who they are. Just… let them come."
She didn't know that wishes have weight. That names unspoken still echo. That loneliness, when spoken aloud, can be heard by things that do not belong to this world.
Far from Wisborg, across crumbling mountains and half-forgotten paths, a presence stirred.
Eyes that had not opened in a hundred years blinked once in the dark. Ears that had long stopped listening twitched at the sound of her voice. And far beneath a castle carved into the side of a jagged peak, the coffin creaked.
Not open. Not yet.
But listening.
And from that moment on, Ellen dreamed of things she could not name. Eyes in the mirror that weren't her own. Shadows in corners that shifted when she turned her back. Whispers in languages no one around her spoke.
No one noticed at first. Not the nuns who took her in. Not the village priest. Not the doctor who said her seizures were "a nervous condition."
But Orlok had heard her. Felt her longing. Reached out with an invisible thread and tied it to her soul.
She grew up. She laughed, sometimes. She even loved.
But deep in her chest, like a thorn she couldn't remove, Ellen carried the echo of that childhood wish — and the thing that had answered.