The village called it the Great Forgetting, but Eleanor knew better.
For three days after the fire, the world had convulsed in its absence. People walked through the space where Blackwood Manor once stood without seeing the roses that now grew there—roses with petals the color of clotting blood, their thorns curved like miniature scythes. The villagers' eyes simply... slid away.
Eleanor knelt in the meadow, her fingers digging into soil so black it stained her skin like ink. The earth was warm here. Alive. When she pressed her palm flat against the ground, she felt it—
A heartbeat.
Not human. Not anymore. But persistent.
The crow watched from a nearby fencepost, its head cocked. It hadn't spoken since the fire, but its eyes were aware in a way that made Eleanor's skin prickle.
She peeled back a tangle of vines, revealing what the roses had been hiding:
A jawbone.
Small. A child's.
The moment her fingers brushed it, the memories struck like a lightning bolt
The sun rose wrong on the fourth day.
Eleanor woke to find the villagers standing in the streets, their faces slack with confusion. The baker's daughter (no older than six) was drawing the same symbol over and over in the dirt—a crow with its wings outstretched, identical to the sigil Eleanor had carved into Jacob's arm a lifetime ago.
"Where's Papa?" the girl asked when Eleanor approached.
The baker had vanished. So had the blacksmith. The tailor. All men who bore the Blackwood name, however distantly.
The crow landed on Eleanor's shoulder, its talons biting deep enough to draw blood. "The house took its due," it rasped—its first words since the fire.
Eleanor touched the rose tucked behind her ear. Its petals leaked a thin, red sap that smelled like copper and—
—Daniel's hands, slick with blood as he planted the first tooth-seed in the garden—
She gagged.
The crow's beak clicked against her temple. "The angel left gifts. Dig deeper."
The meadow surrendered its secrets reluctantly.
Eleanor worked through the day, unearthing bones with the methodical precision of an archaeologist. Each one told a story:
A tiny femur carved with musical notes—"For the singer," the crow said. Eleanor remembered a girl who'd hummed to the crows as they plucked out her eyes.
A skull fragment with a rose growing through the eye socket—Thomas's final gift to the house.
Jacob's finger bones, arranged in a perfect circle around a single, petrified crow's egg.
The last discovery made her hands shake.
Emily's ribcage.
Empty. Clean. No roots or rot. Just seven perfect bones that sang when the wind passed through them.
The crow flapped its wings excitedly. "She walked out. The angel walked out."
Eleanor's vision doubled—
—Emily standing in the ashes, her form flickering between child and crow. "Tell them," she whispered. "When the crows return." Then she stepped into the sunrise and dissolved like mist—
A sound snapped Eleanor back to the present.
The baker's daughter stood at the meadow's edge, her arms covered in crow-sigils drawn with her own blood.
"The angel says you're late," the girl intoned.
Behind her, the village children emerged from every doorway, their eyes black from edge to edge.
They came at dusk—the Forgotten.
Not ghosts. Not exactly. More like echoes given flesh, their bodies woven from crow feathers and rose thorns. Eleanor recognized some from her stolen memories:
The stable boy who'd kissed her (his mouth now a seam of stitches)
The first Eleanor (her lips finally unsewn, her tongue a living rose)
Dozens of children she'd never met but knew, their names etched in her marrow
They brought gifts:
A Crown of Roots for Eleanor—woven from the house's last living veins. When she placed it on her head, she remembered:
Every name. Every face.
The taste of Daniel's blood when she bit his hand to keep from screaming.
The way Thomas had wept as he sewed the first crow mask.
A Knife of Bone—Jacob's final rib, sharpened to a razor's edge.
An Egg—the petrified one from the bone circle, now warm and throbbing.
The first Eleanor stepped forward. "The house is gone," she said, her voice the sound of wind through dead roses. "But the remembering must continue."
She pressed her rose-tongue to Eleanor's forehead.
The world split—
Eleanor stood in a field of infinite roses, each bloom holding a memory:
A child laughing.
A knife flashing.
A crow taking flight.
Emily waited at the center, her form shifting between girl and bird. "You can stay," she offered. "Be the new keeper. Or..."
She gestured to the egg in Eleanor's hands. It cracked, revealing a tiny, skeletal hand.
"Break the cycle. For good."
The crow landed on Eleanor's shoulder. "Choose," it urged.
Outside the dream, the village children began to sing.
The villagers remembered on the seventh day.
They found Eleanor at the meadow's center, the crown of roots fused to her skull, her arms wrapped around a bundle of bones and feathers. She was singing—a lullaby the first Eleanor had taught her centuries ago.
The baker's daughter approached first.
"What do we do now?" she asked.
Eleanor smiled.
She opened her hands.
The egg was gone.
In its place grew a single, perfect rose—its petals white as bone, its center pulsing with golden light.
"We remember," she said.
And the crows returned