What was left of Morn?ngstar Manor stood crooked against the horizon, black ribs of timber jutting through what used to be stone. The air still smelled like smoke and iron, though the fire had died days ago. Azure had told me about Yann?k’s dreams, about how he thought Leo was still alive. Only after I swore up and down not to tell anyone, and not to go investigate the manor, had she given me all the details of what had actually happened that night. I wasn’t entirely lying to her. I’d not told anyone what she had said; I’d just asked Saoirse to meet me at the house to check it out.

  Saoirse climbed off her horse first, boots crunching through frost and soot, and muttered something I didn’t quite catch. Probably a prayer, though she’d rather bite her tongue off before admitting she still had some faith in her saints. I stayed on my horse a little longer, taking it all in. The slope leading up to the ruins was scattered with half-buried debris, porcelain shards, warped silver cutlery, fragments of lives that had been expensive and short. It was colder here than it should’ve been.

  “You’re staring,” Saoirse said, brushing ash from her sleeve. “What’s the diagnosis, master wizard Vallen?”

  “It shouldn’t have burned this way.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The direction of collapse. Fire spreads upward, but here the top floors caved inward. As if the foundation gave out from underneath.”

  She looked at me like she always did when I tried to explain something, halfway between annoyance and worry. Then she stepped past me and started up the hill.

  “Come on, Basin. You can lecture me about combustion on the way up.”

  Inside, it was worse.The walls were brittle with soot, cracked like old bone. A chandelier lay half-melted in the center of what had been the dining hall. The air still hummed faintly, like a bell that hadn’t stopped ringing. I don’t know if Saoirse heard it too; she didn’t say anything, just kept her hand on her revolver, just in case the ghosts here were real enough to bleed. We passed through a doorway that was more hole than frame. The air shifted. I noticed the burn pattern along the walls, circular, deliberate. Runes scorched into plaster. The shapes repeated at intervals I could measure, but not explain.

  “You’ve got that look again,” Saoirse said. “What look?”

  “The one where you’re about to touch something cursed.”

  She wasn’t wrong. I crouched near the edge of what used to be the parlor and brushed away the soot with my glove. Beneath it, faintly etched into the stone, was a sigil. The same shape Yann?k described in his dreams, a circle intersected by a dragonclaw, surrounded by jagged marks that weren’t quite letters.

  The upper floors hadn’t fared any better. The stairwell was blackened, warped, half-collapsed, a ribcage of wood and soot. We climbed on anyway, Saoirse moved ahead in that unnervingly quiet way of hers, light on her toes, gun drawn, shoulders loose. She kept her hand on the rail, afraid to look down, muttering about broken necks and bad ideas. Every step groaned under our boots. Somewhere below, a plank cracked like a gunshot.

  “You sure this isn’t going to come down on us?” she asked.

  “If it does,” Basin said, “we’ll learn something about structural failure.”

  “Great. I’ll be sure to tell your ghost how much that helps.”

  The hallway upstairs was all smoke-stained light and silence.

  Leo’s door stood open, scorched but somehow still upright. Saoirse hesitated, not from fear, exactly, but reverence. The knob was hot when I touched it, though the air was cold. Inside, the room was almost untouched. The fire hadn’t reached it. The walls were cracked and the ceiling half-caved, but the bed was still there, the vanity mirror still in place, just fractured down the middle, like it had looked back at something too bright. Dust clung to everything. The curtains hung in tatters, gold threads dulled with soot.

  Saoirse crouched, brushing a fingertip across the floor.

  “This is wrong,” she said. “The fire started downstairs. It shouldn’t have stopped here.” “Maybe something protected it,” I muttered, only paying her half attention.

  “Like what? Divine intervention?” She grumbled.

  I didn’t answer; I was fully distracted by a section of plaster that had peeled back during the fire, revealing blackened wood beneath it. Not unusual. But the wood wasn’t smooth. It was marked. A rune, carved deep enough to survive fire. Not one of the ritual symbols we’d found in the caverns. This one looked older, sharper, with long vertical strokes and a curved line through the center. Almost like the web of a spider. I pulled at the plank, hoping to find what Leo must have thought would be a very subtle hiding place. I was right. Behind the singed plank was a thick book bound in dark leather, edges singed but pages intact. It smelled old, parchment and ash, and something faintly metallic, like dried blood.

  “Well,” Saoirse said, whistling low, “looks like your sister-in-law was keeping secrets.”

  I ignored her. Turning the cover carefully, trying not to let the spine crack. Each page was covered in precise handwriting, diagrams, translations, symbols that made my eyes ache if I stared too long.

  “These aren’t prayers,” I slipped. “Then what is it?”

  “This… this is Chondathic script.”

  Saoirse raised an eyebrow as I flipped to the next page, and the next, faster now. The handwriting shifted between entries, sometimes neat, sometimes frantic. Notes in margins. Measurements. Drawings of human figures overlaid with sigils.

  “She was studying it,” I said. “Not worshipping. She was… mapping it.” “I don’t speak dead languages,” Saoirse muttered. “Translate.”

  I looked up at her. “Neither do I; her being able to read it is a miracle.” I closed up the book again, slipping it into my satchel. “The mapping is obvious by how she’s writing, how manic it looks. We’d have to find a way to translate it. It wouldn’t be an easy task, considering how none of the professors at the city’s university knew how to read it. Even if they could, I doubt it would be a sound idea to bring this kind of literature to any of them.

  Saoirse stared at me. Really stared. “Azure’s going to believe anything you say. Yann?k will follow any scrap of hope. You and I need to be sure it’s even worth it.” She questioned.

  “It’s the only lead we have. If it brings him closure, it’s worth it.” I said bluntly, not appreciating her skepticism for the obvious clue we had found. The room went still. The faint wind through the cracked windows died away. Then, very softly, came a sound, a rhythmic thrum from somewhere below the floorboards. Like the heartbeat of something buried alive. Saoirse’s hand went to her gun as we both froze, listening.

  “Tell me that’s the wind.”

  “It’s not the wind,” I said.

  Of course, we had to follow the sound down through the west corridor, where the floor had caved inward to reveal a staircase that shouldn’t have existed, stone, old, much older than the manor itself. The smell of burnt incense drifted up from below.

  “I thought the cellars were sealed,” Saoirse said.

  “Yann?k must have known they weren’t, he just never told anyone.” “Guess not.”

  Lighting a small lantern so we could see at all, the flame stuttered like it didn’t want to be there. The walls were covered in carvings. Not written words, more like wounds. Gouged symbols that pulsed faintly under the light, as though the stone itself still remembered the ritual.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “This isn’t architecture,” I mumbled, voice low. “It’s anatomy.” “Meaning?”

  “The house was built on top of something else. Something living once.”

  Saoirse exhaled slowly, half a laugh. “You’re saying the house has a body now?” “I’m saying it had one long before any of us were born.”

  The staircase opened into a wide cavern, the same one Yann?k had described from his dreams of the ritual. The air was wet and cold, the stone slick underfoot. Ash still clung to the altar, thick and gray. Tracing my fingers through it, I found a handprint. Small. Human. Perfectly preserved in soot. Saoirse stood next to me, expression unreadable. “You think it’s hers?”

  “It’s too small,” I mumbled.

  “No, poor thing. I knew there had been more people here, but kids?!” She exclaimed in disgust.

  She wasn’t wrong. The thought of a child here disgusted me just as much. The tomes hung heavy in my satchel as we left the cavern behind, the air growing thinner with every step toward the surface. I didn’t look back until we reached the top of the stairs. I wondered if we should have looked inside the tunnels. I’d seen the opening hiding off in the corner of the cavern. Yann?k had described them as an absolute maze shrouded in darkness, so it was probably a better idea not to risk getting lost in there just to have the house come down on top of us. The thought that we could be leaving evidence behind gnawed at me as we stood at the top of the stairs. I didn’t want to miss anything that could help us figure this mess out, but was it worth risking our lives for? No. I knew that if I asked Saoirse, she would give me the same answer; so instead of going back down, we crawled out of the hole in the floor and stood on the creaking floorboards, looking at each other.

  “Basin, what stupid idea have you gotten?” Saoirse groaned. She could obviously tell I was reconsidering things.

  “We should have investigated the tunnels.” I sighed and ran a hand through my messy hair. “No, we should not.” She insisted, her voice firm and unwavering. “I’m not dying today.”

  “I’ll trade you Yann?k’s room. Could be worth something,” She flashed a devious smile.

  How had I not thought of that? Yann?k’s room could have vital information that we would have missed had she not brought it up. I had been too focused on Leonora to even remember that Yann?k had also lived here. We made our way up the staircase to the first floor again.

  Saoirse was still clutching the railing like the wood was going to break beneath her feet any second. Not a completely irrational fear, given the situation. Thankfully, Yann?k’s room was out in the open, unlike Leonora’s, which was tucked away in the eastern turret. His door had been burned away, so the opening to his small room was like a portal into complete darkness. I handed Saoirse the lantern I was carrying so she had any chance of seeing anything at all.

  With my elemental heritage, I had some sense of darkvision, though only in shades of blue, given somewhere down my ancestry, there had been a water elemental involved somehow. I haven’t yet gotten to researching that, sadly.

  Saoirse stepped inside first, holding the lantern out in front of her. She seemed a bit hurried, like she didn’t enjoy being here. Neither did I, but it was necessary to get as thorough as we possibly could. Anything that could put Yann?k at ease would help us all in the long run.

  “I guess this room got lucky too,” Saoirse spoke from inside. “Or deliberately spared,” I muttered in response.

  I stepped inside behind her, spinning around and taking the room in. The curtains were gone and the window opened. This must have been how he escaped; why else would anyone leave a window open to feed a raging fire? The air inside here was colder than the residual heat in the rest of the house. Refreshing in all honesty. Saoirse stood by a desk opposite the window, rummaging through stacks of paper in the light of the lantern. Moving over, they didn’t look like the pages from the tomes we had found. There weren’t any diagrams or patterns, no, these were the scribblings of fragmented thoughts. Lines crossed out, words rewritten and misspelled over and over again. I could barely tell what had been written, and I could tell Saoirse was struggling too. The ink had smeared and bled thanks to the heat, making the words illegible. Godsdamn it, this could have been useful.

  Above the desk hangs a shattered mirror, the glass cracked like the web of a spider. The shards hadn’t fallen; they stuck there, reflecting the lanternlight into golden veins on the walls.

  The light caught on something on the floor, something shimmered in the soot. I crouched and ran my finger through it, picking the shuímmering soot off the floor and holding it up to Saoirse and the light.

  “Do you see that?” I asked

  “Looks like glitter,” She shrugged.

  “No, it’s not, it’s metallic, gold dust perhaps.” I speculated, why would there be gold in the ash?

  “Sure, because the house decided it needed a bit of sparkle,” Saoirse laughed. Not taking things seriously whatsoever.

  It was then that I realized that this same shimmer had been in the soot on the altar downstairs. What was it doing in Yann?k’s room as well? What had been done to make it appear two levels above where the fire started. Maybe he had a bigger hand in the fire than I had first thought. I didn’t want to believe that he was responsible for all this, but I couldn’t completely ignore the possibility now that we had found this evidence. I couldn’t tell Saoirse; this was too sensitive. The risk of Azure and or Yann?k finding out was too big, even when it was just me who knew. If they find out I had suspicions, Gods know what would happen. I do not have the energy to deal with another internal tragedy right now. Saoirse and Azure butt heads enough for all four of us. I do not doubt that their relationship will only get more strained from here on out. That’s a mess for another day, when I have hopefully had the time to prepare for how to deal with it. I didn’t enjoy lying to my sister, but as we headed back to the chapel, I knew that was what I had to do. By the time we got there, the sun had already risen, and noon was rapidly approaching. My exhaustion rose with the warming rays, reminding me of my lack of sleep these last two weeks. Between exams and all this happening, there hadn’t been much time for sleep; it was beginning to take its toll.

  The chapel loomed ahead, watching us as our horses approached. The stained glass on the desecrated bell tower cascaded colourful light over the ruined building, making it look beautiful even though it wasn’t. Much like people.

  The inside was quiet, Azure kneeling in front of the altar. Her hands clasped, and her head bowed in prayer. It surprised me. I hadn’t seen her pray in years. Having stopped after our parents' passing. Yann?k sat in one of the pews, head in his hands, staring at the floor; seemingly so deep in thought that he didn’t look up when the door opened.

  Saoirse walked ahead of me, unapologetically stomping across the stone floor.

  “You look like shit,” She told Yann?k as she sat down beside him, slinging one leg over the other and spreading herself over the pew.

  “And you smell like smoke,” Yann?k replied, his voice tired but not harsh.

  Azure stood and turned towards us at the sound of their voices, brushing dust and dirt off her skirt. A flash of suspicion crossed her face, telling me everything I needed to know. I looked between her and Saoirse, my eyes wide and lips pursed in a tight line. A silent prayer that Saoirse had a good explanation for this.

  “Nothing to worry about, Azure,” She smiled as she pulled a cigarette box from the pocket of her long coat. “Can’t a girl smoke without being put to trial?”

  She put the cigarette in her mouth as she asked Yann?k, “Want one? You look like you need it.”

  She held out the cigarette, waiting for him to take it, which he did, much to my displeasure. I never enjoyed the smell. At least he’s not as bad as Saoirse, who almost constantly has one in her mouth. Yann?k sparked a flame between his fingers and lit the sticks, spreading the smell of poisonous herbs through the small chapel. Azure shared my disappointed look, but I knew she wouldn’t say anything since it seemed the smoke brought a small bit of colour back into Yann?k’s skin. The thing she had been trying to do since he woke up. She walked over towards the rest of us, standing in front of Yann?k and looking over all of us.

  “Why are you here then?” She asked us, pointedly looking at Saoirse.

  “We wanted to check in on the two of you, with exams I have to take, whatever precious seconds I have,” I smiled at Azure, the answer seeming to satisfy her.

  It was four days later that I received Azure’s message to come back to the chapel. Alone. I had no particular urge to go, just having finished my last exam of the season, but she is my sister after all. How could I possibly deny her? I packed some food in my messenger bag for her and Yann?k and made my way over there. Azure was waiting outside, having let Yann?k out of her sight for what I assume was the first time since we left them here. She smiled at me as I handed her the bag of things I’d brought.

  “Thank you, but that’s not all we needed. Yann?k had another dream.” She said with worry, lacing her voice.

  I looked at her, my eyebrow raised expectantly. “Let’s go inside, and you can tell me about it.”

  She shook her head, “No, Yann?k is sleeping. He just won't wake up.” She sighed. “What’s important is that he saw Leo last night. He was asleep, so I’m assuming it’s a dream, but he swears she’s alive.”

  “He wants to go look for her?” I asked, already knowing the answer. “We have no idea where she is.”

  “I know, but he insists we at least try to look. He’s beating himself up enough as it is; I can’t stand the sight of it.” She sounded like she was pleading with me. “He asked me to tell you to get Saoirse. Can you two meet us by the city gates by dawn?”

  “How are we going to get him back inside? With the fire and the disappearances, all eyes will be on the Morn?ngstars. It won't be easy.” I sighed. What she was asking was next to impossible to accomplish safely.