The cold wind blew against Shanane's face, but she couldn't feel it. Her skin was numb. Her breath came too fast. Her legs were locked in place, as if the ground itself had grown hands and held her down. Her eyes remained fixed ahead, wide and unblinking. Her lips were parted, though no sound came out.
The cottage stood still, whole. It stood Unchanged, untouched.
It was impossible.
She had set it ablaze with her own hands. She'd poured the fuel. She had seen the flames rise, had heard the screams in the fire. She had run through the smoke. Her body still bore the heat of it: smeared in soot, the burn on her wrist, the stench of destruction still clinging to her clothes and hair. She had seen the pages of her grandmother's journals curl in the flames like paper ghosts. She had stood outside for hours and watched it collapse.
But none of that was here now.
There was no blackened wood. No scorched earth. No glass cracked by heat. No ash swirling in the air.
She didn't move. She couldn't.
Her eyes darted across the details. The windows were whole. The door was closed. The ivy still clung to the edges of the porch, green and alive, as if nothing had touched it. As if time had rolled backward, pulled the moment out of history and stitched it over with a lie.
Her heart began to hammer against her ribs, not from fear, but from disbelief. The kind of disbelief that breaks something deep and permanent.
Eoghan stood beside her, silent, his presence firm but distant. She felt him there, but not fully. Her entire awareness was consumed by the house. It pressed against her vision, too sharp, too still.
He glanced at her, then back to the cottage. His face shifted, confusion giving way to unease. He took a step forward, his boots crunching against the gravel.
__Eoghan: "Shanane…"
His voice was low, hesitant. But she didn't answer.
He stepped closer.
__Eoghan: "You said it burned down."
His voice was quiet, uncertain. He didn't ask it like a question. He said it like he didn't know what else to say.
She didn't respond. Her lips moved, but no sound left her mouth. Her chest rose and fell in shallow gasps. She felt the blood rushing in her ears, thick and violent. The wind felt sharper now. Her skin ached where soot still clung to her arms.
Everything she had known, everything she had done, was unraveling in front of her.
He looked at her again, carefully.
__Eoghan: "What's going on?"
Once again, only the silence responded. She couldn't answer. She wasn't sure if there was an answer.
Her eyes burned with the strain of not blinking. Her throat tightened like something had climbed into her lungs and curled there.
This wasn't real. It couldn't be real.
The huntsman reached for her arm gently, but she flinched. Her eyes were distant, her breath shallow, fast. Her fingers twitched at her sides like she didn't know what they were.
The longer she stared, the more her body shook. But the cottage was there. Right in front of her: perfect, untouched, unforgiving.
She stumbled back half a step, her chest tight. Her heart beat so hard she thought it might split open. Her knees trembled beneath her.
Everything was wrong.
Had it tricked her? Had it undone it all?
Or had she never burned it at all?
The dread that crawled into her limbs wasn't fear of what she had done.
It was fear that what she had seen, what she had survived, was never meant to be destroyed.
Her breath caught in her chest, and her legs moved before she even realized what she was doing.
Eoghan reached for her, but she was already moving.
The world became a blur of dirt and wind and the sound of huntsman's voice behind her calling her name, but distant, so far away it could've been a memory.
The only thing that mattered was the house. That lie. That trap
She had to see. She had to know.
Her boots hit the steps. The porch groaned under her weight. The handle of the door was cool beneath her fingers, as if it hadn't been licked by fire just days ago.
She yanked the door open.
And the darkness inside breathed.
It was like walking into the skin of something long dead.
The moment she crossed the threshold, the air changed. It was still, too still. As if the entire house had paused the moment she arrived, holding its breath, waiting to see what she would do.
She stopped just inside, her boots resting on the worn floorboards.
The smell hit her first. There's no scent of fire or ruin. Instead, it was the scent of lavender soap, dried herbs, and old wood, just as it had always been: familiar, domestic, wrong.
Her eyes moved slowly, sweeping across the room.
The table was there, just as it had been. A tea cup rested on the surface, a faint ring of herbs still clinging to the rim. The cushion on the chair was slightly indented, like someone had only just risen. The curtains hung neatly at the windows, and dust motes danced gently in the morning light streaming through the glass.
None of it had burned. None of it had changed.
She walked forward like she was underwater, each step heavy and slow. Her fingertips brushed the wall as she passed, just to feel something solid. It was warm. Not from sunlight. But from inside.
The hallway was exactly as she remembered it: narrow, with uneven floorboards and faded family pictures lining the wall. One of them showed her as a baby, in her grandmother's lap.
She turned the corner and there it was. The secret passage, open and wide. The darkness spilled out from it like breath from a mouth.
She stood there for a moment, staring into the stairwell, her pulse echoing in her ears. Her muscles tensed, waiting for something to happen but nothing came.
She then stepped inside.
The descent was silent. The air grew thick again, heavier with every step, pressing against her skin. Her breath slowed. The familiar weight of the stone walls, the heat seeping from below, it all came back to her in waves. But it was different now. It was deeper, heavier. More aware.
Her heart clenched. Everything was there.
The shelves lined with books. The dried herbs hanging in bunches. The pages scattered across the desk. The air carried the faintest trace of copper: blood, maybe, or ink, but it wasn't strong. There was no smoke. No ash. Not even a trace of soot like the fire had never touched this place.
The door to the ritual chamber was already open. She didn't stop this time. She stepped inside. And the silence swallowed her whole.
There was no breeze, no sound, no light but her own. And yet the atmosphere around her pressed down like a weight against her lungs. It wasn't the heat, it wasn't even the unnatural stillness. It was the feeling that she was being swallowed.
The chamber looked exactly as she remembered it, but cleaner. Too clean.
The bones on the floor were neatly arranged, laid out like a pattern she couldn't decode. They gleamed faintly in the dim light, their surfaces free of ash or dust, like someone or something had recently polished them. The dried blood that once crusted the runes had darkened, thickened, staining the grooves with a permanence that no fire could have erased.
The summoning circle was intact. Flawless.
It pulsed faintly, like a second heart buried beneath the floor, waiting.
She stepped further inside, her breath ragged in her throat, her palms cold despite the heat thickening in the room. Every sound was muffled: her footsteps, the breath in her chest, the faint creak of the boards behind her. It was as if the room had decided sound was no longer necessary. It absorbed everything.
The silence wasn't empty. It was listening.
The jars along the wall were sealed tight, their contents undisturbed. Some held dark liquid that moved too slowly to be natural. Others contained things she didn't want to look at too closely, shapes that pulsed faintly, or twitched as she passed.
The stone beneath her feet was warm. Not as if it had recently been heated, but as if the heat was coming from below, from something alive. Something that breathed in pulses of heat and waited just beneath the skin of the earth.
Her eyes swept the room, searching for some proof that what she had done had mattered.
But everything was rebuilt, reclaimed. Like it had been waiting for her to return like it had never left. Like she had never left.
Her throat tightened. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to run. But her feet didn't move. Her body had turned cold and rigid. Every part of her was screaming inside, but it was locked beneath her skin, buried under layers of disbelief and terror.
And yet… the longer she stood there, the deeper something else began to grow.
________________________________________
∆ ☆ ATHERAMOND ☆ ∆
________________________________________
As soon as Eoghan's stepped through the doorway, everything in him recoiled.
The moment he crossed the threshold, something inside his chest twisted. His breath caught before he could stop it. His eyes swept the space in front of him, and then refused to move. He stood frozen, like the stone beneath his boots had grown fingers and locked him in place.
He had known something was wrong the moment Shanane burst into his home, her face pale, her body trembling with a fear she hadn't put into words. He had followed her without hesitation, without question.
But he hadn't expected this.
He hadn't expected to walk into something that would break his understanding of her. No part of him had been prepared for this.
His gaze swept the room, slowly, deliberately, as if the pieces might come together into something sane if he just looked at them long enough. But they didn't.
The space made his skin crawl. The weight of it wasn't just physical. It was emotional, mental. It crushed the breath in his chest, pressing against something deep in his mind that refused to look any closer.
The shock hit in slow waves. Not loud or violent, but cold, rising through his chest like water seeping into a cracked foundation. It numbed him. Froze the thoughts trying to form behind his eyes.
He had seen something like this before. It looked almost exactly like what he'd seen in the cavern the day they'd found Shanane's grandmother. The same foul markings. The same aura that had twisted the air and made the forest around it sick. The same sense of presence. Of weight. Of being watched by something far, far older than men. The day that smell clung to his clothes for hours, and his men had stopped speaking halfway back down the hill because no one wanted to say what they'd seen.
It was here now again.But worse.
This wasn't hidden deep in the earth. This was beneath her home.
The huntsman stepped back once, instinctively, his throat tight.
He turned toward her, hoping to find some kind of answer, some flicker of explanation in her face. But Shanane stood still, unmoving, her eyes were locked on the far wall.
He opened his mouth to speak, but the words collapsed before they reached his tongue.
What could he possibly say? What language was left to describe this? And for the first time since he had met her, he didn't know what to say. Because this was no misunderstanding.
This was something real. And it had been here, beneath her feet, the entire time.
A pressure behind her eyes. A low, growing hum in the base of her skull.
It wasn't noise. It was sensation.
Like the room had wrapped itself around her, slowly pulling her back into something she didn't understand. Something she hadn't escaped, just delayed.