Darkness swallows the room whole. The candle is a stub of smoke, the air thick with melted wax. For a long time I don't move, every nerve taut, listening for the next ripple in the glass.
But the mirror lies still. Only my reflection stares back, dim and faint in the weak dawn bleeding through the curtains. My hand throbs with cold, joints stiff as if frost has rooted in them. When I curl my fingers, skin cracks faintly like thin ice.
I step closer, chest tight, a weight in the air that makes the room feel smaller, more claustrophobic. I breathe, slow and deliberate, trying to silence the pounding of my heart. Each beat feels louder, as though the house listens to my every move.
Across the pane, faint and unmistakable, the scratches remain:
ELEANOR.
The letters are crooked, jagged, but alive with intent. No smudge of condensation disguises them. They exist in the surface, gouged permanent.
I lift my palm, press it gently. The glass stings with chill, but nothing moves beneath. No ripple. No hand rising to meet mine.
The system murmurs in its detached tone:
Status Ping: Environmental cold exceeds threshold.Passive Unlocked: Cold Resistance I — bodily tolerance to external chill increased.
A sharpness clears in my head, a cold clarity I didn't have before. The frost loosens its grip on my bones. The chill in the room no longer feels invasive. My skin still prickles, but the sensation isn't as suffocating. I'm more aware, more alert, but something else stirs—uncertainty. Was that Eleanor? Or something else that calls me to this glass, to this mirror? The questions knot in my chest, heavier than the cold.
I close the notebook, keep it close to the bed like a charm. Sleep is shallow, broken. Waves batter the cliff until morning, and I wake with grit in my eyes, the name still etched behind them.
The library answers when I return.
The doors creak wider than before, as if they've accepted me into their confidence, opening as though the house itself has grown used to my presence. Dust motes drift, haloed in weak daylight, and I can't shake the feeling that the air around me is heavier now, more laden with unspoken words. I stride for the ledgers, the name hammering at my ribs, gnawing at me like a whispered command.
Eleanor.
I open the register where I first saw it buried. My fingertips rest on the page, and Ink Trace blooms awake. The glisten of newer ink is unmistakable. The overwriting has grown bolder. Entire lines now doubled in weight, as if someone tried to choke the name with excess strokes.
I flip pages. Whole blocks gone. Names scraped out with acid, rewritten with hand too eager. Eleanor Harrow surfaces faintly again, then again, like a drowned body refusing to sink. I want to look away, but I can't. The name lingers in the air, the ink now more than just ink. It's a part of the house, a part of what it's hiding.
Another book yields the same scars. Not just ledgers now—genealogies, guest lists, inventories. Every place her name once stood, another has been forced over it. Evelyn Hart. Eliza Hale. Always new faces masking the same erased figure.
The system acknowledges it coldly:
System Ping: Erasure detected. Archival integrity compromised.
I slam the ledger shut, dust billowing. The thought that I've been following false trails, ghost names and fractured memories, feels like a burden on my chest. Whoever buried her didn't finish the job. And if I keep digging, I'm only getting deeper into something I'm not sure I want to understand.
That night, the house wakes with me.
Steps scrape the hall. Not one pair—many. Soft, overlapping, the rhythm wrong, too irregular for human gait. My passives draw the sounds apart: a dozen feet pacing, circling, whispering.
Whispers thread the air. Faint. Too faint to shape words—until one does.
Eleanor.
The syllables slip under the door, breathed by voices I can't count. It's as though the house itself is alive, its corridors shifting with secrets and memories I can't piece together. The whispers slip past the cracks in my mind, tugging at me with a weight I can't shake. They crawl under my skin, tracing my thoughts, making the room feel smaller, tighter, until the walls seem to close in.
I push back against the quilt, heart thundering. My hand closes over the notebook on the desk. The ink anchors me: Eleanor, written in my hand, real. I whisper it back, though no one should hear.
The voices cease at once, like a curtain falling. Silence presses harder than noise ever did. The absence of sound, of breath, is a new kind of terror. It's the silence before something terrible happens, the kind that fills the space until you're drowning in it.
The waves below crash in the distance, but even they seem muffled, as if the house swallows everything, all the sounds, all the movement. The clock on the wall ticks louder, mocking the stillness, reminding me that time is moving but nothing else is.
I lie there, staring at the ceiling, the weight of the house pressing down on me. My mind is sharp, but my thoughts are clouded, tangled in the web of whispers that still haunt me.
Morning claws its way in pale and reluctant. I find Adrian waiting in the corridor outside my room. His posture is immaculate, coat buttoned, eyes bright as if sleep has no claim on him. His mere presence feels like an interrogation.
"Your work," he says smoothly, "progresses?"
The words are casual, but the pause before them is wrong. My Social Acuity hums sharp, parsing emphasis and hesitation like a scalpel. He already knows what I've seen. He wants to hear me confess it. He wants me to break, to speak of things I can't explain. I wonder how long he's been watching, how much he knows about what I'm uncovering.
"I've begun cataloguing," I say, voice flat. "The archives are… extensive."
For a moment, silence hangs taut between us. His gaze rests heavy on mine, a weight that feels like it could tip either into courtesy or condemnation. Then the faintest curve shapes his mouth, not quite smile, not quite sneer.
"Very good."
He steps past me, shoulders square, coat brushing silence in his wake. The scent of salt and old paper lingers, unnatural, as though carried from some room deeper than the house should have. I watch him go, but the feeling he leaves behind doesn't shift. I'm no closer to understanding him—or the house. But something tells me, deep down, the house already knows everything I'm doing. And it's watching me now, like a predator, waiting for the right moment.
My pulse only slows once he's gone. The weight of his presence remains, and with it, the certainty that whatever I've uncovered, whatever the house is hiding, Adrian is its keeper—and his secrets are far darker than mine.
By evening, the mirror waits.
I drag the wardrobe across the floor so the pane faces the bed directly. I light a candle, set it before the glass. Flame shivers, reflection doubling. My notebook lies open on the desk, the name Eleanor scrawled bold across the page.
The system hums low, anticipatory. I feel the house around me, pressing in, listening. The walls thrum like an instrument tuned to a frequency I can't yet hear.
I press my palm flat to the surface. The glass is cold, inert.
"I know your name," I whisper. "Eleanor Harrow."
The flame gutters.
Depth swells behind the glass, dark pooling like water. Her outline forms: hair trailing damp, eyes wide, lips parting in soundless effort. She lifts her hand. Nails trace downward, scoring the pane from within. The sound slices through my teeth.
A wire hums through me, too taut to bear. "Who are you?" I whisper.
Her mouth shapes a word. No sound, only the soft tremor of lips.
Lightning rolls across the sea; the mirror snuffs to flatness—only my hollow-eyed face, hand raised to emptiness. Then the surface ripples once, faint as breath across water.
The ripple lingers, a shiver the glass can't shake. My reflection swims like a figure under ice—indistinct, unstable. I take one step, the floorboard complains. The house disapproves.
Condensation blooms in a handprint from the inside.
Her hand. Pale, nails sharp enough to score. Trails drag down in the mist, more wound than smudge.
"Who are you?" My voice is a thread.
Her lips shape it again, slower, deliberate. I catch it this time: Eleanor.
The name from the ledgers.
The system cuts in, cold and metallic:
System Alert: External entity recognized. Classification: Unstable. Proximity: High.
The glass bulges outward, subtle but real, as if a membrane thins. My stomach flips. Her palm rises to meet mine.
I should pull away. I don't.
Our hands meet through the pane. Ice needles flood my skin, racing up the wrist. For a heartbeat, the barrier isn't there. For a heartbeat, I touch her—skin clammy, thin as paper soaked in seawater; nails pricking, almost breaking.
Her eyes flare, pupils swallowing light. Her mouth opens—no whisper, no breath—just a soundless scream that rakes my bones though the air never moves.
I wrench back. The mirror snaps flat, giving me only myself, gaping. The chill remains in my palm.
And the scratches now run both ways—etched inside and out.