They called it the Haunted Mansion, but its ghosts were not the kind that rattled chains or drifted through walls. No, this place was haunted by memory.
From the moment Ahce arrived at the edge of the Pentecase estate, the mansion loomed before her like a relic torn from the bones of a dream. Once, it must have been magnificent, a palace of white stone and glass that caught the sun like a mirror to heaven.
Now, time had eroded its grace. Ivy strangled its balconies. Moss climbed the marble lions guarding the gate. The windows, once pristine, were cracked into veins of colorless glass that scattered candlelight into fractured rainbows. And the air, heavy with cedar, old dust, and rain, carried the faint perfume of something long dead but not yet gone.
They said this house once belonged to the first Duchess of Pentecase, a woman who went mad waiting for her husband's return from war. Her diary, still sealed in the west wing, was said to whisper when the night wind blew.
