Seven days passed.
Seven days alone in the shadows beneath the cottage. Seven days turning fragile pages, deciphering ink-stained secrets, feeding her fear in slow, deliberate bites. And with every hour, every line, every word, the image of her grandmother, the woman who had held her close and hummed soft lullabies, cracked further.
Shanane hadn't cried. Not once.
She couldn't. What she'd discovered demanded something colder than grief. It demanded resolve.
Her grandmother's early notes were full of guilt, doubt, the kind of terror that crawled beneath the skin and never left.
But with time, they changed. The years hardened her. The fear turned to control. The desperation turned to ambition.
Shanane found records, ledger-like entries scrawled in a tight, controlled hand: Names, dates, services rendered. Not for healing. Not for protection.
People had come to the village from far beyond its borders. Some wanted wealth, others revenge. Some simply wanted someone else to suffer. And her grandmother had helped them all, for the right price.
"I only showed them the door," she wrote. "They chose to step through it."
She called it balance. She called it fairness. But Shanane read between the lines.
Her grandmother had become something more than a healer. She had become a gatekeeper to hell.
And now, Shanane stood at that gate.
She faced the second door.
She'd seen it a week ago, hidden in the stone, nearly invisible. At the time, she hadn't dared to open it. She wasn't ready. But now, after what she'd read, what she'd accepted, she knew she couldn't keep walking in circles, pretending knowledge would be enough.
Answers weren't in books anymore.
They were in there.
She pressed her hand to the cold seam. It pulsed faintly beneath her touch, warm from the inside, like something was alive behind it.
She pushed. The door opened without sound.
A rush of hot air poured into her face, thick and stifling, like a furnace left open too long. It carried the stench of decay and smoke and old blood. Her body recoiled, but her feet didn't move.
The space beyond the door was dark. Deeper than shadow. It swallowed light.
She lifted the lantern, but its flame dimmed as she stepped inside, flickering low and weak, as if even fire didn't want to linger here.
She descended slowly.
The walls were carved stone, damp with condensation. Symbols glowed faintly along the edges, markings that looked burned into the rock, pulsing with residual heat. The deeper she went, the worse it became.
The heat was unbearable.
It pressed against her chest like a hand. Her lungs ached. Sweat slid down her spine, her skin slick and burning.
But she didn't stop. She reached the bottom after what felt like hours, though it couldn't have been more than minutes.
The chamber opened before her like a mouth.
It was massive, larger than she expected, a cavernous room hollowed beneath the earth. The air shimmered with heat. The stone floor was cracked and blackened, marked with hundreds of symbols layered on top of each other. Some glowed faintly red, others were scratched in deep, violent lines.
Dead animals littered the edges of the space: goats, birds, foxes, even dogs. Their bodies were curled, dried, and rotting, their blood long soaked into the floor. Most had been opened, split with terrifying precision.
They were sacrifices.
The stench clawed at her throat. She turned her face, gagging, but forced herself to keep walking. She had to see.
Her lantern passed over more symbols. Some she recognized from the books. Others were new. And worse.
There were bones in the corners. Not animal. Not anymore.
And the air, It wasn't just hot. It was alive.
Things watched her.
She couldn't see them, but she felt them. Eyes in the walls. Breaths on the back of her neck. The sensation of being surrounded, observed, tested.
The stone beneath her feet pulsed once, like something beneath it had stirred.
She staggered, catching herself on a table carved from a single slab of obsidian. It was etched in thousands of lines, tiny, unreadable. Her hand came away sticky. It wasn't dust or blood.
She turned slowly, heart thudding in her ears, and looked toward the far wall.
There it was.
A circle, etched deeply into the floor, layered with hundreds of runes and sigils, all coiled around a central mark she didn't dare step too close to. Around it were candles, melted down to stubs. Bones arranged in patterns. Jars filled with preserved organs and black, unidentifiable sludge.
It was the ritual site. Where her grandmother had called it.
She stood there, silent, sweat dripping down her spine, and understood something that words on a page could never teach her.
Her grandmother hadn't stumbled into darkness. She had built it. Fed it. Grown it.
And now it wanted her.
A whisper tickled the edge of her thoughts, too low to understand. It wasn't a word, just a sound.
The mark on her wrist began to burn again, slow and sharp, as if reminding her what she was. What she was becoming.
She should've been terrified. But she wasn't.
She was angry.
Because she had spent years loving a woman who had never once told her the truth. Who had smiled and served tea and tucked her in at night, knowing one day, she'd pass this rot on to her.
Shanane stepped back, raising the lantern higher. It flickered again. Shadows danced.
And in the far corner of the room, something moved. Something big.
She didn't look closer. She turned and left, the mark still burning. The breath of things she could not see trailing behind her.
She had seen enough.
________________________________________
∆ ☆ ATHERAMOND ☆ ∆
________________________________________
She didn't remember walking outside the secret passage.
She only remembered the door closing behind her with a soft, final thud, as if the passage itself had exhaled after she left. She stood motionless for minutes, maybe more, her hand still resting on the wall. Her body was soaked in sweat, her lips dry, the taste of iron still clinging to the back of her throat.
The cottage around her felt... hollow. Lighter in weight, but heavier in silence.
Nothing moved. Not even the air.
She walked numbly into the kitchen, the floorboards creaking beneath her steps like old bones. She reached for the glass she had left in the sink days ago, filled it with water, and drank without tasting it. Her hands shook. She didn't stop them.
Her mind was silent. That scared her more than anything. Because for the first time since arriving in the village, the fear was gone. It hadn't disappeared. It had simply... settled. Folded itself into her bones, like something she'd stopped resisting.
She sat down at the table, one hand resting over the mark on her wrist. It no longer burned. It pulsed. Like it was breathing. Like it was waiting.
That was when it started: the slow, sharp tear. Not in her skin. In her sense of self.
A feeling she couldn't name crawled into her chest, dark and slick and patient. She pressed her palm to her sternum, gasping quietly. Because something in her had turned. She didn't cry. Couldn't.
What she had seen down there: the smell, the dead things, the circle, the movement, should have shattered her with terror. But it didn't. Instead, she felt... different. Like someone had taken a chisel to her ribs and pried open something that had been sleeping.
Her thoughts spun, looping back to everything she had read: the sacrifices, the rituals, the names of the desperate who came to her grandmother for power, revenge, cruelty, the dead children, the jars of things that used to be alive.
She felt it then, a flicker in her blood. The way her body had burned when she spoke Atheramond's name. The way the walls listened when she stepped into that room. The way the shadows had circled her without touching.
They knew her. She was his.
No matter how hard she tried to deny it, the truth pressed its weight down on her spine.
She belonged to something now.
The world would never see her the same. Even if she walked away. Even if she ran. That second door was inside her now.
She stood slowly, still holding her glass, and walked toward the mirror in the hallway. It was old, spotted in the corners, the wood frame cracked along one side.
She stared at herself. For a long time, she didn't see anything different. Then she looked closer. Her eyes were not darker or glowing or monstrous. They looked... aware.
Like she had seen too much to ever be what she was again.
She turned from the mirror.
She didn't sleep that night. She couldn't.
Instead, she sat on the floor, back against the wall, arms loosely wrapped around her knees. The fire had burned down to embers hours ago, and she hadn't moved. Not because she was too tired. But because moving meant acknowledging time again. And she wasn't sure time mattered anymore.
Somewhere in the world, life was still moving forward.
But not here.
Here, in this house, beneath this roof, beneath this legacy, time had become something else. It had blurred. Bled. Folded in on itself until the days lost meaning and the weeks collapsed in her memory like ash. It had been three months since she arrived. Three months since she stepped off that train, expecting to stay for maybe a week. Two, at most.
She was supposed to come, attend a quiet funeral, pack her grandmother's things, and leave.
That was all.
She hadn't even brought much with her. A duffel bag. few outfits. Her laptop. She had planned to get back quickly, to return to the life she had worked so hard to build.
And it had been a life.
Shanane wasn't just getting by before all this. She had a future.
She had been the top student in her program, medicinal botany and alternative healing sciences. She was weeks away from finishing her thesis. Her internship had been secured at one of the most respected clinics in the state. Her professors knew her by name. They spoke about her with pride. They called her a promise.
She had been a promise.
Her friends used to tease her for being too focused. She'd pull all-nighters with her notes, color-coding flashcards, half-asleep on study benches before exams. But she had people. Real people. Even when she buried herself in work, they showed up for her. They dragged her out for late-night dumplings or study breaks at the river. She used to laugh, really laugh. She used to talk about the future like it was something solid. Like it was already hers.
And now?
Now she hadn't responded to most of them in weeks.
She had sent Aurora one reply.
"I'm okay. I just need time. Everything feels heavy right now. I'll explain soon."
But that "soon" was a lie. She hadn't explained. She couldn't. How could she tell them she was trapped in her dead grandmother's cursed house, researching demon pacts and rituals written in blood?
How could she tell them about Atheramond? She didn't even know how to say his name without feeling it echo through her bones.
She dragged her fingers down her face and stared at the ceiling. There were cracks in the wood she hadn't noticed before. Maybe they'd always been there. Or maybe the house was changing, growing brittle as the weight of its secrets deepened.
Her chest felt hollow. Like something inside had already started to give out.
She was going to fail her master's program. That much was clear now. Her university had strict guidelines. Missed deadlines. Unexcused absences. And she had vanished for nearly a full semester. Even if she emailed them today, she doubted they'd believe the story she gave them, assuming she could lie at all.
She wasn't the girl they remembered. Not anymore.
She had opened a door carved in shadow.
She had read words that bled. She had heard things breathing behind her when she was alone.
How did you come back from that? How did you pick up your life like nothing happened?
The world she came from, the one with bright classrooms and friends who hugged her tightly and called her brilliant, felt like someone else's memory now. Like it belonged to a different girl. One with a future. One with freedom.
And she hated herself for how much she missed it.
She would've been someone. She would've helped people. She would've built something good. Maybe opened her own clinic one day. Maybe taught. Maybe walked across a stage in a cap and gown, her name called out in applause.
Instead, she was here. Marked. Watched. Bound.
She pressed her hand to her wrist. The mark
wasn't burning now, but it hadn't faded. It never faded. It pulsed softly, quietly reminding her that no matter how long she waited, no matter how hard she fought...
This was her life now. This was her path.
And part of her, the part that hadn't broken yet, wanted to scream.