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- Herausgeber: Adenike Eniola Mohammed
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
What is this book about? Bloodbound Roses is a gothic romance novel and dark fantasy romance that blends supernatural suspense with emotional intensity. Sairah Avelis wakes each night haunted by visions of a girl who died centuries ago. As the veil between life and death shatters, her past self, Sa’irah, rises from the grave demanding vengeance. In a haunted mansion where mirrors don’t reflect her and blood stains never fade, Sairah must choose between love and ghostly revenge. Who should read this book? This book is perfect for fans of paranormal thrillers, vampire love stories, and romantasy novels with strong female leads. Readers who enjoy emotional dark fantasy, historical gothic fiction, and gothic supernatural stories will be captivated by Sairah’s haunting journey. What makes this book particularly exciting? The combination of romantic supernatural thriller elements with heart-stopping suspense makes this novel unique. Twists of betrayal, love, and ghostly revenge keep readers on edge, while the gothic supernatural elements create an eerie, unforgettable atmosphere. What sets this book apart? Unlike typical romance or fantasy novels, Bloodbound Roses fuses gothic, historical, and supernatural themes with a deep exploration of identity, love, and vengeance. Its hauntingly beautiful prose and emotionally charged narrative make it a standout gothic romance novel.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Inhaltsverzeichnis
The Graveyard of the Nameless
3:06 AM
Chapter One :
Where Blood Speaks
Chapter Two:
The Fear She Feels
Chapter Three:
Sister’s Hate
Chapter Four:
Chapter Five:
Chapter Six :
Chapter Seven:
Chapter Eight:
Chapter Nine:
Chapter Ten:
Chapter Eleven :
Chapter Twelve :
Chapter Thirteen :
Chapter Fourteen :
Chapter Fifteen :
The Mirror’s Dark
Chapter Sixteen :
The Screams of Night
Chapter Seventeen :
The Room That Calls
Chapter Eighteen :
The Voice She Hears
Chapter Nineteen :
His Heart to Keep
Chapter Twenty :
The Grave’s Rise
Chapter Twenty one:
Two Souls, One Path
Chapter Twenty Two:
Blood’s Vow
Chapter Twenty Three:
The Fight for Her
Chapter Twenty Four:
Vow or Revenge
Chapter Twenty Five:
The Betrayal’s End
Impressum
Copyright © 2025 Seraphina Dove
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, Or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, Recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and the author. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Graveyard of the Nameless
3:06 AM
The wind didn’t howl. It whispered low, wet, intimate. Like a secret pressed too close to the skin.
Branches stirred overhead, skeletal fingers combing the fog. The mist moved like something sentient, sliding between nameless graves, slow and knowing.
Nothing here bore names. Just stone and rot and silence.
Sairah stood barefoot at the edge of the graveyard, nightgown clinging to her legs like regret.
Mud slicked her feet. The hem of her white cotton gown was no longer white it carried the red-brown kiss of something older than dirt.
She didn’t know how she got here.
She never remembered the walk. Only the pull.
Each time, it began as a dream velvet black, scent of rain on iron, the rhythm of her own breath echoing like footsteps behind her. And then she’d wake to this. Or not wake at all.
Her breath steamed into the cold, pulsing with unease.
She wrapped her arms around herself. Not for warmth. For weight.
She didn’t want to float away again.
A shape moved just past the veil of fog. Her head snapped toward it. Nothing. Just that hush.
Then
A whisper. Low. Male. Velvet and razored at the edges.
“You called me… again.”
The voice slid into her like a remembered kiss.
Her heart was jackknifed. She spun.
Empty space. Dead stone.
No.
Not empty.
Not anymore.
A tremor passed through her bones like someone had spoken her name beneath the earth. Her body knew something her mind refused to grasp.
I didn’t call you.
But her lips never moved.
Her pulse kicked against her throat. She backed away on instinct, feet slipping on moss-slick ground and then there was no ground.
Only dark.
The earth behind her was gone, the grave collapsed into a gaping void that breathed. Not a hole. A mouth.
And it knew her.
The wind dropped. The fog held its breath.
The first touch was not cold. It was warm.
A hand black with soil, slender and clawed like bone lacquered in obsidian shot from the grave and clamped around her ankle.
She didn’t scream at first. She gasped.
Because she remembered this.
The pressure. The grip.
The feeling of being claimed.
Then her lungs caught fire and she screamed sharp, ragged, real.
Her hands clawed at the air, at the headstones, at the nothing.
Whispers rose hundreds moaning, gasping, chanting. Not in words. In memory.
“Found you.”
The voice again. This time inside her skull.
Sairah fell. Or was pulled.
Her fingers scraped stone, caught nothing.
Darkness swallowed her not like night, but like hunger.
And before the black closed over her completely, she felt something slide across her cheek.
Not fingers.
Breath.
Not hers.
Chapter One :
Where Blood Speaks
The train exhaled like an ancient beast, releasing a fog thick enough to smother memory.
The platform at Dovewick Hollow was more shadow than stone, swallowed by ivy and years of whispered things left unsaid.
As the last carriage hissed to stillness, she stepped out boots kissing damp gravel, coat catching the wind like a shroud.
Sairah Avelis was home.
The name tasted like iron in her mouth, rusted from disuse, laced with something that didn’t quite fit in the human world anymore. She hadn’t spoken it in three years, not since the incident, not since the blood, not since everything she loved was peeled from her life with a cruelty only the unseen could craft.
But she had returned. Not out of sentiment.
Out of necessity.
She hadn’t returned just to remember. She came because the dreams were growing sharper and no longer dreams at all. Something was waking beneath them. And she needed to know what, before it woke her up wrong.
Her eyes scanned the platform. Empty.
Good. Dovewick never welcomed strangers, Coming back meant stepping into the bones of her own name. Meant touching the parts of herself that had once burned with magic and guilt and love too dangerous to survive. This town didn't just bury secrets. It bred them. The wind whispered through the pines in the distance, and Sairah tensed.
Not at the sound but at the silence that followed.
Nothing here was ever just wind.
***
Her taxi was late. Of course it was.
The air was colder than it should have been for late September, as though the Hollow refused to surrender the chill of its secrets. She slid her hand into her coat pocket and touched the object she swore she wouldn’t bring.
A locket.
Black metal. Cold as a corpse. With the symbol etched on the back a sigil her mother had once told her never to trace with bare fingers. The Mark of Avelis. The curse. The key.
Sairah didn’t flinch when the first crow landed on the broken signpost ahead. Another followed. And another. Watching. Waiting.
“You remember me,” she murmured.
One crow tilted its head, as if amused.
She felt the burn before she heard the voice.
“You shouldn’t have come back.”
Sairah turned slowly.
A figure stood at the edge of the mist. Wrapped in a dark coat, boots soaked in mud, face shadowed by the brim of a hat yet those eyes, unnatural in their stillness, pierced through her like a blade laced with memory.
“Good to see you too, Malakai,” she said, tone bone-dry.
The man stepped forward, slow and measured. “You smell like him.”
She didn’t ask who. They both knew.
Lucien.
His name was a wound wrapped in her breath.
She hadn’t said it in years, not since the blood, not since she carried his body to the river, not since the ritual that left her cold and flickering in her own skin.
Her pulse skipped then raced to catch up. She buried it beneath sarcasm. “I see you haven’t gotten better at greetings.”
“I don’t greet ghosts,” Malakai replied.
Sairah’s jaw clenched. “I’m not a ghost.”
“Aren’t you?”
***
By the time the cab finally came, the driver refused to make eye contact. His hands trembled as he opened the door, and his crucifix glinted once under the dying sun.
She slid into the backseat without a word, ignoring the way his breath fogged up the glass in shallow puffs. They drove in silence.
Fields rolled by barren, bruised, rotting at the edges. Trees loomed like mourners at a funeral that had never ended.
Gravenhurst rose from the hill, grim and expectant, like a secret that had been waiting too long.
Home.
The driver stopped half a mile down the road, muttering something about not crossing the old gate line after dusk.
Cowardice. Or wisdom.
She stepped out. The path up was twisted and overgrown, as if the ground itself rejected footsteps.
She remembered every bend, every stone. The time she’d fallen and scraped her knees chasing Lucien through the wild roses. The time she’d kissed him under the thorns.
The time he didn’t return.
A gate of wrought iron appeared from the mist. It hadn’t been closed the last time she saw it. Now it was padlocked with no key.
She touched the locket again. Whispered the incantation engraved on her family’s burial scroll.
The padlock clicked open.
Magic. Old magic.
Dead things never stayed buried in Dovewick.
***
Inside, Gravenhurst was exactly as she remembered. And nothing like she remembered.
The staircase still curved like a ribcage, its banister lined with timeworn roses carved from obsidian.
The chandelier above still dripped with glass shaped like tears. But the walls… the walls had changed. They breathed.
“Sairah Avelis,” came the voice again.
This time, it wasn’t Malakai.
She turned sharply.
And there he was.
Lucien.
Or something wearing his skin.
"Tall. Barefoot. His chest, bare and stark, bore the faint, branching tracery of what looked like veins of night frozen beneath the skin.
His hair was longer than she remembered..."
“Tell me I’m dreaming,” she whispered.
He took a step forward, his eyes black as the storm waiting behind the stars. “You’re not.”
“You died.”
He tilted his head. “So did you.”
Her breath hitched.
“I buried you,” she said. “I carried your body to the forest and”
“Bound me in the river. I know. I watched you do it.”
She backed away instinctively. “This isn’t real. This isn’t”
“Real?” Lucien smiled sad and sharp. “You still think reality is the world that pretends it forgot us?”
She couldn’t breathe. Not properly. The walls narrowed. The house leaned in. And Lucien’s shadow was longer than it should have been twisting against physics, against sanity.
“What are you?” she asked.
“Still me,” he said. “But not only me.”
***
Flash.
Three years ago.
The ritual. The coppery tang of her mother’s blood thick in the air, a dark stain blooming on the altar stone.
Lucien holding her hand, his grip cold despite the pyres. The chant. The cracking sky.
And then
Screams.
The curse awakened.
The entity bound to the Avelis bloodline, what the town called The Hollowed One, had chosen a host.
Lucien.
She had sealed him that night. Used her own soul to bind the demon to the river, a fire consuming her from within, then an echoing emptiness as her own light guttered and went out. Died in the process.
And yet, here they were.
Alive. Haunted.
Changed.
***
“I came because the dreams wouldn’t stop,” she admitted.
Lucien nodded. “Because the seal is breaking.”
She looked up. “Why now?”
“Because the Hollow is awake. It knows you’re here. And it wants you back.”
“Wants… me?”
He stepped closer, eyes softening. ““You’re the last Avelis, Sairah. The bloodline runs cold without you.
And it’s that cold, that fading echo of our magic, that strains the gate… the one holding The Hollow back.” The gate. Sairah’s breath caught. She remembered
hushed family lore, the Avelis duty to keep something terrible sealed, something that now apparently wanted out.
Her stomach twisted. “You think I came back to reopen it?”
“No,” Lucien whispered. “I think you came back to finish what you started.”
She shook her head. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“But you will.”
He extended his hand. His fingers trembled. So did hers.
When they touched, the air cracked.
And she saw
Flashes of black water. A crown made of bone. Her name etched in fire. The Hollow roaring. And Lucien eyes glowing, wings of ash rising behind him.
A prophecy.
A price.
A choice.
***
She yanked her hand back, gasping.
Lucien swayed. “It’s already begun.”
Sairah turned toward the door. “Then we stop it.”
He caught her arm. “There’s no stopping the Hollow, Sairah. Only offerings.”
She looked at him, thunder boiling in her eyes.
“Then I’ll burn the whole damn place before I offer myself again.”
Chapter Two:
The Fear She Feels
The first time Sairah called the woman “Mother,” it felt like betrayal.
Not to the woman but to herself.
The word tasted wrong in her mouth. It wasn’t a rejection of love, but an instinct carved deep into her marrow.
Something ancient inside her whispered that this love was borrowed. Bought. Not earned. And one day, it would ask to be returned.
***
Thirteen years ago…..
Midnight. Rain-soaked roses. A dream that felt like drowning.
Julianne Avelis woke up screaming.
She sat bolt upright in her four-poster bed, silk sheets clinging to her skin, breath rugged and uneven.
Her husband, Dorian, didn’t stir beside her. He never did. Not for dreams. Not for storms.
Not even for the shrill cry that tore from the throat of the child they were about to find.
But Julianne heard something else.
A voice no, a sob.
It came from the window. From beneath the window.
She stood barefoot, trembling, and peered into the endless night beyond the mist. Her chest tightened.
The field behind the manor was blooming. Wild roses. Every stem bleeding. The petals were black.
Julianne fainted.
***
When she awoke, Dorian was waiting with a lantern and muddy boots. “I had the car ready before you screamed,” he said, his voice devoid of surprise, a chilling flatness in it that was somehow more terrifying than panic.
She blinked. “How did you do?” “You said her name in your sleep.” “I don’t know her name.” “Yes,” he said, his gaze distant. “You do.”
***
They found the child under the old cypress tree, laid out as if by design. No blood. No afterbirth. No sign of life or death.
Just stillness.
Perfect. Pale. Watching.
Julianne wept. Dorian did not. He wrapped the girl in his coat like she was sacred. Like she was dangerous. “Where did she come from?” Julianne whispered. Dorian lied with ease. “She was abandoned.”
Abandoned. The word had been a stone in Sairah’s shoe for as long as she could remember, a convenient fiction that never quite covered the truth she felt pulsing beneath.
Back in the present, that same pulse seemed to emanate from the cypress tree itself as Sairah stood before it. Its trunk was thicker now, bark lined with black veins. A wound in the earth.
She placed her hand against it. The wood was warm.
And it pulsed.
She didn’t flinch.
Behind her, the mansion sighed as though remembering.
The tall gothic windows glared down like glass eyes, judgmental and tired. Vines clung to the stone like they were afraid to let go.
Sairah walked up the steps slowly, her footsteps echoing on the marble like distant drums.
The door opened before she touched it.
Julianne Avelis stood in the frame.
A porcelain sculpture of a woman too delicate, too haunted.
She wore pale lavender, always lavender, as though the color could keep death away. Her hair was the color of frost. Her eyes, faded violets. Always searching, never finding.
“Sairah,” she said, voice like silk drowned in water.
“Mother,” Sairah replied.
A pause. A breath caught. Something unspoken passed between them like a cold draft.
Then Julianne turned and walked inside without a word.
The house swallowed them both.
The drawing room was dim, lit only by the fire. Portraits lined the walls centuries of Avelis women, each one more tragic than the last. Sairah was not among them.
She sat across from Julianne in silence.
No one offered tea.
No one asked how she’d been.
Julianne folded her hands over her lap. “I never thought you’d come back.”
“You knew I would.”
Julianne flinched.
“Why now?” she asked. “After all this time?”
“Because the ground started bleeding again,” Sairah said softly.
Julianne’s breath stilled.
“You always speak like that.”
Sairah tilted her head. “Like what?”
“Like something ancient is inside you.”
Sairah didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
Julianne rose to pour herself a glass of wine red, always red. She held it like an offering.
“Your father isn’t here.”
“Does he know I am?”
Julianne nodded once. “He left the moment your name was spoken.”
“Coward,” Sairah whispered.
“No,” Julianne replied. “Worse.”
***
Dorian Avelis never touched Sairah after that night beneath the cypress tree.
He signed the adoption papers with shaking hands. He gave her the Avelis name, the Avelis room, the Avelis inheritance.
But never his voice.
Never his eyes.
He avoided her shadow as if it could swallow him.
And maybe it could.
Sairah remembered catching him once, in the mirror. He was watching her sleep, lips moving in silent prayer.
As though begging her not to wake.
***
That night, the house creaked more than usual.
Sairah couldn’t sleep.
Her old bedroom was untouched. Preserved. The violet sheets. The black mirror. The faint smell of lilies that never came from any flower.
She lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, until the whispers began.
Soft. Like sighs beneath floorboards.
She got up and followed them.
Down the stairs.
Through the east hallway. Past the locked music room. Past the crooked painting of Aunt Mireille who slit her wrists on her wedding night.
To the west wing.
The wing no one entered.
Where the mirrors were covered in velvet.
The wing where her sisters slept.
***
She paused at Veyda’s door.
A faint moan slipped through the Crack pleasure and pain indistinguishable.
Inside, she heard a voice. A man’s. Whispering her name.
Not Veyda’s.
“Sairah.”
Then silence.
She turned away quickly.
The next door was Saelith’s.
Quiet.
Too quiet.
She leaned in. Listened.
Nothing.
But the moment she placed her palm on the wood
A scream tore through the house.
***
The entire manor woke up.
Julianne ran from her room, breathless and bare-footed.
Servants emerged like ghosts, old Elara, the housekeeper, pressing a trembling hand to her mouth, her eyes darting from Saelith’s door to Sairah with a look of dawning, ancestral terror.
And from Saelith’s room came a stench, earthy, metallic. Like rot and blood.
They burst in.
Saelith sat upright in bed, eyes wide, body stiff as a corpse.
The sheets were soaked in dirt.
Her arms bore scratches. Deep ones.
But there were no nails in sight.
And on her wrist, in blood freshly crawled was a name.
“Sairah.”
***
“She’s sleepwalking again,” Julianne said through gritted teeth.
“She wasn’t asleep,” Sairah replied, staring at the mark.
“You’re not helping.”
Sairah stepped closer. “She wrote my name.”
“She doesn’t remember,” Veyda snapped, suddenly behind them.
Wrapped in a silk robe, skin glowing, lips swollen from something recent. Her eyes burned with accusation.
“She never remembers,” Sairah whispered. “That’s the problem.”
Veyda’s voice cracked. “This is what you do. You *unmake* people. Just by being near them.”
Sairah turned to her, slow and deliberate. “And you still follow me like a moth to flame.”
Veyda slapped her.
It echoed.
Julianne said nothing.
Sairah didn’t flinch.
She looked at her sister and smiled.
And Veyda cold, cruel Veyda stepped back.
Because in that smile, for a flicker of a second, she saw something behind Sairah’s eyes.
A grave.
And it was open.
***
Later that night, Sairah stood alone in the dead garden.
The roses had returned.
Bleeding.
Just like before.
She knelt beside one.
Touched its thorn.
Her blood dripped onto the soil.
The earth shivered.
And from somewhere far beneath, something stirred.
Watching.
Waiting.
Calling.
She closed her eyes and whispered:
“I remember.”
Chapter Three:
Sister’s Hate
Sairah stood at the edge of the cracked fountain in the courtyard, watching the water ripple in unnatural patterns.
No wind. No stone thrown. Just a vibration beneath the surface, like the water remembered something it wasn’t supposed to.
She could feel them watching her.
Not from the windows. Not from the hallway.
Not from behind doors.
From deeper.
From under the skin.
***
Veyda Avelis was a symphony of elegance and poison.
She moved like her presence was a threat and a gift, each step choreographed to remind the world it was lucky to see her.
But her beauty was a cold weapon crafted, sharpened, and wielded without hesitation. Her eyes, storm-gray and sharp, were mirrors that refused to reflect.
She didn’t knock. She never did.
Instead, she appeared in the garden like a phantom at dusk, heels silent, robe undone just enough to declare dominance.
“You’re bleeding again,” Veyda said.
Sairah didn’t look up from the fountain. “It’s not mine.”
“Then whose?”
Sairah shrugged. “The house keeps secrets.”
Veyda stepped closer, her perfume filling the air with amber, violet, danger.
“The house doesn’t keep secrets,” she whispered. “It becomes them.”
They stood there in silence, the tension between them old as bone and twice as bitter.
Sairah finally met her gaze. “You dreamed of me last night.”
Veyda stiffened.
“I saw it,” Sairah continued. “You were holding a blade. My hands were tied. You smiled before you struck.”
Veyda’s lips parted. “You think I want to kill you?”
Sairah’s voice turned to ice. “You already did.”
***
Flash…
A different life. A different era. Cobblestones. Blood on silk. Veyda standing over her, whispering words that tasted like betrayal.
“Forgive me,” she had said then.
But the dagger didn’t stop.
***
Veyda’s mask didn’t crack.
She leaned in, lips near Sairah’s ear.
“I don’t hate you because of who you are,” she whispered. “I hate you because even when I take everything from you, it never feels like enough.”
She stepped back.
“You don’t break.”
Sairah smiled faintly. “That’s because I remember the parts of me you tried to bury.”
“Then let them stay buried,” Veyda hissed, before vanishing into the mist.
***
Saelith Avelis lived in lace and lullabies.
The youngest. The quietest. The one whose voice barely rose above a whisper but it was always the whisper you should fear.
Sairah found her later, sitting cross-legged in the music room, playing a porcelain music box with blood-stained keys. She was humming a tune no one taught her.
A funeral song.
Saelith didn’t look up.
“I used to sing this for you,” she said softly.
Sairah stayed by the door. “When?”
“In a different house,” she replied. “In a life where I was still pretending to love you.”
The music slowed. Broke. Clicked back to the beginning. Over and over.
Saelith’s smile was porcelain too.
“You should be careful,” she said. “The mirrors have started moving again.”
Sairah raised an eyebrow. “How do you know?”
“I watched them. They showed me their teeth.”
***
She remembered the night Saelith first lied for her.
Sairah had broken a glass ornament, one of their mother’s oldest heirlooms. Saelith stepped forward and took the blame.
She was five.
Sairah hugged her.
And later that night, Sairah woke up choking rose thorns shoved into her mouth.
Saelith slept soundly.
***
“You scratched your own arms last night,” Sairah said, stepping into the room.
“I didn’t,” Saelith replied. “She did.”
“Who?”
“The other one.”
Sairah froze. “What other one?”
“The girl in the walls. The one with your eyes. She keeps whispering your name.”
“And what does she say?”
Saelith finally looked up. “That you should never have come home.”
***
They hated her.
Not in the way sisters sometimes do. Not out of jealousy or rivalry or unmet longing.
This was deeper.
Older.
Etched into their bloodline.
The curse was never written in scripture; it was lived. Played out across centuries.
The firstborn daughter of Avelis was always the hunted one, the haunted one.
The beautiful tragedy cursed to draw love that was never hers to keep, cursed to be betrayed by the ones who bore the same name.
The other daughters?
They were knives.
Dorian and Julianne never spoke of the curse. They kept the portraits covered, the letters locked away, the history buried in rooms behind rooms.
But the house remembered.
And so did the blood.
***
That night, Sairah couldn’t sleep.
The mansion groaned with memories. Every mirror she passed offered her the wrong reflection too tall, too gaunt, eyes too hollow.
She climbed the stairs to the attic.
It was forbidden.
Of course it was.
The door opened without resistance, like it had been waiting for her.
Dust. Moth wings. Cobwebs like veins.
And in the center
A cradle.
Black wood. Carved with the same sigils etched on her locket.
Inside it
A baby blanket.
Stained with something that had dried black.
A letter sat beneath it.
She opened it slowly.
To the First Daughter,
If you are reading this, the cycle has begun again. Do not trust the mirrors. Do not kiss the men who say they love you.
Do not bleed in the garden.
Your sisters are not your sisters.
They are the hands that buried you.
Sairah’s breath caught. The paper curled in her fingers, pulsing with heat. And then A voice. So close, the words seemed to vibrate against the bones of her skull. Right behind her.
“They weren’t supposed to let you find that.” A jolt, raw and electric, shot down Sairah’s spine.
Her fingers clenched, nearly crushing the ancient paper. She spun, heart hammering against her ribs.
No one.
But the air still thrummed with the intimacy of that presence, the phantom warmth of hot breath at her neck. Lucien’s voice echoed in her mind.
The house doesn’t sleep when you’re awake.
***
Back in her room, a chill unrelated to the manor’s draft settled over her. On her pillow, stark against the violet linen, lay a single rose. Fresh.
So fresh, a bead of crimson blood or dew, she couldn’t tell well at the tip of a thorn, then slid down a velvety petal. Bleeding.
Beneath it, a slip of parchment, the ink still seeming to whisper on the fibers.
She’s remembering too.
Sairah’s fingers tightened on the note. She. Veyda, lost to the mirror? Saelith, with her haunted lullabies? Or the girl in the walls? The house itself?
The threat was a hydra, and every severed head only revealed more, each one whispering of a past that refused to stay dead. This felt less like a warning and more like a promise.
***
The next morning, Veyda didn’t come down for breakfast.
Julianne stirred her tea like she was casting a spell.
Saelith played with her food, humming the funeral song again.
“She’s not coming down,” Saelith said.
Julianne nodded once. “She’s been…unwell.”
Sairah stood. “I’ll go.”
Julianne looked up sharply. “No. Give her time.”
Sairah ignored her.
***
Veyda’s room was locked.
Sairah placed her hand on the door.
It opened.
Inside
The air was thick with the metallic tang of blood and the cloying sweetness of too many roses. Candles flickered, casting frantic shadows.
And Veyda stood before the mirror.
Naked.
Her skin was a canvas of frantic, weeping lines runes of what looked like desperate warding, or perhaps a plea for severance, carved deep. Self-inflicted. Ritualistic in their raw, overlapping repetition.
She didn’t look at Sairah, her gaze fixed on her own marred reflection.
“They said if I bled enough,” Veyda whispered, her voice raspy, “if I made myself anathema to him… he’d leave me alone.”
“Who?”
Veyda smiled at her own reflection.
“The one you brought with you.”
Sairah stepped closer. “I didn’t bring anything.”
Veyda turned slowly.
Her eyes had changed.
One was no longer hers.
It was black.
Veined.
Inhuman.
Sairah’s blood went cold.
“Veyda…”
Her sister stepped forward.
“Do you know what it’s like,” she whispered, “to want someone so badly, you’d kill your own soul just to be looked at first?”
Sairah didn’t move.
“He never looks at me,” Veyda hissed. “Not the way he looks at you.”
“Who?”
But she already knew.
Lucien.
***
Veyda leaned in.
“I remember now. I remember what we did. And if I have to die again to stop you, I will.”
Then she smiled.
And walked straight into the mirror.
Gone.
No ripple.
No scream.
Just silence.
***
Sairah stared into the mirror.
Only her reflection remained.
But it was smiling.
And she wasn’t.
Chapter Four:
The House’s Grip
Gravenhurst did not sleep.
It breathed.
The walls veined with vines that pulsed under moonlight shifted ever so slightly when no one watched.
Doors closed on their own, sometimes slower than they should. The chandelier above the main hall always swung, though there was never wind. Footsteps echoed in patterns no one made.
It wasn’t haunted.
It was alive.
And Sairah knew: the mansion did not remember memories.
It remembered souls.
***
She walked the west corridor, barefoot, candle in hand, the flame swaying with every breath the house took.
Each step brought the scent of dust, old wood, and something sweeter rot kissed by roses.
The portraits on the walls changed as she passed. She never saw them move, but their eyes were not the same.
Smiles warped. Hands bled. Once, she swore one of them whispered her name.
She didn’t flinch anymore.
She had lived here too long both in this life and the ones before.
At the end of the hall stood a door sealed with gold.
The Avelis crest glimmered in the center a rose pierced by a fang.
This was the room that wasn’t on the floor plans. The room Julianne told her never existed.
The room that called to her blood like it was home.
She touched the doorknob.
Cold as bone.
“Come in,” the house whispered.
She did.
***
It was a library.
No dust. No cobwebs. Every shelf gleamed. Every book looked fresh and cruel. The fireplace roared even though no one had lit it. And the walls... the walls were mirrors.
Not glass.
Memory.
She walked deeper.
The books were blank. Every single one. Spine after spine of untold stories, of unwritten fates, as if awaiting a hand to fill them, or perhaps one to erase them.
A chill touched Sairah, wondering if these were all the lives she hadn't lived, the histories denied her.
Except one.
It sat on a pedestal of black marble at the center of the room. Bound in flesh-colored leather. No title. No name.
She opened it.
Firstborns do not belong to love.
They belong to legacy.
And legacy remembers what the living forget.
She flipped to the next page.
There was her face. Not drawn. Not painted. Reflected.
Sairah’s lips parted, a gasp stealing her breath.
Her heart seized, a cold, hard knot in her chest.
And then The reflection blinked. But she hadn’t.
Her own eyes were wide, fixed, frozen. A tremor ran through her hand, the candle flame flickering violently.
***
“Sairah.”
She spun.
Julianne stood in the doorway, pale and shaking.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
Sairah raised an eyebrow. “Then why does the house let me in?”
Julianne clutched the doorframe like it was the only thing keeping her upright.
“It doesn’t let you in,” she said. “It summons you.”
***
They sat in the drawing room that night, the fire between them more for memory than warmth.
Julianne sipped brandy. Sairah drank nothing.
“The house wasn’t built,” Julianne said, her voice a mere breath. “It grew. Bloomed from the cursed soil above Aeltharion."
Sairah didn’t respond.
Julianne continued. “They say Aeltharion lies beneath it.
The City of the Forgotten. The one erased from history. The stones we sleep on? They once held rituals older than language.”
Sairah stared into the flames. “Then why live here?”
Julianne smiled, but it was empty. “Because Avelis women are always drawn to their graves.”
***
Sairah had been six when she first noticed the portraits breathing.
Ten when the mirror in her room showed a version of her with black veins and silver eyes.
Thirteen when she bled on the floor of the west wing and the blood sank into the wood.
She remembered asking her father once: “Why does the house like me?”
Dorian hadn’t answered.
He’d left the next morning.
***
Later that night, she wandered.
The halls had changed again. Longer. Angled wrong.
The architecture folded in on itself like the house had forgotten physics.
She reached her childhood bedroom.
The door was ajar.
Inside nothing had been touched.
The dolls on the shelves. The velvet curtains. The cracked mirror with the lace draped over it.
She stepped in.
The air turned thick.
Not just heavy. Watching.
A low hum vibrated beneath her feet. Like something ancient purring.
She walked to the mirror.
Lifted the lace.
Her reflection smiled.
She did not.
***
In the glass: a version of her with no pupils, lips stitched, skin pale as bone. She raised her hand.
So did the reflection.
But when she turned to walk away
The reflection stayed.
Still staring.
Still smiling.
***
She tore the mirror from the wall.
Behind it: a hollow.
A crawlspace.
And inside an altar.
Carved from black stone. Marked with symbols she knew from dreams.
Laid upon it: a rose. With her name carved into the stem.
Her knees buckled.
And from behind her
A voice:
“I warned you not to look behind the mirrors.”
Sairah didn’t turn.
She didn’t need to.
The air in the small space had changed, growing heavier, colder.
Elarian.
The only one who ever moved like he belonged to both worlds. “I thought you watched,” she managed, her voice thin.A beat of silence. Long. Unbroken. “I do.”
“Then why… why let me come this far?” The question was a whisper against the humming stone.
“Because the house…” Elarian’s voice was low, resonant, a vibration against the ancient stone. His smile never reached his eyes. “…has been chosen.”
She finally turned to him, her eyes burning with a mixture of fear and defiance. “Chosen what?”
His gaze held hers, steady and knowing. “You.”
***
In the family records, Gravenhurst was listed as a historical estate built by explorers.
A lie.
The real foundation was written in blood.
Every ten years, the mansion added a new corridor. A room no one remembered building.
A staircase that curved impossibly high. A mirror that hadn’t been there yesterday.
It fed on presence.
And Sairah reborn, cursed, blood-bound was exactly what it needed to grow.
Elarian touched the altar gently.
“The stone is obsidian from Aeltharion,” he said. “Only the blood of the cursed can open it.”
Sairah stepped back. “You’ve seen it before.”
“I never said I hadn’t.”
“Then why not stop this?”
He looked at her. Really looked.
“Because we tried once. And the house buried every one of us alive.”
***
Flash.
Dozens of mirrors shattered.
A staircase flooded with fire.
Her screaming.
And her sisters were laughing.
Until they, too, burned.
***
Back in the present, Sairah whispered:
“What’s under this house, Elarian?”
He paused.
Then said:
“Your grave.”
***
She ran.
Through the twisting halls.
Through doors that moved.
Down staircases that bled.
Until she reached the garden.
Dead.
Cold.
And in the center
A rose.
Not a bush.
A single rose.
Growing from marble.
Its stem wrapped around a stone that read:
Here Lies the Firstborn.
The earth trembled.
She fell to her knees.
Lucien stood beside her.
Barefoot. Shirtless. Glowing faintly.
“This is where you began,” he said.
“This is where I died.”
He nodded.
“And this is where you’ll end, if you don’t remember soon.”
She looked at him.
Really looked.
“You’re not all Lucien anymore, are you?”
He didn’t lie.
“No.”
Sairah touched the grave.
Her blood dripped onto it.
The rose turned black.
And from beneath the soil
Something answered.
Chapter Five:
The Mirror’s Shift
It began with the whispering frames.
Oil paintings lining the east gallery stirred as the wind passed though the windows were shut, and the night outside was too still to move anything but breath.
Their eyes, those painted ancestors watched her as she walked alone beneath the flickering gaslight sconces, their stares no longer static.
They blinked.
Once.
Twice.
Sairah didn’t stop walking. Not yet.
She knew better than to show fear inside the walls of Gravenhurst.
Fear was how it found you.
***
The family portrait hung at the end of the hall like a curse framed in gold.
It was massive, reaching nearly floor to ceiling an ancestral medley painted in masterful brushstrokes that glowed when struck by moonlight.
The entire Avelis line had been captured within it, generation upon generation of eyes that looked too aware.
Sairah had walked past it all her life.
She had never touched it.
Until tonight.
***
The house had whispered again in her sleep.
This time, not in voices but in images: her own face, twisted in rage, hand outstretched toward the portrait.
Blood on her palm. Paint that peeled back like skin.
When she awoke, her hand was already reaching for her robe.
The path to the gallery had never been shorter.
***
The room chilled the moment she stepped inside.
The fireplace went out without warning. Shadows wrapped around the baseboards like tendrils of smoke. The air thickened not with dust, but with memory.
She stopped in front of the portrait.
Her candle trembled.
The brushwork was flawless, alive.
There was Julianne, a young beauty in lavender, lips like secrets sealed with a smile. Dorian stood beside her cold, stern, almost regal.
Veyda and Saelith were at their sides, as children.
But Sairah… she wasn’t there.
Not exactly.
She was the shadow between them.
The faintest shape of a face, painted over, scraped back, repainted, erased again.
Her presence was a wound beneath the varnish.
The artist had tried to remove her.
But something something older refused.
She reached up.
And placed her fingers against the canvas.
***
The moment her skin met the paint, the gallery shifted.
The frames on the walls trembled.
The gold trim of the portrait began to pulse like a heartbeat under flesh.
And then she was no longer standing in the gallery.
***
She stood in a memory.
The floor beneath her was still Gravenhurst marble, but the sky above was not real. It bent, cracked, full of stars that did not belong to this world.
The family stood frozen in front of her Dorian, Julianne, the sisters. And her.
Her own body.
Stiff. Cold. Bound in ceremonial robes stitched with thorn-vine thread. Her mouth sewn shut.
Veyda stood beside her, holding a rose dipped in black wax.
Saelith held a dagger made of glass.
Julianne whispered a prayer that wasn’t human.
And Dorian lit the fire.
***
“Sairah,” a voice rasped beside her.
Lucien again but not whole. Not fully him.
He stood in shadow, watching. Pale, bare, his veins glowing faintly with cursed light.
“They tried to erase you,” he whispered.
“I see that now.”
“They painted over you. But paint is only a lie when the soul refuses to forget.”
Her reflection in the portrait spoke.
“I remember,” it said.
Its stitched lips did not move.
But the voice echoed in Sairah’s chest.
She reached toward it.
Lucien’s grip tightened, his shadowy form seeming to leech warmth from her.
“Don’t.”
“Why?”
Her voice was a breath. “Because touching that semblance,” he gestured with his chin towards her bound reflection,
“wakes the oldest blood. The essence sleeping beneath the stone. The one that answers.”
Sairah’s eyes narrowed.
“You mean the grave in the garden.”
Lucien’s shadowed face was unreadable, his voice dropping to a near-inaudible rasp. “No. The garden holds an echo, a vessel. I mean the original. The source of you.”
***
Flash…
She was lying in a field of bleeding roses.
A circle of fire around her.
The sisters chanted.
Dorian holding a book bound in skin.
Her heart in someone else’s hand.
The word rebirth is written across the sky in blood.
***
She gasped…
a choked, tearing sound, the vision searing itself behind her eyelids.
A phantom agony pulsed in her chest, as if her own heart had just been ripped free. Her knees gave way.
Lucien caught her, his touch both shadow and substance.
The memory bled back into the present.
The portrait cracked.
Long, jagged lines tore through the canvas like it had tried to scream and the frame crushed its throat.
And then the paint melted.
***
Julianne arrived seconds later, still in her nightdress, breathless.
“What did you do?” she hissed.
Sairah’s voice was calm. “I touched the truth.”
Julianne rushed to the portrait but it was already gone.
The canvas was blank.
Wiped clean.
No faces.
No legacy.
No lies.
Sairah turned to her mother, cold and clear. “You tried to erase me.”
Julianne’s lip quivered. “We tried to save you.”
“By binding me?”
Julianne shook her head. “By binding what lives inside you. The Hollow was *never* supposed to wake.”
Sairah took a step closer.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have fed it my blood.”
****
The air shifted.
Saelith appeared behind Julianne, barefoot, smiling.
“There’s someone in the west mirror,” she said, voice melodic. “She says she remembers too.”
Julianne’s face fell.
Saelith giggled.
“She says you’re all liars.”
***
That night, Sairah dreamed of fire.
She stood in the ballroom, alone.
The chandelier dripped blood.
The mirrors shattered one by one each scream belonging to a version of her that should not exist.
And in the center of the room
A child.
Six years old. Dressed in black lace. Eyes too knowing.
She looked up.
“You don’t get to be whole,” the child said. “You’re a cage.”
Sairah dropped to her knees.
“Who are you?”
The child stepped forward.
And her shadow stretched behind her like wings made of void.
“I’m the first.”
***
She woke up in her bed, the scent of the black-bloomed rose on her pillow a cloying accusation.
Again.
A palpable disquiet hummed through the manor, a tightening of its ancient grip. Downstairs, the gallery had been sealed with heavy timbers and fresh mortar, a hasty, brutal scar.
Dorian had returned,
drawn back as if by the house’s own shriek of violation, or perhaps by a summons Julianne had been too terrified to refuse.
He stood before the ravaged, blank canvas like a man confronting his own damning ledger.
