I. The House Dreams in Tongues.

The first sound Briar heard that morning wasn’t the rustling trees or the ticking grandfather clock in the hall.

It was breathing.

Not hers. Not human.

It came from the walls—wet, slow, labored, as though the manor were waking up through its own lungs. The air felt thick with memory, the velvet curtains trembling without wind. And beneath it all: a voice murmuring beneath the floorboards, a language she didn’t know… but her blood did.

Briar stepped into the main corridor, barefoot, wrapped in a robe once belonging to her mother. She followed the sound past the west wing’s sealed threshold. The lock, once rusted shut, now hung open.

Someone had opened the forbidden hall.

And it wasn’t her.

II. The Unsealed Wing.

The west wing was colder than the rest of the manor—colder than outside. As if the sun itself refused to peer in. Briar moved with the stillness of a memory retraced.

Behind a rusting velvet curtain, she found what had once been a ballroom.

Now, it was a crypt.

The ceiling sagged under time. Chandeliers lay shattered on the tile. But above the fireplace was a portrait so old it was nearly erased: a woman in a crimson gown beside a dark-haired man with no nameplate.

He looked like Thorne

But younger. Sharper. Sadder.

Below the portrait sat a chest, locked with three symbols: an Elwood crest, a serpent biting its tail… and a third carved so deeply into the wood it looked like it had bled.

The symbol of the Witness.

III. The One Who Remembers.

She found him below the ballroom, in the inner belly of the manor—the old servant’s chapel, stripped of its pews.

Thorne sat on the altar, drenched in dusk-light, his shirt unbuttoned to the ribs. Scar tissue webbed down his chest like roots that had grown under the skin.

“Where does it come from?” she asked.

He didn’t look up.

“The scarring or the knowledge?”

“Both.”

He stood slowly, crossing the old chapel, eyes dark but calm.

“How long do you think I’ve been down here?”

“Since my mother’s generation,” she said carefully.

He shook his head once.

“You think too kindly.”

Then he told her.

IV. His Origin: The First Pact.

The truth was older than her family. Older than Blackthistle. Older than faith.

Thorne had not been born to the Elwoods. Not directly.

He was born during a lunar blood pact, three generations ago, when the first Elwood patriarch—Reinhold Elwood—struck a deal with the house to protect his dying lineage.

To seal it, they created the Witness:

A child born not through union, but ritual. A vessel bred to absorb the sins, secrets, and shame of the bloodline. He was not given a surname. He was given a burden.

He was born beneath the chapel altar.

Named Thorne by the first matron. It meant dark and negativity in the old tongue.

When each Elwood heir was born, Thorne was called upon to carry the pain of their blood—like a tether, a haunted reflection. What they erased, he remembered. What they denied, he felt. When an Elwood murdered, Thorne bled from the chest. When they broke a heart, he lost a tooth.

He was the price.

And he never aged.

V. How He Knows?

He didn’t “read” Elwood history.

He absorbed it.

Every death. Every betrayal. Every secret affair and locked-away heir. All of it poured into him through the house's veins—through candle smoke, dust, and time.

“The manor is the body. I am its breath. I am what they locked away when they were too weak to look at themselves.”

He showed her a wall of old portraits. Not the proud ones hung in the grand foyer. These were hidden—shameful, scratched out, annotated in blood.

Under one: Mirena. Traitor. Keeper of the Root.

Another: Asa Elwood. Father of Fire. Beast of the West Wing.

And then, one marked not with a name…

…but with hers.

“They prophesied your name,” Thorne whispered. “Briar, you born from thorn. The final seed. The one who chooses to bloom or burn.”

VI. The House Awakens

The walls groaned.

A long, wet creak like a coffin sighing open.

In the chapel, the candles all lit themselves—flickering with green fire.

And from beneath the stone altar, something old began to breathe.

Briar grabbed Throne's arm.

“What’s beneath us?”

He looked at her then—truly looked.

Not as a haunted thing.

But as a man afraid for her.

“What’s beneath us is what I was supposed to become. What they needed me to cage but couldn’t.”

“And it’s waking because it knows the pact is breaking.”

“Because you’re feeling something for me… and it hates that.”

VII. The Decision.

Thorne turned to her, trembling with restraint.

“There’s one way to end it. Release me fully.”

Briar asked: “What does that mean?”

He replied: “Let me forget the names. Let me unbind from the house. Let me exist outside of its memory. You must kiss me without fear, walk me to the garden, and say my name without the manor listening.”

She asked getting curious: “And if I don’t?”

He replied tensely: “Then it will feed on me again.”

She asked again getting more curious: “And if I do?”

Hesitantly said: “Then it will feed on you.”

She stared at him, breathless.

The house, in response, let out a thunderous moan from beneath the chapel, cracking the floor just an inch.

It was hungry.

Waiting.

~TO BE CONTINUED....🖤🥀🕯️