I. Beneath the Altar, Something Breathes.

Briar returned to the chapel that night.

Not because she wanted to.

Because she was called.

The manor had stopped pretending. Its walls moaned openly now, whispering her name not as a warning—but as an invocation. Candles lit themselves in hallways she hadn’t entered. Mirrors reflected pieces of her face she didn’t remember being hers.

But beneath it all, she heard one heartbeat.

His.

She descended the stone steps behind the altar—the place where generations ago, the Witness was first buried alive in silence.

The air was sharp with the scent of iron and salt.

And then she saw it:

A sarcophagus of obsidian, veined with red light, pulsing like a dying star.

And written across the lid, in the old tongue:

“He Remembers Because We Refuse To.”

II. Thorne Is Not a Man. Not Anymore.

She found Thorne standing over the sarcophagus.

His chest was bare. Blood marked his shoulders, spiralling in the shape of the Elwood sigil—but reversed. His back revealed the truth: not scars, but seals—symbols burned into flesh to keep something beneath him locked away.

“What is this?” she whispered.

He didn’t turn.

“The cradle. The womb. My beginning and my undoing.”

Then he turned to her.

“I’m not the first Witness. I’m the last. The others were sacrificed and absorbed—folded into my skin. The manor made me a vessel because the true curse was a spirit it couldn’t destroy.”

He stepped closer, eyes burning.

“Every Elwood sin had to go somewhere. They fed it to me.”

III. The Deal Her Blood Made.

As Briar opened her mother’s final letter, tucked into the spine of the altar, the pieces came together.

Mirena had not just loved Thorne.

She had fed the pact.

She had given birth to Briar with blood harvested from Thorne’s dreams.

Briar wasn’t just family.

She was designed.

The pact’s loophole. The child who could undo centuries not because she was innocent—but because she carried equal parts Elwood sin and Witness memory.

She was the key.

The weapon.

And the altar beneath them knew it.

IV. The Kiss that Broke the Pattern.

She stepped to Thorne—slowly, carefully, with the weight of every truth now heavy on her tongue.

“Do you know my name?” she asked.

“I spoke it before the womb did,” he replied.

“Then speak it again.”

And he did.

Soft. Like prayer.

She kissed him.

But the moment their lips met, the manor screamed.

Not metaphor.

The house let out a sound so raw it shattered the stained glass in the west wing.

The sarcophagus split.

Crimson light poured from it.

And the truth rose.

V. The Plot Twist: Thorne Was Not the Curse. He Was the Prison.

Emerging from the cracked sarcophagus was not a demon.

It was a boy.

No older than seven.

Eyes pitch black. Skin stitched at the wrists. Mouth sewn shut with gold thread.

“Who—” Briar whispered.

Thorne fell to his knees. “That… was the first Witness. The one they made the pact with. I was built to keep him dreaming.”

“And now he’s awake.”

The child opened his mouth.

The threads dissolved.

And from his throat came a voice that was not mortal:

“Blood bound me.
Love broke me.
You’ve kissed the lock—but opened the war.”

The candles snuffed out.

And the boy vanished into Briar’s shadow.

VI. What Has Been Set Free?

Thorne clutched Briar’s hand as they backed away from the sarcophagus, now empty.

“He’s inside you,” he whispered. “Not just symbolically. Literally.”

The house had tricked them.

The kiss didn’t free Thorne.

It freed what Thorne had been containing for centuries.

A god. A curse. A memory sharpened into entity.

Now Briar had inherited it.

And the manor?

It bowed to her like a knight to its queen.

~TO BE CONTINUED....🖤🩸🥀