The air in Blackwood Manor was thick with the scent of dust and decay, a perfume Elara had known her whole life. Rain wept down the grimy panes of the library window, blurring the skeletal trees outside. It was a house of ghosts—not of spirits, but of memories that clung to the peeling damask wallpaper and tarnished silver. While prying at a loose floorboard she believed to be the source of a persistent draft, her fingers brushed against the chill of worn leather. A book. Small, bound in calfskin, its clasp a tarnished silver leaf.
It was her grandmother Genevieve’s diary.
October 17th, 1958.
The last of the wards has fallen. The magic of this house, of our line, is as thin as watered milk. Father says we must leave, that the Blackwood line is at its end. The portraits on the walls watch me, their painted eyes full of accusation. They do not know the lengths I will go to preserve us. They do not know about the one who waits in the shadows of the yew grove.
Elara’s breath hitched. Magic wasn’t a story in their family; it was a quiet, guttering candle flame. It was the reason the roses in the dead garden sometimes bloomed in winter, the reason a book might fall open to the exact page you needed. But it was fading. She felt it every day, a growing hollowness in the bones of the house, a silence where there should have been a hum.
She turned the brittle page, a corner flaking away like a dried leaf.
October 19th, 1958.
He came to me at dusk. He is not of this world, a creature woven from shadow and starlight, with a voice like rustling leaves and breaking ice. He calls himself the Keeper of Forgotten Things. He offered a pact. He would tether our magic to his own realm, a deep and timeless place, preserving it from the erosion of the modern world. In exchange, one day, he would claim a sliver of that magic as his own—an echo, he called it. A single descendant to walk in his world, to keep the bargain balanced.
A cold dread, sharp and immediate, snaked up Elara’s spine. The diary felt heavy, a stone sinking her into a history she never knew existed. The house groaned around her, the wind whispering through the eaves. For a moment, it sounded like a name, a sibilant, drawn-out sound she couldn’t quite catch.
October 20th, 1958.
The pact is sealed. I pricked my finger on a thorn from the winter rose and let the blood fall on the yew root that anchors this house. The magic surged back, a tidal wave of vitality. The lights flickered on, the dust seemed to settle, and the portraits looked down with approval. He asked for my name. I gave it. He said the price would be paid when the last rose of winter bloomed without a thorn. A poet’s bargain. I do not care. The family is safe.
Elara slowly looked up from the diary, her gaze drawn to the rain-streaked window. Outside, in the derelict garden, a single, perfect crimson rose had bloomed on a skeletal bush, its petals catching the grey light like drops of blood. She could see its stem, smooth and green and perfect.
There were no thorns.
The shadows in the corners of the library deepened, coalescing, no longer empty. A voice, like rustling leaves and breaking ice, whispered from the darkness just behind her.
“Genevieve’s echo.”