Prologue
Start writing here…The rain had come without warning—sharp, sudden, and thick with the scent of forgotten sins. It washed the cobbled streets of Viremoor in a shroud of silver, blurring the gaslights into trembling halos. The city exhaled secrets through its chimneys and gutters, a breath of rot and roses, of rusted gates and gilded lies. Somewhere behind shuttered windows and velvet drapes, the highborn danced in silk and laughter, oblivious to the shadows curling at their heels. But beneath the city, beneath the stone foundations of opulence and order, something older stirred. The girl arrived on the fifth night of rain.
No one saw her step from the carriage—black as pitch and trimmed in dying ivy—but the driver did not wait to be paid. He left the way he came, with hooves pounding like war drums, scattering crows and silence alike. She stood alone in the courtyard of the derelict manse, a cathedral of broken glass and curling iron, its windows blind, its doors slightly ajar like parted lips after a long-held breath. Her name was Lilith. She carried nothing but a worn violin case and the kind of stillness that unsettles wolves. The manor welcomed her as if it had been waiting.
Inside, the air was thicker—saturated with candle smoke, old paper, and the faintest trace of dried blood. Portraits lined the hallway walls, their eyes gone milky with age, their frames eaten at the edges by time’s cruel mouth. She walked without hesitation, as if she knew every splintered step, every echo the floorboards chose to keep. At the heart of the house was a music room. Not a soul had entered it in thirteen years.
But when she opened the case and drew the bow across those strings, the room breathed again. Dust rose like ghosts, swirling in harmony with her first note. It wasn’t beautiful, not in any conventional sense. It was a lament—a song of something long buried and now unearthed, raw and aching. The kind of music that remembered too much.
That was when he found her.
He didn’t knock. Didn’t speak. Just stood in the doorway, the flickering candlelight catching the glint of a ring he hadn’t worn since the fire. He was taller than she remembered—sharper, quieter, the cruel angles of grief carved deep into his face. But those eyes… they hadn’t changed. Not when he was a boy, not when the world burned, and certainly not now, as he looked at her like she was the beginning of every nightmare he never wanted to wake from.“Lilith,” he said, voice rough as winter bark. “You should be dead.”She didn’t stop playing. Didn’t blink. “I was,” she whispered.
And somewhere in the walls, the house listened. Somewhere beneath the city, something began to weep. And the story began again—not with love, but with ruin.
