Ashveil
The candle had burned out an hour ago, and Elysia had not replaced it.
She sat on the edge of her bed in the dark, still and upright, as if she had simply paused herself somewhere between waking and sleep. The cottage around her was quiet in the way old stone became quiet over time, not soft or comforting, but heavy, like it had learned to hold silence instead of release it.
Moonlight slipped through the small window above her worktable and touched the jars she kept there. Herbs she had gathered herself, season after season, because that was something she could still control. Silverleaf with its pale shimmer, duskmarrow that only grew in shaded ravines, winter-sage whose leaves curled like dried breath.
They were ordinary things in an ordinary life, but they anchored her more than anything else ever had.
Her hands rested on her knees, but even in stillness there was tension there, as if her body never fully accepted rest. That feeling came before anything else.
It always did.
A pressure gathered in her fingertips first, subtle at first, then deeper, like something inside her was testing the boundary between thought and skin. Elysia lowered her gaze slowly.
Darkness had begun to form across her palms.
It was not shadow in the way night created shadow. It was not absence or lightless space. It felt heavier than that, almost intentional, as if it had weight and direction of its own.
Her throat tightened slightly, not with panic, but with recognition. She had learned long ago that fear did not help anything. What came instead was something quieter, more controlled, the understanding that this was happening again.
Not now.
The words formed in her mind without sound, not spoken, but firm enough to act like instruction. She focused on breathing, and the hum began before she called it. It rose in her chest like something remembered rather than created, a vibration that did not belong entirely to her but had always responded when needed.
She let it steady her.
One breath. Then another.
The pressure in her hands did not disappear, but it shifted, easing back as if it had been held in place for a moment and was now reconsidering its strength. The scent of crushed silverleaf drifted through the room, sharp and bitter, grounding her in something physical enough to hold onto.
Elysia exhaled slowly.
Her fingers trembled once before stilling again.
It had been happening more often lately. That was the thought she avoided more than the sensation itself. There was no warning anymore, no gradual build she could prepare for. It simply arrived, as if something inside her was becoming less patient with restraint.
She pressed her fingers to the scar beneath her right breast without thinking. Her body always moved before her mind had time to decide otherwise.
There were other scars across her back, too many to count properly, but she never looked at them directly. She did not need to. Her body remembered what her mind refused to revisit in full.
Voss House was never far from her, even here in Ashveil. It returned most often in sleep, but sometimes it bled into waking moments as well, in small, unwanted fragments. The smell of damp stone. The sound of footsteps in narrow corridors. The third stair that always groaned under weight.
Jetta Vance was part of that memory in the way some things never fully separate from a place. Not always visible, but always present.
Elysia pressed her hand more firmly against her ribs, as if pressure could keep memory from expanding further.
“You are here,” she whispered, her voice low in the dark room. “Not there.”
It was not comfort. It was instruction. Something to repeat until the body accepted it again.
Her hand slowly released its grip and moved to the pendant at her throat.
The stone was cool against her skin, dark teal and smooth. She turned it once between her fingers without looking at it. She never needed to. The back was always the same beneath her touch, a carved sword and four lilies forming a seal she had never fully understood but had always belonged to.
She let it fall back against her chest.
Outside, wind moved through Ashveil, brushing against the cottage walls and slipping through the gaps in the window frame. The village below continued its quiet existence, unaware of the small struggle happening inside a single room above it.
Elysia lay back slowly.
The blanket was rough wool, familiar in its weight. She stared at the ceiling, where a thin crack ran across the stone. She had never repaired it. Not because she could not, but because some part of her had stopped believing that everything broken needed immediate fixing.
Her hand returned once more to her ribs, but this time without urgency. Just presence. A reminder that she was still here, still contained within herself.
Eventually, sleep came.
Not gently.
A corridor stretched into darkness. Stone floor beneath her feet, though she could not feel the steps properly. Twelve of them, always the same number, though she never remembered counting.
The air was cold and damp, carrying a smell she knew without needing to name it.
Voss House.
Jetta Vance’s footsteps echoed somewhere ahead, slow and deliberate, the sound of someone who never needed to rush because she was always obeyed.
Elysia could not see her yet, but she felt her presence the way one feels pressure before impact. Absolute. Familiar. Unavoidable.
The third step groaned.
That sound always came first.
Not as detail, but as warning.
Her chest tightened in sleep, not in fear alone, but in recognition of something her body had never forgotten even when her mind tried to separate itself from it.
The corridor waited.
Not empty.
Not still.
Just remembering her the way it always did.
