Story 1069: The Bleeding Portrait

They say the portrait weeps.

High on the cliffs of Dagger’s Point stands the Marrowick Estate, abandoned since the Great Purge. The house itself is little more than a skeleton of splintered timbers and ash-streaked stone, but inside its grand, rotting parlor still hangs one immaculate thing—a portrait of Lady Selene Marrowick, untouched by flame, framed in obsidian, and forever crying blood.

In life, Selene was an occult painter—renowned, reclusive, and possibly mad. Her final piece was said to be her own soul rendered on canvas. As the story goes, she locked herself in the studio with her paints, her blood, and something else—something that spoke to her from the walls, begging to be remembered.

She emerged days later, pale and shriveled, dragging a canvas covered in silk.

She died before it was unveiled.

Her husband opened it at the funeral.

He screamed. His eyes burst in his skull.

He clawed out his own heart.