DaoistMApKyt

The dead should stay dead.

Kael Arvid repeated the words like a prayer as he adjusted the raven mask over his scarred face. The carved beak pressed cold against the bridge of his nose, the eyeholes narrowing his vision to slits of flickering torchlight. Beneath him, the ballroom of House Dain shimmered—a grotesque painting of gold and rot. Nobles laughed behind ivory masks, their gloved hands clutching goblets of wine dark as clotting blood. The air reeked of clove and something fouler beneath, like meat left too long in the sun.

He hadn't come for wine.

The dagger at his belt was hungry. It had waited seven years for this night. Seven years since House Dain's soldiers kicked in the door of his family's cottage. Seven years since he'd watched from the treeline as the flames turned his sister's screams to smoke. Seven years of imagining this moment—the moment he'd slide steel between Lord Dain's ribs and whisper his family's names as the light

The Hollow Masquerade

Jacob realized it the moment he tried to stand his legs buckling, not from weakness, but because the grass melted under his touch, strands twisting into skeletal fingers that grabbed his ankles. The infant Emily in his arms let out a gurgling laugh as her skin peeled back, revealing the hollow bones beneath.

Eleanor gasped. "It's not real. We're still inside."

Not with a sound, but with a scream the same one Jacob had heard the night he carved the first sigil. The crow launched from the oak, its wings shedding feathers that morphed into falling knives. They struck the ground, sprouting into writhing black roots that spelled a single word in the dirt:

Then the meadow inhaled.

The grass flattened. The trees bent double. Even the sunlight seemed to suction toward a single point the now-rotting oak, its bark splitting to reveal a doorway of fused human teeth.

Emily's skeletal form wriggled from Jacob's grip, her tiny bones clicking as she crawled toward it.

"She's calling us home," Eleanor whispered, her voice layered with the Crow's ancient hunger.

Jacob grabbed her wrist. "That's not Emily. And that's not a door."

The roots at their feet shrieked in response, surging upward to form a cage of thorns. Beyond the tooth-doorway, something scratched.

A name he hadn't answered to in lifetimes.

The crow landed on Jacob's shoulder, its beak brushing his ear. "You woke up," it rasped. "Now so did she."

Inside stood the Hollow Priest but his mask was gone. His face was Jacob's. Older. Ravaged by time and guilt, his eyes two pits of feasting beetles.

"Welcome to the first house," the Priest said, stepping aside to reveal the nursery now overgrown with veins of pulsating black rot. "Where every lie begins."

Infant Emily's bones scurried past his feet into the darkness.

Eleanor wrenched free of Jacob's grip.

Chapter 16: The Waking World