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

The nursery stank of spoiled milk and wet charcoal.

Jacob staggered after Eleanor, the tooth-door slamming shut behind him. The walls breathed, expanding and contracting like a living lung, their floral wallpaper now a mosaic of screaming face every child the house had ever consumed.

The Priest was gone. Only Eleanor remained, crouched beside the cradle where the skeletal infant perched, her tiny fingers knitting the air into strands of smoke.

"She's remaking it," Eleanor murmured. "The cycle."

Jacob's scars burned. He grabbed Eleanor's shoulder, forcing her to face him. "Look at yourself."

Her reflection in the nursery mirror told the truth:

Her left eye was gone. In its socket writhed a single crow's feather, its quill burrowing deeper into her skull with each blink.

"I know," she said softly. "I've always known."

The infant Emily hissed, her bone fingers snapping. The walls lurched, disgorging figures Dozens of past Jacobs and Eleanors, their bodies fused with crow parts, their mouths sewn shut with black thread. They reached for the cradle in unison.

The crow on Jacob's shoulder pecked his cheek, drawing blood. "The key," it urged. "You left it in the grass."

The rusted key vanishing into the meadow's illusion. The one tool that could unravel sigils.

The infant Emily's jaw unhinged, releasing a sound like a hundred children crying. The fused corpses shambled closer.

He ripped the feather from Eleanor's eye socket.

She screamed as it came free not a feather, but a key, its shaft glistening with her blood, its teeth jagged as broken bone.

The crow laughed. "Clever boy."

Jacob drove the blood-key into her ribcage.

The nursery exploded in a storm of feathers and shattered porcelain. The walls peeled back, revealing the true house beneath

A colossal, rotting birdcage, its bars made of fused skeletons.

A pulsing, cancerous thing veined with old sigils.

Chapter 17: The Blood Key