I do not want this.
I do not want this bastardised immortality.
Wherever souls travel, I want to follow. I would ratherbe reborn than remain here. If I cannot live, may I not at least die with honour?
Was I so wicked in life that this is my punishment?
Yet… I can fight. They may use my magic, perhaps even me, but they will never take my will. With a twist of power and the hard-gained knowledge I possess, I battle to rewrite the spell. I shrug off his control, correct his sloppy spellwork, and reshape the magic.
There is nothing so dangerous as an educated woman who is both powerful and angry.
I will not lose myself.
I will not forget.
I shall not be broken.
If they want a cursed house, well, they have bloody well got one.
Chapter Three
One Hundred and Fifty-Six Years Ago
Time hasno edges at first.
For years, I answer every command the way a door answers a push. Open. Close. Ward. Unward. No name, no thoughts—only the tug of spells.
Then thought trickles back into place.
I am still here—neither alive nor dead.
Ceiling, walls, staircase, floorboards: all of it is me, and none of it feels like a body. My awareness skates along joists and plaster, slips into knots in the wood, and pools in the cold belly of the cellar.
A voice cuts through the fog.
“Hestia.”
My name.Memory floods in. The knife. William. Thecircle. The stink of chalk and tallow. I remember I am a paper mage. I remember what they did to me.
I reach for paper and ink as I always have, instinctively questing through the world for words, and this time something shifts.
Bodiless, my power is unconfined. No lungs to tire, no bones to break. I wield more magic than I ever did in the flesh.
Even the walls of the house struggle to hold me.
I compartmentalise the power, splitting myself, which is… disconcerting. The filaments of my soul peel apart like layers of silk; each fragment moves independently. I could divide again—thirds, fourths, perhaps more—but I must walk before I run. For now, I exist in two places at once.
One part stays within the house, tending the whims of monsters. The other unfurls, slipping along lines of power until I arrive elsewhere—home.
I find my family.
The manor is quieter than I remember.
I weave through familiar rooms until I reach what I came for: a neat stack of papers in Father’s old study—the inquest, the death certificates, the burial register.
Six years ago, John told them where we had gone. When we did not return, they searched. William’s carriage lay in a ditch off a country road, doors half-open, horses long since cut free, two bodies slumped inside.
Misadventure. Tragedy.
