Behind us, the Dowager’s voice rose again in shrill protest, but the door shut before I could hear it.
The corridor outside was cool and dim, a balm against the fever that still clung to my skin. I curled closer to Sylum, my pulse slowing at last, and let myself believe, if onlyfor a moment, that I was safe.
Dearest Reader,
Sylum believes I am asleep.
He carried me to my chamber as though I were something breakable and beloved, and for a brief, shimmering moment I allowed myself to rest within that illusion. He sat at my bedside until the trembling left my limbs, pressed a cool cloth to my brow, murmured soft assurances meant to soothe a frightened child.
He asked me once—only once—what I had seen.
I told him fatigue had unstrung my senses. That his aunt’s sharp tongue had merely caught me at a vulnerable moment.
He accepted it.
Or pretended to.
I do not know which frightens me more.
When he finally slipped from my room, believing (or hoping) that I slept, I reached under my mattress—not for my diary, but for you. For the page upon which I might anchor myself before the world slips again.
Because if I do not lay the truth bare somewhere—if I do not confess it to someone—then I fear it will unravel, strand by strand, until even Icannot distinguish what is real from what the house demands I see.
Reader, you must understand this:
I know precisely how I sound.
Every whisper in this manor already strains toward the word madness, eager to tether it to my name as it was once tethered to my mother’s. A legacy I never asked to inherit, yet one that clings to me.
But listen to me—truly listen—for I have no one else.
I am not mad.
Something or someone twisted that room around me.
Before the visions came, I felt it. The air tightening, the fire pressing too hot against my skin, the light sharpening unnaturally as though the walls themselves were drawing breath.
And then the tea.
God preserve me—the tea.
I still see it when I close my eyes: the trembling surface, the slow roiling darkening into something thick and vile. Not a sudden nightmare, not a blink-born distortion, but a deliberate corruption—as though it wished to be witnessed.
Flies do not rise from tea.
They do not crawl from sweetness like omens dripping with honeyed rot.
I know this.
I am not ignorant.
I am not a child telling ghost stories to amuse herself.
And Isolde…
Reader, her face changed.
Not with the softness of illusion nor the blur of tricked light, but with a grotesque, sliding defiance of nature. Her skin seemed to slough from her bones, her features warping, splitting, melting—her mouth speaking without moving, her expression peeling away to reveal something horrid beneath.
