Elsewhere — In the Room of Masks
The Manor had many names for its rooms, but this one had none.
Here, the air reeked of old breath and powdered bone. Masks lined every surface—wooden, porcelain, leather—each carved with care and forgotten with cruelty. Some wept tar. Others smiled too wide. One bore Larissa's face.
Lukyan stepped inside, knife still slick with silver and blood. The corridor behind him was gone, devoured by shifting architecture. His steps echoed, too loud for such a small space. He reached toward a mask—hesitating when it blinked.
"Don't," Dimitri said, appearing beside him like a shadow peeled from the wall. "They remember more than you want them to."
"What is this place?"
"The House's memory. Not yours."
A low laugh slithered between the masks. One of them turned—literally, bone creaking as its expression twisted from serene to vicious.
"You brought her here," it rasped, voice like branches snapping beneath snow. "You and the mirror-boy. You cracked the roots."
Lukyan stepped back, but the room closed in.
"Where is she?" he demanded.
The mask didn't answer with words. Instead, it opened its mouth wide, impossibly wide, and exhaled a wind that smelled of pine needles and funeral ash.
Inside the wind—Larissa's voice:
"I've chosen nothing yet."
Then the mask shattered.
The rest followed.
And Lukyan fell through the floor again, into darkness that whispered his name not with fear… but with hunger.
Below — The Stair of Bone
The spiral staircase wound endlessly. Larissa moved not with her feet, but with will—her steps didn't echo. They whispered.
The walls pulsed around her, red and black, layered with screaming veins and ancestral oaths. Every step downward stripped her of something she hadn't known she carried—fear, perhaps. Or mercy.
As she descended, fragments of voices brushed past:
Her father, promising safety.
Her mother, hiding the knife behind her back.
Anya, screaming from the bath the day the water turned to ink.
The book's heartbeat kept time beneath it all.
She didn't stop. Couldn't.
And then—suddenly—there were no more steps.
Just a door.
Wooden. Plain. Carved with one symbol: the same spiral burned into her hand.
Behind it, silence so deep it made her teeth hurt.
Larissa pressed her hand to the symbol.
It flared.
The door opened.
Within — The Heart Below
There was no sky.
No floor.
Only the beating thing at the center of it all.
It floated, suspended in black roots and silver threads, each one singing in a voice older than language. It had no shape—not truly. Sometimes it looked like a heart. Sometimes a house. Sometimes a cage.
Sometimes a girl curled into herself, weeping.
Larissa stepped forward.
And it noticed her.
The roots curled toward her like fingers. The threads tugged her forward like breath in her lungs.
"You found me," it said—not in words, but in her blood.
"I wasn't looking," she replied. "Not at first."
The thing pulsed. "But you came anyway. You heard me calling."
Larissa nodded. "I've heard you all my life."
And it laughed. A child's laugh, broken and soft.
"I've been so alone," it said. "I tried to forget. I tried to sleep. But they kept building, Larissa. They kept feeding me memories I didn't want. Dead children. Wars. Sacrifices. And hope."
The word tasted bitter.
"What are you?" she asked.
It didn't answer. It didn't need to.
Because she saw it now—truly.
Not a god. Not a monster.
But a bargain made flesh.
Every promise broken.
Every prayer unanswered.
Every Queen who had bled into the walls to keep the house from collapsing inward.
"I am the hunger that waits between choices," it said. "And you, little thread… You are my ending. Or my beginning."
Larissa stepped closer.
And extended her hand.
Elsewhere — The Skin Library
Dimitri flipped a page. The book didn't want to open, but he bled on it until it complied.
The room around him was stitched from flesh—walls of skin, bound books whispering curses, windows that blinked instead of showing the sky.
He was looking for her name.
Not Larissa.
The first name.
The original bargain.
The reason the house still lived.
"You're close," the Librarian rasped—a figure with no face and fingers made of quills.
Dimitri ignored it.
His hand landed on the right page.
And he whispered:
"Seryna."
The house shuddered.
Every door slammed shut.
And one door—a hidden one, beneath the roots—opened.
Below — The Final Thread
Larissa's fingers brushed the heart.
Pain didn't come.
Only truth.
She saw the foundation—Seryna kneeling, offering her child to the house.
She saw the centuries of lies, of masks, of Queens sacrificed to keep the walls standing.
She saw herself, not as she was… but as she could be.
Unbound.
Queen of nothing.
Sovereign of all.
The heart pulsed once.
"Choose."
She breathed in.
And then—
A knife cut through the dark.
Lukyan.
His voice.
"Larissa."
He had found the door.
The heart screamed.
So did the house.
Because the choice—
—was no longer hers alone.