The house was silent, but its walls spoke.
From the creaking of wood to the trapped sighs between its layers, everything was memory. That room—the oldest in the east wing—opened on its own, as if awaiting the return of one who was once its guardian. Rei moved slowly. His shadow curled across the floor like a pale echo. The air was thick, almost liquid, and smelled of damp books, iron, and forgotten childhood.
Symbols lined the walls, buried beneath layers of old paint. Not mere markings—they were anchors, hand-drawn to seal something away. Rei traced them with trembling fingers. His pupils dilated. He saw a hallway.
A hallway that did not exist.
Memories projected by the house itself. The children were there. Small, silent, in gray robes, eyes locked onto a void without bottom. The house once embraced them. It sang to them through the creaking bones of its structure. It offered them refuge.
Ershem was part of that. An entity woven into the house's essence, born from a need for comfort and vigilance. He was protector. He was a soft voice. He was the invisible hands that prevented falls, that closed windows in the middle of the night.
But all changed when the fire came.
One night, the orphanage staff discovered the hidden basement. They turned it into a place of punishment. Ershem felt the fear, the rage. The house was violated. The children's screams, their marked bodies, the endless nights in darkness—these shattered him.
He stopped being a guardian and became a judge. The symbols, the anchors, tried to bind him, but he was no longer one with the house. He had become something else.
Rei collapsed to his knees. He saw the records. Each child had a story. Names: Elias, Margo, Damian, Luz. They all bore the same note: "Transferred to external custody"—a euphemism for those who vanished.
Yuki, unknowingly, had been one of them.
His file was there, hidden behind a false wall. A charred page, stained with dried blood. Date unreadable. Diagnosis: "Persistent silence." Final note: "High potential for bond with the entity."