Entry 30: January 9th
The blood remembers.
I dreamed those words last night. Not just heard them, felt them. Etched into my bones like heat from a brand.
They echoed through a hallway that never ended, doors on either side slamming open and shut as if the house itself was breathing.
And at the far end, a mirror. But the reflection wasn't mine. It was her.
Liraine.
My mother.
Except her eyes were black like ink, and she whispered in a voice that wasn't hers.
"What you inherited was never dormant. Only waiting."
I woke up gasping, tangled in my sheets, sweat freezing against my back.
It's been three days since the Hollow answered me.
The pendant hasn't left my neck since I retrieved it. It's warm now.
Sometimes it pulses faintly like a second heartbeat.
And the scratch... the word Return hasn't faded. If anything, it's deeper. More deliberate.
Like something inside the pendant is pushing outward.
Ash hasn't come back. Not since he told me that I had "called it." That something had heard me.
But someone else did come.
Valen.
He found me on campus today. Just… appeared like he knew where I'd be.
I was sitting under the archway between the library and the philosophy building, trying to read a text on medieval blood rites I checked out under a fake ID.
"You've been digging," he said without preamble.
I didn't deny it.
He sat next to me like we were old friends, like we hadn't only exchanged a handful of sentences at the Hollow.
His presence isn't like Ash's. It doesn't weigh down the air or blur the edges of reality.
But it does something subtler... bends attention. Makes people look away, forget.
Even now I can't recall exactly what color his coat was. Gray? Dark green?
"What do you know about the House?" I asked him.
He glanced at the book in my lap, then back at me. "Enough to know you're not safe. Not anymore."
There's something clinical about him. Watchful. I don't think he's human either, but he's not like Ash.
Not like Veyrix. He feels more… aligned to rules. Like someone who's read the manual backward and forward but refuses to skip a single step.
"Why are you helping me?" I asked.
He didn't answer right away.
A moment later.
"Because when she broke the line, she made enemies. And if it reawakens through you… those enemies will come back."
He handed me a folded paper. An address. Not to the Hollow, to somewhere else. A place called The Red Vault.
"What is this?" I asked.
He stood. "Where they buried the names they were too afraid to burn."
And then he left, disappearing into the crowd like mist.
I haven't opened the paper again yet. It's in my pocket, burning like a secret.
But I think I know what it means.
The House isn't just haunted.
It's hunting.
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Entry 31: January 10th
I went to the address.
I didn't tell anyone, not even Cara. Not that she would've stopped me, but I'm starting to feel the gap between us widening.
I don't want to drag her deeper into this, not unless I have no other choice.
The Red Vault wasn't what I expected. I thought I'd find a mausoleum, maybe a crypt or even some long-forgotten church. But it was a bookstore.
Or at least, it looked like one.
Tucked between a shuttered laundromat and a florist that reeked of dying carnations, "The Red Vault" had dust-caked windows and no signage other than a faded blood-red symbol painted above the door, an eye inside a flame.
When I stepped in, the smell hit me first. Old pages, iron, and something else.
Something... rotten sweet.
There was no bell. No music. Just silence.
The shop was deeper than it should've been. Shelves rose high, casting shadows in impossible directions.
Some books had no titles. Some had too many. One vibrated faintly as I passed, like it wanted to be opened, or resisted being closed.
I almost left.
But then someone spoke.
"You wear it openly."
I turned.
An old woman sat behind a desk carved from bone-white wood, her hands thin and veined like parchment.
She wore a crimson shawl that shimmered even in the dark. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts, or maybe they weren't eyes at all.
Just silver pools reflecting the pendant at my chest.
I didn't ask how she knew. I knew what she meant.
"The Hollow's mark," she said, not unkindly. "So the bloodline survives after all."
I stepped forward. "What bloodline?"
"You know already," she replied, and gestured for me to sit. "You've felt it."
And gods help me, I had.
She didn't give me her name. Just spoke of The House of Thorne, as though I were already its heir.
A line that had once ruled quietly over power unseen. That kept the balance between the realms of waking and unseen.
Until someone tried to cut the root.
My mother.
"She stole the names,"
The woman said.
"The ones branded into the blood. She tried to erase the line by walking away. But you, you were never outside of it. You were born inside the fire, child. And now the name wants you back."
The pendant glowed faintly as she said it. Almost pulsed.
I asked her about Ash. About Veyrix. About who or what they are.
She laughed, a dry, wheezing sound.
"Two sides of the same blade,"
she said.
"Ash is what remains. Veyrix is what was promised."
I don't understand it yet.
But I think I'm starting to.
Before I left, she gave me a book.
No title, no author, bound in black leather stitched shut with red thread.
She warned me.
"Open it only when you're ready to choose."
Choose what?
She didn't say.
But I think I already know.
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Entry 32: January 11th
I opened the book.
I told myself I wouldn't, not until I had answers, not until I was ready.
But readiness is a lie.
You're never ready to tear open a wound.
You just do it when the pain of not knowing becomes sharper than the fear.
It was midnight. The dorm was silent. Cara was out with classmates, and the hallway lights had gone dim, flickering every so often like something unseen walked past them.
I unthreaded the red stitches carefully, each pull of the string making the leather groan like skin.
And then I opened it.
The first page held no words.
just a mark.
The same one burned into the Hollow's gates.
The same I saw in my dream, branded into my mother's hand. The eye inside the flame.
When I turned the next page, the words bled into place. Not ink, but blood. I saw it happen.
The text didn't read like a diary or a spellbook.
It was alive.
Sentient.
Reading me while I read it.
It spoke in layered voices and metaphors, but I pieced together what I could.
It wasn't just history.
It was prophecy.
My bloodline wasn't simply noble or ancient.
It was chosen, by the Hollow itself. The House of Thorne was born from a pact. One that required naming.
Names written in flame, in bone, in sacrifice. Names that became power. When my mother fled, she didn't just run.
She broke the pact.
And now, the Hollow starves.
Without an heir to carry the flame, the House began to unravel.
The other families, veiled names like Umbra, Sennelith, and Veir.
Began circling like carrion birds.
Ready to take what was once held in balance.
Ash was a guardian once, the book said.
Veyrix, a promised prince.
But something went wrong.
The two names now inhabit one being, torn in conflict.
And then I saw it.
Scrawled in the blood-ink at the bottom of the page.
Not printed, but bleeding into the page like it had been hidden until I looked:
Caelith
I whispered it aloud, and the room pulsed like it recognized the name.
The shadows shifted, not threatening, but attentive.
That's his name.
Not Ash, the nickname I gave him in ignorance.
Not the silent shadow I followed through the library.
Not the ghost I trusted without a face.
Caelith...
The name burned into the Hollow's pact. The name the House remembers.
And when I said it aloud, I swear something in the pendant stirred. Like it had been waiting to hear it again.
The book didn't stop.
"The heir must name the guardian.
One to seal. One to unbind.
In choosing, the House remembers."
I closed the book with shaking hands. The stitches had vanished, as if the book no longer needed to be sealed.
My name.
Eira Thorne
The book called me.
It wasn't written, but I felt it settle in my chest.
Like something old had finally exhaled through me.
I haven't slept.
I don't know how much longer I can stay here. The Hollow is calling louder.
And I think… I think Caelith is watching again.
But so is Veyrix.
And they no longer feel like two sides of the same blade.
They feel like weapons aimed at each other.
And I might be the one holding the hilt.
-----------------------
Entry 33: January 12th
I saw him again.
Not Caelith.
Not Veyrix.
But something in between, or maybe just… what's left when neither name is in control.
I was walking back from campus.
It was late.
The cold was biting harder than usual, and the snow felt strange under my boots.
Not soft, but brittle, like ash packed over ice.
I passed under one of the old streetlamps near the gate and paused because I heard it again.
The sound I now know isn't a wind chime. It's chains, light ones, brushing against stone.
When I turned, he was there.
Leaning against the old iron fence, head tilted slightly, arms folded like he had all the time in the world.
His coat was dark, soaked near the hem.
His eyes, neither entirely Caelith's soft ember-glow nor Veyrix's void-dark.
Flickered like someone trapped between flame and shadow.
I didn't run.
I didn't speak.
He did.
"You opened the book."
A statement, not a question.
I nodded.
My hand instinctively touched the pendant, and it burned.
Not with pain, but with a slow, pulsing heat.
Like it recognized him, too.
"Then you know what I am."
I said nothing. Because no, I don't fully know.
The book told me fragments.
Whispers.
Names.
Prophecies.
But not why I still feel drawn to him.
"Do you hate me yet?"
His voice cracked slightly when he said it, like he wanted me to.
"You should"
he added.
"You will."
There was a silence between us.
Thick with all the things I couldn't bring myself to ask.
Were you ever whole?
Did you love my mother?
Did you kill her?
But he stepped closer before I could say any of them.
"They'll make you choose soon, Eira."
The way he said my name was careful. Tender, even.
"One of us will burn. The other… remains."
"Why me?"
I finally asked.
"Why am I the one who decides?"
He smiled then, a sad, knowing smile.
Not cruel.
Not mocking.
"Because you were born holding both names in your blood."
And then, as if the moment would fracture if I moved too fast, I asked the thing that had started to grow like a thorn in my chest.
"Was Caelith your name first? Or Veyrix?"
He looked at me long and hard.
"Neither"
he said.
"My first name was taken from me when I was bound to your house. The names you know are pieces, weapons I had to become."
He reached out, like he might touch my hand, but stopped just shy of my skin.
The cold around us deepened. Time stalled.
"You're not ready yet"
he said, softly.
"But you will be."
And then he was gone.
Not in smoke. Not in light.
Just… gone.
But the fence behind him bore a mark.
Fresh, scorched into the iron.
The eye in flame.