The message on the wall glowed faintly into the morning, long after the candles had guttered out.
She will tell you nothing.
Elara hadn't slept. She had sat in the corner of her room with the lifeless raven still sprawled on the floor, its feathers slick with silver sheen. Her heart beat slow and heavy, dulled by exhaustion, but her mind burned with a single thought: Agnes knows.
When the housekeeper knocked on her door at dawn with her usual tray of tea, Elara did not answer. She watched through the crack beneath the door as Agnes's shadow lingered, unmoving, for longer than any servant would wait.
At last, the footsteps retreated.
Elara rose, set her jaw, and followed.
She found Agnes in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, hands buried in dough. A portrait of domestic simplicity but Elara's eyes locked on the faint red scratches across the woman's forearms, half-hidden under flour.
Elara stepped inside. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Agnes froze. Slowly, she brushed her hands clean and turned. "Tell you what, child?"
"Don't call me that." Elara's voice came out sharper than intended, but she didn't falter. "The curse. The bargain. My mother's journals. You've known all along."
Agnes's gaze flickered, just for a moment, to Elara's cut finger. Then back to her face. "Those books should have stayed locked away."
Elara's pulse spiked. "Then it's true."
The house seemed to lean in, beams groaning softly, as though listening. Agnes wiped her hands on her apron and sighed. "What did you do, Elara?"
"I tried to unbind it."
For the first time since Elara could remember, Agnes's composure cracked. She paled, gripping the edge of the counter. "Foolish girl. You've woken it further."
Elara's anger surged. "You stood by all these years, watching, pretending to protect me while I was hunted. Why? Why didn't you warn me?"
Agnes's lips pressed tight, her silence damning.
Elara stepped closer, trembling with both rage and fear. "I heard your voice last night. In the raven. You should not have tried. Those were your words."
Agnes shook her head quickly, but too quickly. "The curse wears many voices...."
"Don't lie to me!"
The kitchen air chilled, the hearth fire guttering low. Shadows thickened around them, pooling in the corners. The house always punished lies. Elara felt it watching.
Agnes stiffened, then straightened, her eyes suddenly fierce. "If you think the truth will free you, you are more foolish than I feared."
"Then say it," Elara whispered.
Speak the truth for the truth to uncoil.
Agnes's hands trembled as she poured water into a basin, as if busying herself might shield her from speaking. But Elara waited, relentless, until the housekeeper's voice cracked open like old wood.
"Your mother bound herself to the ravens willingly. It was not madness, not weakness it was desperation. The land was failing. Crops withered, the house falling into ruin. She sought power, Elara. Power to preserve the Veyne name."
Elara's throat tightened. "And she traded me for it."
Agnes flinched. "She thought she could bargain offer only her own blood, her own years. But the pact is greedy. It takes daughters, each generation, in turn."
The words hollowed her. All the pieces fit now the whispers, the ancestral voices, the journals scorched as though someone had tried to erase the truth.
"Why didn't you stop her?" Elara demanded.
Agnes's face hardened. "Because it is not my place to stop a Veyne. It is my place to keep the house alive long enough to receive the next."
The next. The word landed like a blade.
"You mean me."
The raven's corpse still lay upstairs, its feathers scattering the floor. Elara thought of its silver eyes, Agnes's voice croaking through its beak.
"You serve it," Elara whispered.
Agnes's silence was answer enough.
The room seemed to tilt. For the first time, Elara saw her housekeeper not as the loyal guardian she had believed, but as part of the machine that had caged her life.
Her nails dug into her palms. "Then you've been feeding me to it all along."
Agnes's jaw worked, but no words came.
Elara stepped back, trembling. "I will not be fed."
The candles flickered violently, though no wind stirred. The air thickened with the smell of ash. And from the walls came a new sound which were not whispers this time, but low, hungry scratching, as though something vast dragged its claws along the beams of the manor.
Agnes went rigid, her eyes darting toward the ceiling. "You've brought it closer," she hissed.
Elara's voice broke into a shout. "Then tell me how to end it!"
Agnes finally turned her gaze on her, eyes wide, raw with fear. "End it? Child you cannot end it. You can only choose who carries it next."
The words slammed into Elara like stone.
Before she could answer, the scratching above them grew louder and heavier until plaster dust rained from the ceiling. The house moaned, yawning wide. The kitchen door slammed shut with a thunderous crack.
And in the suffocating dark, the voice that came was not her mother's, nor Agnes's, nor the countless women before her.
It was her own.
"Elara Veyne," the voice purred, from nowhere and everywhere. "You will choose."