Part Ten – The Mansion and Its Silence
The staircase groaned faintly under Jonathan's slow descent, his hand brushing the rail polished smooth by generations. The house was quiet—eerily so. The silence pressed in on him like a living thing, swallowing each step. What once had been a mansion brimming with voices, laughter, hurried footsteps, and the constant clatter of work was now a hollow carcass of itself.
The Hanns estate had not always been this way. Built on the edge of Ironclover's oldest quarter, the western quarter, the mansion was one of the first testaments to Raymond Hann's unlikely rise. His grandfather had arrived with little more than calloused hands and an iron will, a smith among smiths when the town was still a cluster of forges choking beneath their own smoke. Where others saw soot and hardship, Raymond saw dominion. He gathered patents, seized opportunities in iron and steel, and built not just wealth but a seat among the ruling Council. The mansion was the crown of that ambition—a labyrinth of fifty rooms, sprawling libraries, ballrooms, and wings that seemed designed not merely for living but for outlasting.
Jonathan remembered how alive it once felt. Even on quiet nights, there had been rhythm—the kitchen staff trading jokes, Heller's brisk footsteps as he checked the lamps, his father's voice echoing through the halls as he rehearsed speeches or quarreled with fellow inventors over mechanical diagrams. It was a home filled with the momentum of progress.
But since the night of Raymond Hann's death, the great house had been stilled. Curtains drawn tight, fireplaces left cold, clocks unwound. The grand corridors that once pulsed with warmth and certainty now bore the scent of dust and abandonment. Ironclover's fog, always thick, seemed to cling more tightly to the windows of the Hanns estate, as if the very town had turned inward to mourn—or to watch.
Jonathan's footsteps faltered. He had known this mansion as a child's kingdom, a place where shadows could be friendly and every door hid some wonder. Now the shadows stretched longer, heavier, whispering of absence. The Hanns legacy was carved into every beam, yet without his father at its heart, the structure seemed almost a mausoleum, a monument less to power than to loss.