I didn’t remember walking through the threshold.
One moment, I was a girl unclasping her cloak at the estate’s entrance—bare fingers brushing against the woolen collar, the air too warm, the lighting too gold—and the next, I was somewhere else entirely. Drenched in sound and shimmer. Light blooming across every surface. The air perfumed with spellwork and winter citrus, honeyed wine and something older, darker, threaded beneath it all like a memory you couldn’t quite name but still somehow feared.
I stood at the top of a shallow descending stair, just past the vestibule’s inner arch, and the ballroom stretched before me like something pulled from the ruins of a half-forgotten myth. Grand didn’t feel like the right word. Grand was a cathedral. A palace. This was older. Hungrier. A monumen
