The Ravenwood Palace

The East Wing

The match burned low in Lucas’s fingers, casting a trembling circle of light across the grand hall. He lit another, then another, finally coaxing the flame into a lantern he’d taken from the inn. Its glow pushed back the shadows, but only barely. Darkness seemed to drink the light, as though it had been waiting centuries to do so.

The hall stretched endlessly, the marble floor cracked and slick with mildew. Twin staircases curved upward like skeletal arms, meeting in a balcony above. Faded banners drooped from the rafters, their sigils long erased by smoke and time.

Lucas opened Anna Fletcher’s notebook. Her cramped handwriting scrawled across the pages, uneven, hurried. She had sketched the palace’s outline — the grand hall, the servant passages, and in thick underlined script: East Wing.

Beneath the word, a single note: “She lingers here.”

Lucas exhaled smoke, gaze flicking toward the corridor yawning to the right. The East Wing.

He crossed the hall. As he did, his lantern’s glow brushed against portraits lining the walls. Faces of the Ravenwood bloodline — grim men, pale women, all painted with the same hollow eyes. Eveline’s face appeared again and again, each portrait subtly different, as though the artist had tried to capture something restless in her. In one, she sat with a raven perched on her wrist. In another, she stared directly at the viewer, smile sharpened to something cruel.

The corridor swallowed him in damp air and silence. His boots echoed, the sound bouncing too far, as though the walls were wider than they appeared.

On the floor near the threshold, Lucas spotted something. He crouched. A scrap of paper, its edges singed, lay half-buried in the dust. He lifted it carefully. It was a page torn from Anna’s notebook, ink smudged with water.

The words were frantic, pressed deep into the page:

“The whispers follow me. East Wing. Third door. Do not—”

The rest was ripped away.

Lucas’s jaw tightened. He slid the fragment into his coat. His lantern beam swept the hall ahead. Door after door lined the corridor, their brass handles dulled by time.

Third door.

The first creaked as he passed, the sound like a sigh escaping old lungs. The second bore a deep gouge across its wood, as though clawed.

And then, the third.

The handle was cold, colder than the rest, rimed with a faint sheen of frost though the air was still. Carved into the wood, almost invisible in the dim light, were letters scratched by a desperate hand.

E.R.

Eveline Ravenwood.

Lucas’s grip tightened on the lantern. He set his hand on the door. The silence deepened. For a heartbeat, he thought he heard a woman’s breath on the other side — slow, deliberate, waiting.

He pushed the door open.

The hinges groaned. The darkness beyond seemed thicker, more alive. His lantern wavered as if the flame wanted to go out.

And somewhere in that shadow, something moved.