The Ravenwood Palace

The Fire That Took Her

Lucas Blackwood did not often dwell on the night Evelyn vanished. Memory had a way of burning hotter than the flames themselves, and though he had buried it deep beneath years of whiskey and smoke, it returned sometimes — unbidden, merciless.

He had been only seventeen then, a boy trying to wear his father’s shoes. Evelyn was twelve — bright, curious, always wandering where she shouldn’t. Their house outside Holloway stood three stories tall, all timber and stone, old enough to groan in the wind. Their father, a stern magistrate, had been gone on business. Their mother lay bedridden, the illness already eating her from within.

It was late — past midnight — when Lucas woke to the smell of smoke.

He remembered rising from bed, bare feet striking the cold floorboards. The air was heavy, thick with the bitter sting of burning pitch. Down the hall, Evelyn’s door stood open, her room empty.

He called her name once. Only once.

Then the fire roared.

It started in the east wing — later they would say a lantern had fallen, that Evelyn had been careless. But Lucas knew better. He had heard the voices before the smoke came — faint whispers threading through the walls, words in no tongue he recognized. Evelyn had been chasing something that night, he was certain. Chasing secrets the house wasn’t meant to give.

He ran through the hall, smoke searing his lungs, the ceiling timbers groaning above. He saw her — just as he always did in the dream — at the far end, her white nightdress lit by the flames that licked the corridor. She was reaching, lips forming his name.

Lucas sprinted. The floor buckled beneath his weight, boards snapping, flames biting at his heels. He was close — so close — when the wall of fire surged between them, swallowing her in a scream that never left his ears.

He threw himself into the blaze, felt the sear across his jaw — the scar he carried to this day. But there was nothing beyond. Only fire. Only smoke.

They told him afterward they never found her body. The blaze had been too fierce, the collapse too complete. His mother died within weeks, broken by grief. His father turned to the bottle and the courts, never looking his son in the eye again.

Lucas left Holloway soon after, scarred in body and soul. He became a detective not out of ambition, but hunger. Every missing person, every unsolved mystery — he took them all, chasing the ghost of Evelyn in every case file, in every shadowed ruin. If he saved someone, he told himself it was her. If he failed, he felt her slipping away all over again.

Now, sitting in the Raven’s Rest Inn with rain whispering against the window, Lucas let the memory settle over him like ash. Anna Fletcher’s notebook lay before him, its ink bleeding into his own history. Eveline Ravenwood. Evelyn Blackwood. Two names, two fires, two vanishings.

Coincidence? No. The world was cruel, but it was never random.

He touched the scar on his jaw, the flesh long healed but forever burning in memory. That night had made him who he was: a man who chased ghosts with nothing left to lose.

And Ravenwood — he knew it now with a certainty that chilled his blood — was not just another case. It was the place his path had always been leading.

When he finally rose from the bed, the storm had stilled. The silence outside was worse than thunder.

For the first time in years, Lucas spoke his sister’s name aloud.

“I’m coming, Evelyn.”

And in the distance, as though answering him, a light flickered in the highest tower of Ravenwood Palace.