The silence that descended upon the Silver-Crest Manor was not the peaceful stillness of rest; it was the suffocating, heavy quiet of a grave. The banquet had ended, not with the clinking of glasses or the laughter of the elite, but with the hollow, echoing sound of shattered dreams. In the aftermath, the manor had become a hollow shell. The servants, sensing the shift in power—or perhaps sensing the something-else that now prowled the halls—had fled before the sun could even think to rise.
The tapestries that once heralded the grandeur of the house now hung like flayed skin. The air, heavy with the phantom scent of jasmine and stagnant river water, clung to the velvet curtains and the marble floors. It was a residence of ghosts, even if the living still breathed within its walls.
Miles
