Shanane woke just before the first light broke across the hills. The cottage around her was silent, breathless, like it too was waiting for her to move. The sheets were tangled around her legs, soaked in sweat. Her hair stuck to her temples, her throat dry, her heart pounding steadily. But not from a dream this time. N visions. No voice. Just the decision, burning in her chest like a second heartbeat.
She sat up slowly, staring at the gray shadows on the wall. The stillness was eerie, unnatural, as though the house was listening. Judging.
It had grown quieter over the last few days, but the silence hadn't brought peace. Only pressure. She could feel it building behind the walls, under the floor, inside herself.
She had made her choice in the dead of the night, while sitting cross-legged on the floor with the journal open on her knees and her grandmother's words burned into her mind like a scar. There was no fixing this. No reasoning with the past. No appealing to Atheramond's mercy. Because he had none.
And her grandmother had known that. She had written it plainly. "He never forgives. He never forgets. And he always collects."
She rose to her feet and crossed the room with slow, purposeful steps. Her body felt heavier than usual, like something was being pulled from inside her with every breath. Her limbs ached, her joints stiff, her chest full of weight. But her hands didn't tremble.
She opened the back closet where old tools and fuel were stored. Her fingers wrapped around the handle of the red gas can, cool and heavy. She hadn't touched it since the day she arrived. But now it felt right in her grip, like it was waiting too.
The matchbox sat in the drawer by the stove. She picked it up without a word, sliding it into her pocket. Her breath stayed steady. She didn't cry. She didn't scream.
She was done reacting.
This time, she would act.
The air shifted the moment she approached the hidden stairway.
The heat pulsed against her skin like breath from an open furnace. The hairs on her arms lifted. The mark on her wrist began to throb again, a steady, rhythmic beat.
She paused at the edge of the darkness, staring down into the passage below. The stone seemed to exhale, thick and warm. It welcomed her back like a long-lost child.
But this time, she didn't go down to kneel.
She went down to end it.
Every step echoed like a hammer strike. The air grew heavier the deeper she descended, clinging to her skin, thick and damp like flesh. Shadows twisted against the walls, pulling and stretching like something alive. She knew they were watching her. She could feel their presence behind her, beside her, even above. Crawling shapes just out of view. Breathing things pressed against the stone.
She didn't look at them. She kept walking.
The chamber opened like a wound at the base of the stair. The walls glistened with sweat and old blood. Bones littered the corners: animals, some fresh, others little more than dark, brittle shards. The books lined the shelves, cracked and ancient, humming softly with invisible voices. The summoning circle glowed faintly in the far corner, pulsing like a heartbeat under the floor.
She moved through the room with slow, deliberate steps, unscrewing the cap from the gas can. Her fingers didn't falter.
She poured the first stream across the desk, watching as it soaked the papers, the fragile pages curling from contact. She moved to the books, the shelves, the dried herbs in their cracked jars, the ceremonial table with its dried blood and bone-carved inscriptions.
The air hissed. The walls groaned.
She poured the last of the fuel across the summoning circle.
The runes writhed as the liquid touched them, like they were alive, like they knew what she was doing.
Something growled, low and distant, like thunder from deep below the earth. Her chest clenched, but she didn't stop. She pulled out the matchbox, her fingers slick with sweat.
The first strike failed. The second flared.
She stared at the flame: small, bright, fragile.
And she dropped it.
The fire exploded across the stone, roaring to life with a heat so intense it knocked her back. The room screamed as the shelves ignited, the flames climbing like vines, hungry and wild. Pages curled and turned to ash. Bones snapped in the heat. Smoke poured through the cracks and seams, choking the air.
But it wasn't just fire.
There were voices, dozens at first, then hundreds, then more, whispering in the smoke with tongues not made for this world. They slithered between the cracks in the stone, seeping from the books as they burned, rising from the ink as it curled and blackened.
They weren't words so much as sensations: hissing promises, jagged curses, wet sobs that sounded like lungs filled with mud. Some screamed. Some begged. Others laughed with a sound that didn't bend right in her ears, like broken bells ringing underwater.
The chamber pulsed with sound and heat and something else, something heavy and crawling, like insects beneath her skin. The fire roared, but it was the voices that took her breath.
They filled the room like a storm. A thousand tongues. A thousand eyes. A thousand hungers.
Until the silence fell beneath the chaos.
Then a deeper voice rose from the pit of the earth. It wasn't loud or strained.
It was Laughing. Soft. Cold. Ancient. Amused.
It didn't echo, it reverberated, slipping under her ribs, into her spine, coiling like a snake behind her heart.
It was the kind of voice that knew her name before she was born.
"Do you think fire will unbind blood, child?"
Her heart slammed against her ribs. Her knees buckled.
And then she heard it. A breath. And it wasn't hers.
Something breathing in from the circle. As if tasting the smoke she had made. As if pleased.
Her heart slammed in her chest.
The circle glowed brighter for a moment, then cracked down the center with a sound like shattering bone. A gust of hot wind slammed into her, nearly knocking her down. She scrambled up, coughing, vision blurred with tears and smoke.
She fled the room. She didn't look back.
The flames followed, crawling up the walls of the passage like living things, hungry and angry and aware.
She burst through the trapdoor and ran through the cottage, choking on the smoke now seeping up from the floorboards. The house groaned around her, the walls trembling.
She threw open the front door and stumbled into the morning, falling to her knees in the cold, wet grass. Her lungs burned. Her throat scraped. But she was alive.
Behind her, the cottage trembled.
Then came the sound. It was deep and thunderous, shaking the ground beneath her knees.
It wasn't the crack of timber giving way, nor the groan of stone splitting under heat.
It was a roar. But not one born from lungs or flesh.
It rose from somewhere far below the earth, from a place no sunlight had ever touched. The air around her vibrated as the sound tore through the ground, through the cottage, through her bones. It was not anger. It was not pain. It was not even rage.
It was hunger.
A guttural, monstrous sound that echoed not in her ears, but in her blood. Like something ancient was waking. Stretching. Realizing it had been challenged.
The mark on her wrist ignited.
White-hot pain lanced through her arm, searing and sharp. She screamed, clutching at her wrist, the skin beneath her fingertips burning like it had been branded. The veins around it darkened, pulsing, writhing like something alive slithered just under the surface.
And then, just as suddenly silence fell again. There was no flame or voice or smoke anymore. Just wind brushing against her sweat-slick skin, cold and slow, like a whisper crawling up her spine.
It wasn't peace. It was pause.
The kind of quiet that came before the killing blow. A silence that watched. That waited.
Shanane stayed frozen, barely breathing, her eyes wide and locked on the doorway behind her.
Because something down there had seen what she'd done.
And it wasn't finished with her yet.
________________________________________
∆ ☆ ATHERAMOND ☆ ∆
________________________________________
The wind carried the scent of smoke for hours.
Shanane didn't move from the hill where she stood, wrapped in the fading dark, eyes fixed on the charred silhouette of what used to be the cottage.
It took hours for the fire to die, for the embers to grow still and black. When it was over, there was nothing left: No walls, no roof, no sign of the life that had once grown there. Only twisted metal, scorched stone, and a trail of ash the wind scattered like broken bones.
And she realized, standing there with soot on her skin and nothing in her hands, she had taken nothing.
Her phone, her clothes. Her papers, the pc, everything she had carried into the house with her, every connection to the world outside was gone. Burned!
She turned slowly, her legs aching, her throat still raw. The path to Eoghan's home stretched long before her, but she didn't hesitate. There was nowhere else to go.
By the time she reached his door, the sky was turning gold with the first edge of morning. Her hair clung to her temples in damp strands, her palms streaked with soot and blood from a fall she hadn't even noticed. Her clothes smelled like fire. Her eyes were distant.
She raised her hand and knocked.
A moment later, the door opened, and there he stood, Eoghan, hair tousled from sleep, barefoot, wearing a shirt hastily thrown over his shoulders. His expression shifted the instant he saw her. First confusion. Then concern. Then something sharper.
__Eoghan: "Shanane… what the hell happened?"
She opened her mouth, but her voice cracked on the first word. She swallowed, trying again.
__Shanane: "The house… it caught fire. I couldn't stop it." her voice was hoarse, hollow.
He stepped forward, taking her gently by the arms, his eyes scanning her face, the soot on her neck, the red mark still fresh at her wrist. He didn't say anything for a moment, just searched her expression.
__Eoghan: "You need to sit. I'll get help."
__Shanane: "No." she grabbed his arm. "There's nothing left. Eoghan, it's gone."
But he didn't listen.
He was already pulling on his boots, grabbing a jacket, heading for the door. She followed him reluctantly, saying again and again that it was over, there was nothing to save. But he didn't stop until they reached the edge of the hill where the cottage had once stood.
And there, side by side, they stood in silence.
The wind moved around them in slow, careful currents, stirring the grass at their feet, carrying the faint scent of ash that still clung to Shanane's clothes. The morning light was pale and cold, casting long shadows behind them. Neither spoke.
Shanane stared ahead, her breath caught somewhere between her lungs and her throat. Her eyes didn't blink. Her hands trembled slightly at her sides.
Eoghan stood just as still. His arms hung at his sides, his posture rigid, but there was something taut in the line of his shoulders. His gaze was locked forward, unblinking, fixed.
They didn't move.
They didn't speak.
And yet, in that silence, something passed between them. Something unspoken, heavy, impossible to name.
They were both staring at the same place.
And they were both shocked.
But not for the same reason.