Chapter 1: The Willow House

Somewhere between the fading edges of memory and myth, perched like a wounded bird on a fog-draped hill, stood the Willow House. It had no neighbors. No footpaths led to its doors. Even the birds avoided its trees, as though nature itself had reached an unspoken agreement to give the place a wide berth.

Once, long ago, someone had cared for the gardens. There were traces of symmetry beneath the rot—sunken flowerbeds filled with brittle stems that shivered in the wind, iron trellises choked with ghostly vines, and a crumbling fountain in the shape of a weeping cherub whose eyes forever overflowed when it rained. Moss blanketed the stone steps like a burial shroud. The wrought-iron gate hung half open, eternally inviting, eternally warning.

The house itself was built in a time when craftsmanship mattered, when every stone and timber was placed with intent. But the years had warped its grandeur into something... unnatural. Something that defied the natural order of decay. The shutters hung askew, like slitted eyes watching without blinking. Its steep gables split the sky like broken teeth. Windows, smeared with dust and time, glinted faintly in the mist as if blinking back tears or memories. Even its silence was not true silence—within its walls there were murmurs, soft as breath, rustling through empty halls and hollow rooms, that stirred even when no wind passed through.

Locals told stories about Willow House, but never in daylight. After sunset, behind closed doors, they whispered of lights glowing in rooms no one had entered in years. Of a piano playing faintly in the dead of night, a single, off-key lullaby. Of a scent that drifted from the attic window under a full moon: lavender, sweet and sickly, laced with the unmistakable metallic tang of blood.

No one remembered who built the house. No records were kept, and even the elders, sharp of mind and long of memory, could only shrug and mutter that it had always been there, like a thorn in the land’s side. No one knew why it had remained standing, untended and yet somehow untouched by time’s decay. It was as though the Willow House had simply risen from the earth one day, fully formed, and rooted itself into the hillside like a parasite.

But the truth was—the Willow House did not wish to be forgotten. It hungered for remembrance, for attention. It dreamed in silence and listened in the stillness. And it waited.

Beneath its rotting floorboards, something slept—something that had once been human, perhaps, or something that had never been. A secret. A sorrow. A voice. It was trapped, or anchored, or maybe simply too old to leave.

And now, someone was coming. A man hollowed by grief, drifting through the ruins of his life. A girl—silent, pale, with eyes too old for her face. The house knew them. It had heard their names long before they were born.

The Willow House was waking.

And it was ready to whisper again.

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