The rain had not left for three days. It clung to the rooftops like a confession, soaking through parchment, prayers, and the memory of sunlight. The fog in the valley never lifted anymore — it sat heavy, smothering the trees and veiling the cliffs. I’d begun to understand why the villagers avoided looking up at the castle.
It wasn’t the ruin they feared. It was what remembered it.
The morning after the hanging, I walked through the square, where vendors whispered beneath their breath and every bell seemed half a tone off. Father Lucien was in the churchyard, lining salt in crescent patterns before each tomb. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in years.
“Father,” I called, “was the man found by the tree one of yours?”
He turned, his eyes hollow, his hands trembling so violently that the salt spilled into the mud.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRFdGzQgLHY
“The dead are all mine,” he said, voice breaking. “But this one was taken.”
“Taken?”
He didn’t answer, only made the sign of the cross — backward — and retreated into the chapel. The door closed with a sound like stone grinding against stone.
Inside the inn, the air was no warmer. I spent hours poring over parish ledgers, letters, the faded records of trials. So many names struck out in red ink. So many disappearances without cause. Then, beneath the baptism lists, wedged between two boards, I found it — a smaller volume, its cover dark, slick to touch.
The pages were fragile, handwritten in ink that had long turned brown.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmqfGULEqTt
1649.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡgPPgsj75W3
A column of names. Every one of them ended with the same Latin phrase:
“Sanguis pro sanguine.”9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTTq1OibP7P
Blood for blood.
Beside the last entry, newer handwriting. A trembling script.
“The Mother’s chalice is empty again. The lighthouse will burn crimson when she calls.”
The lighthouse. The dead tower by the sea.
That night, I stood by my window, watching waves gnash at the rocks. The sky was pitch, yet for a moment, the lighthouse blinked — a faint pulse of red. I froze. It wasn’t a reflection, nor lightning. It beat — steady, living, unnatural. Then, gone.
My reflection in the glass seemed to linger a second longer than I did.
At dusk the next day, a knock came at my door.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0mtZP1JZcU
Three times. Slow. Hollow.
When I opened it, a woman in a black veil stood before me. Her dress was soaked through, gloved hands trembling. She smelled faintly of myrrh and damp soil.
Without a word, she handed me an envelope, sealed with wax bearing the sigil from the corpse tree — the circle and cross.
“Who sent this?” I asked.
She tilted her head slightly, and the veil shifted. Beneath it, I caught a glint — eyes red-rimmed, but not from tears. Her voice was barely breath:
“They all did.”
Then she turned and walked away. I swear she did not touch the ground.
Inside the envelope, there was only a torn page from an old Bible. Across it, written in scarlet ink — or blood — were three words:
He never died.
The ink had not dried.
That night, I could bear it no longer.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡrJKTw8THiT
I took my lantern, pistol, and journal, and began the climb toward the castle. The fog thickened as I ascended, swallowing the trail. Branches reached across the path like arms. By the time I reached the outer gate, my lantern’s flame had turned blue.
The castle was awake.
I entered through the western archway — the one half-collapsed and overrun with ivy. Inside, the air was colder than ice. My breath came out white. Every sound echoed wrong, like whispers trapped in stone.
The great hall lay in ruin — chandeliers snapped, portraits torn, saints with their faces gouged out. But at the far end stood a door I had never noticed before — iron, carved with seven small crosses arranged in a circle. It opened on its own.
Inside was a narrow corridor lit by flickering candles — hundreds of them, all melted into a single shape, like wax grown sentient. I followed the light until I reached a room lined with mirrors.
And in each mirror — not me, but a different me.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡQM97htwE25
Younger. Older. Dressed in monk robes. In armor. In rags.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7atx9HAhXe
Each reflection mouthed the same word, though I heard nothing.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡitcD1ZjrUZ
Then, all at once, I understood what they were saying:
“Return.”
In the center of the chamber, beneath a cracked dome, stood an altar made of bone. Upon it lay a silver goblet filled with something dark. A voice broke the silence — raspy, low, ancient.
“You shouldn’t have come here, historian.”
I turned.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGa9Ovpjm7l
From the shadows stepped a man in tattered priest’s robes, eyes like wet ash. He leaned on a cane carved with symbols that hurt to look at.
“I seek truth,” I said. “About the Covenant.”
He laughed — the sound like stone splitting.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNMwptQ6vLn
“Truth? Truth was buried when they crowned the Virgin in blood. They called it redemption. But it was hunger. Always hunger.”
He raised his hand, and I saw his fingers stained crimson — not from fresh blood, but old, baked into the skin.
“She drinks it still,” he whispered. “From those who remember.”
The ground beneath the altar shuddered, and the goblet began to tremble, the liquid swirling as though stirred by breath. I stepped closer, despite every instinct screaming not to.
Inside that silver cup, reflections shimmered — not of me, but of the hanging corpse, the widow, the red lighthouse. All drawn together by an unseen thread.
And then I saw it:9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡX5w1Ioj6P3
A shape, faint but there — a face submerged in the liquid, its eyes opening.
The priest began to chant. Latin, reversed.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡg5NXyy1QWX
Candles extinguished one by one until only the goblet glowed faintly red.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXbIMnqEEQB
“The Covenant is the bloodline,” he hissed. “You carry it now.”
“What do you mean?”
He smiled, teeth too many.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡybLPECFokK
“The Mother does not forget her sons.”
The goblet burst, splattering the floor in a pattern that pulsed like a heartbeat. The light flooded upward, engulfing the chamber, and I fell backward — vision seared white.
When I awoke, dawn was breaking. The altar was gone.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡuDhUwFKhPL
The mirrors shattered.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ1T7eEl2hnV
And on the wall, written in blood not my own:
“Find the Widow.”
I stumbled out into the morning fog, every shadow watching. The villagers would later tell me they heard bells tolling that night, though the church had no bells left to ring.9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡDOuaJzJYVx
9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ6jtyf3YFar
9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwf77hFHq6L
I left the castle as the world remembered how to be silent — that peculiar, pressing hush that follows things men refuse to name. My lantern guttered in my hand; its feeble halo made the fog look like a congregation of pale faces. I walked without the thought of where I should go, guided instead by a single foolish purpose: to find the widow whose veil had slid like a question across my door the night before.
The village road that led to the shore was a ribbon of mud and slate, flanked by hedges gone wild. Houses reclined against each other as if to share the same story, shutters drawn and breaths held. The lighthouse loomed ahead, a ruined tooth against the sky — and for a trembling instant its glass burned again, the same faint crimson like a heart deciding to beat. Then the light closed and it was only stone. I swallowed.
They said she lived in the old fisherwoman’s cottage, a low place with salt-stained eaves, half-buried in juniper and kelp. The path to it was lined with small, carefully placed stones, each one marked by a child’s toy or a scrap of cloth. Offerings, perhaps. Or warnings.
When I reached the cottage, the door was ajar. A lamp inside burned with the smell of tallow and something else, sweeter and colder: the scent of iron. The room was neat in the way of houses that had once known company and now only kept company with their ghosts. A cradle sat by the hearth, empty and turned wrong on its rockers, as if the occupant had left mid-lullaby. The walls were hung with nets and old prayers pinned to the beams with rusted nails.
She sat behind the table — not the frail, skeletal figure I had imagined, but a woman whose age had been worn into patience and whose gaze still carried a terrible, unsoftened steadiness. The veil lay in her lap; when she saw me she did not lift it. Her voice was a thing I felt more than heard.
“You climbed the cliff,” she said. Simple as a bell. As if no one in Drachenwald ever asked their own questions.
“I followed where your envelope pointed,” I answered. My voice did not sound like mine. “You said they all sent this.”
She lifted one gloved hand. “They did, Monsieur Moreau. They ink themselves into a ledger that is older than the parish. They sign in blood and in silence.” Her fingers tapped the wood in a slow, steady rhythm. “They have not forgotten how to keep a book.”
“Who are ‘they’?” I asked. It was a childish question, but this was how the world yields answers: in childish questions.
She let out the smallest laugh — a sound like a pebble. “You want names. You want to put order on ugliness.” Her hand moved, and she set something before me: a folio bound with hemp and stained with something dark. The leather had been smoothed by a hundred fingers. On its front was the sigil: three interlocked rings over a cross, carved deep enough to have scarred the hide.
“I wrote this,” she said. “Once. And I un-wrote myself from it, but the page keeps writing back.” Her voice cracked. “We are not all monsters. Some of us are ledger-keepers. Some of us, when the tide comes, must bring the tally.”
I opened the folio with a hand that would not stop shaking. The first pages were lists — names, ages, times. Children predominated. Every so often a notation: "consumed", "sealed", "returned." In the margins there were words scratched hastily in Latin, in the vernacular, in broken script: oblationem, servitus, jubilee for the town. A line caught my eye:
Those who barter the blood barter their debt. The debt is kept by bone; the bone keeps the town steady.
Beneath that, in a different hand, fresher and less restrained: “Find the bell at midnight.” The line had been crossed out, heavily, then re-written, as if the act of striking it through could rend the words from fate.
“How long has this been going on?” I asked. My throat was dry; the room seemed smaller by breath.
She looked at me like one appraises a tool. “Longer than I can name,” she said. “Longer than your graveyard stones. Long enough that the sea remembers its payments.”
“Why children?” The question tasted like iron.
Her eyes narrowed. “Because the ledger prefers the light. Because the ledger demands the clean and the new. Because the covenant is jealous.” She crooked a finger. “Go to the chapel at the next tolling of the bell. Stand where the choir would stand. Listen. The ledger sings there sometimes. It is hunger made musical.”
I dressed and left before she could stop me. The sky had turned the sloppy gray of early winter; the tide crept higher, lapping the base of the cliff like a tongue. I kept thinking of the cradle turned wrong, of the toys set beside the shore, of the gentle way the widow spoke of ledgers as if they were pianos waiting to be played.
That night the bell did not ring at its appointed hour. Drachenwald’s clock tower had no clock; its mechanism long rusted. But at eleven, a sound else — deeper than bell, like iron dragged across glass — rolled through the town. It vibrated through my chest; I could feel the whole village listening and holding its breath.
I crept toward the chapel. The doors, usually locked, were standing ajar. A smell rose from within, something rich and old: oil, old wax, and the faint metallic scent of blood when warmed by the air. The choir stalls sat empty. Candles gleamed along the altar cut into the wall, but when I stepped nearer I realized they were not candles at all: they were bone candles — human phalanges bound together and lit with tallow. The flame at each fingertip burned with a reddish light, and where the wax pooled it smoked in the stiff air like old papal incense.
My stomach turned, but I stayed.
From the vestry came a soft murmur, a recitation too low for words but very precise in rhythm. It was not Latin; it was something older, ossified, a language that walked on its knuckles through the mouth. I recognized the cadence from the ledger — the same stanza scratched in the margins: intonato sanguinis, conclamat votum — intone the blood, proclaim the vow.
I rounded the corner where the organ had once been, and there they were. Cloaked figures filled the stalls, their faces hidden beneath the hoods. They sat not singing but moving in something like prayer and calculation, lips forming shapes I could not hear. In the center, a man knelt before an iron basin. He held a child's doll wrapped in a rag. The cloth was dark with stain.
My step creaked. Several heads turned toward me as if a draught had passed through. The kneeling man rose. He moved without haste, the kind of slow that carries inevitability.
“You should not be here,” he said. His voice was familiar, and for a moment my brain rejected it because it associated it with the soft rasp of the soothsayer. But this voice belonged to a man of offices — Father Lucien. The salt on his cassock gleamed faintly under the candlelight.
“You—” I began.
He touched the sigil at his breast, beneath his stole. “We keep Drachenwald steady, Monsieur Moreau,” he said. “We pay the debt.”
I reached for the ledger at my side. “This is a crime.” The words felt infantile in the vaulted dark.
He smiled, and the smile did not reach his eyes. “Crime is an invention of those who can afford to call it such. We call it an account.”
From behind him someone pushed a small wicker basket across the stone, and the smell — my God — the smell of iron burst into my nostrils. Something inside moved. The clatter of teeth — not animal.
A muffled sound at my feet made me look down. A child’s shoe lay in the dust, its leather cracked and old. Beside it, another scrap of paper was stuck to the floor: the page torn from the Bible. The same words were scrawled across it, but here they were as cold as a ledger entry: He never died. Above that, in a hand I recognized — neat, impatient — was a single line: “Witness — André Lucien.” The name swam.
I looked back up. Father Lucien’s face had gone slack, as if someone had drained his blood of surprise. He lifted his hand and the cloaked figures straightened. The organ groaned like a creature and stopped. The chorus — if it could be called that — ceased, and silence fell like a lid.
“Who are you?” I asked, because the mind needs to ask despite knowing the answer.
“We are the witnesses,” a voice intoned from the dark. “We were appointed, as you would say, to stewardship. When the ledger was opened we were chosen.”
“And the children?” I said. The question tore a ragged edge in my throat.
“To keep the town as it was,” Lucien answered softly. “We barter to maintain the light against the winter rot. The covenant chooses, not with cruelty, but with hunger. A town must eat to live. This is the oldest arithmetic.”
My hand closed on the ledger. I felt foolish, naive. “You cannot be absolved by ledger entries.”
He stepped nearer. The scent of old wax and iron choked me. “It is not absolution you seek, historian. It is an end to curiosity. And some curiosities bleed.”
The man behind him — tall, carriage of a man that might once have been a magistrate — took a step forward. He removed his hood. His face was not the face of any man I’d seen in Drachenwald’s square. It was younger, cruelly handsome, with a narrow mouth and eyes like a knife. He smiled with certainty.
“You have read,” he said. “You are now part of the account.”
Before I could answer, a hand clapped over my mouth. A taste of rust filled my mouth. I tried to wrench away. The man with the magistrate’s face had a rope ready. Another figure — the widow? — moved behind me, gentle as a bride, and pressed something cold to my neck: a silver disk, warm with recent contact. I saw then, under the hood, a small incision in her palm — a witness-mark, fresh and red.
“You will understand,” Father Lucien whispered at my ear, and the world narrowed to the rope at my wrists, the weight of the ledger pressed to my chest, and the choir of candle-finger flames turning toward me like hungry mouths.
The last thing I remember in that room was the sound of my own name uttered as if a prayer:9Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKa852x5MWH
“Alexandre Moreau.”
Then darkness fell — not sleep, but a ledgeless drop.
When I woke, I was not in the chapel.
I sat up in a cot in a dim back room. Bands of light from a shuttered window slatted across the floor. My wrists smarted where they had been bound, linen rubbed raw. The ledger lay open on the table beside me. Its pages had been turned to a single entry that had not been there before:
“Accession: Witness signed — A. Moreau. Entry: The ledger swallows the curious. Note: Keep him fed.”
A child's whimper came from somewhere down the hall. A soft staccato — something being rubbed smooth against cloth. The lamp burned low. I felt hollow and entire at once, as if something had been both taken and given.
I tasted the faint iron of it on my tongue.
Outside, the bell that had no bell tolled, deep as a throat. The sound rolled across hollow eaves and into the fog. The villagers did not stir; they only listened as one listens when the hunger calls for payment.
I forced myself from the cot and stumbled to the window. In the distance, the lighthouse blinked again — red and resolute, the pulse of an old thing freshly waking. Beneath it, lights moved like the marks of someone painting with blood.
My hands shook so violently I could scarcely steady the ledger. On the inside cover, written in a hand I knew too well, was one final line that had not been there when I went to sleep:
“Welcome, Witness. You are not yet bound. But you will be. We will be gentle.”
The widow’s voice — soft, patient — whispered at the door.
I had thought myself a scholar, learning by books and by dust. I had thought the ledger was something I could read and then shelve away. But now I knew: in Drachenwald, the ledger reads the reader.
And it had just begun to write me into its margins.
ns216.73.216.13da2
and then Add to home screen.