The house had never been this quiet.
No creaking floorboards. No whispering walls. No blood-chilling draft. It felt like something vast had gone to sleep, something ancient and angry.
Juliette stood at the top of the staircase, looking down into the grand foyer of the Armand estate. Elias stood by the open front door, light streaming around him like a halo. He turned slightly, his eyes finding hers with new weight.
He remembered.
Not just names and places. He remembered the lake. The kiss. The ritual. The ache. The girl who had held his hand through the curse.
Juliette descended the stairs slowly, one hand grazing the banister. She was exhausted, not just physically, but in soul and spirit. The ritual had returned Elias to her, but the echo of the First Witch still haunted the shadows. Memory had proven stronger than the curse, but it hadn't destroyed it. Not fully.
Elias reached for her hand when she reached the final step. "It feels like I've just woken up after a long winter."
She looked up at him. "And I feel like I haven't slept in years."
They stood there a moment, letting silence bind them. It wasn't cold or cruel. It was full. Alive. The kind of silence that hummed with everything unsaid.
Then the silence shifted.
It began with a vibration beneath the floorboards, faint, almost imperceptible. Then a flicker of light passed over the mirror in the foyer. The same mirror from the second floor hallway. The one that never reflected quite right.
Juliette turned.
In the mirror, she saw not herself but her grandmother, Odette.
"Did you see that?" she whispered.
Elias nodded. "She's trying to speak."
They approached slowly. Odette's face remained still in the glass, her eyes burning with urgency.
Then she spoke.
But her lips didn't move.
Juliette heard the voice in her mind:
"It isn't over. She's waking something older than the curse."
The image rippled.
And shattered.
Juliette stumbled back. Elias caught her.
"That wasn't the witch," she said, heart pounding. "That was Odette. Warning us."
Juliette's breath came fast and shallow. Her grandmother's warning echoed in her skull like a tolling bell, She's waking something older than the curse.
"What does that mean?" Elias asked, steadying her. His voice was soft, but tight, coiled like a wire drawn too taut. "Who is she?"
Juliette's mind reeled. "The First Witch was bound by the curse. But what if... what if she was only a vessel? A door?" Her eyes darted back to the now-shattered mirror, splinters of gilded glass littering the floor like frozen fire.
Elias turned to look out the front door, his hand unconsciously tightening around hers. The sunlight that had poured into the estate was dimming, swallowed by a sudden thickening of fog across the lawn. It rolled in unnaturally fast, as if called by some unseen breath.
"Odette said older than the curse." Elias repeated the words slowly. "What could possibly be older?"
Juliette whispered, "The one who cursed the First Witch."
Silence again. But this time, it wasn't peaceful.
It was holding its breath.
She turned sharply and moved toward the parlor, where Odette's old journals were stacked in uneven piles on a shelf. The ones she hadn't dared to open since her arrival. Something about them had always made her skin prickle, as if the books watched her.
Elias followed closely behind.
Juliette ran her fingers across the spines, until she landed on the oldest, the leather cracked, the gold lettering faded to near invisibility. She opened it, and the pages exhaled a musty scent of smoke, wax, and something bitter, like dried herbs and decay.
The journal was in Odette's unmistakable hand, but this entry was frantic. Ink smudged. Words crossed out. Margins filled with drawings that looked like circles inside circles, and eyes with no lids.
"She was never alone in the forest. I was wrong to think she had conjured the darkness. No, the darkness came to her. It found her grief, her rage... and it fed. She did not create the curse, she was seduced by it. It whispered through bone and blood, calling itself: La Vérité Mère. The True Mother."
Juliette read the last line aloud. Her voice barely left her throat.
Elias stilled. "La Vérité Mère. That's not French. Not really."
"It's old," Juliette said. "Older than Armand blood. Older than this estate."
The air in the room dropped. The windows rattled.
And then, a cry pierced the house.
Shrill. Unhuman. Like a woman screaming through water.
They ran toward the sound, but it came from everywhere, bouncing off walls, vibrating through the floorboards. Elias spun toward the hall. "The west wing. Did you hear that?"
Juliette grabbed the iron key Odette had always warned her never to use, the one that opened the locked music room.
She had a feeling the silence had broken for a reason.
The music room hadn't been touched in decades. Dust coated the furniture like a funeral shroud. In the center stood a grand piano, its ivory keys yellowed and cracked. But it wasn't the piano that caught their attention.
It was the mural above the fireplace.
Before, it had been a faded pastoral landscape, roses, meadows, and a woman playing the harp.
Now, it had changed.
The woman's eyes had been painted black. Her hands were bleeding into the strings. And behind her, in the trees, shadows moved, shapes barely visible, except for their gleaming eyes.
Juliette stepped closer. "This... this wasn't here before."
Elias touched the wall. "It's changing. Like the mirror."
Suddenly, a cold wind burst through the room, though the windows were sealed shut. The pages of Odette's journal fluttered in Juliette's hands, whipping open to a passage with a jagged tear down the middle.
"Do not follow the music. The True Mother sings through silence. If you hear the melody, it's already too late."
A piano key struck itself. Then another.
A melody began to play, slow and haunting.
Juliette turned, her face pale. "We have to get out."
But Elias didn't move.
He was staring at the piano, transfixed. His eyes had glazed over, like fog over glass.
"Elias?" she said, grabbing his arm.
He didn't blink.
Juliette shook him. "Elias, look at me!"
He turned but his eyes were wrong. Empty. As if something else looked through them.
And then, he whispered in a voice that was not his own:
"She is awake."
Juliette staggered back, her heart pounding. "Elias, no. Fight it. Don't let her in."
But he didn't move.
Instead, the fire in the hearth roared to life. Flames twisted upward, not red, but white, unnatural and blinding. In the center of the fire, a face formed.
Not human. Not witch.
Something far older.
A woman's visage, but hollowed, her mouth wide in a silent scream, her eyes endless and pale. Hair like tangled roots, skin like cracked marble.
Juliette screamed, stumbling against the piano. The keys hammered out dissonant chords beneath her touch, as though protesting her presence.
The face in the fire whispered, though no sound filled the room.
And yet Juliette heard her.
"You wear the blood of the gatekeeper. He wears the blood of the chained. Together, you woke me. And now… I will sing the world back to silence."
The fire exploded outward.
Darkness engulfed the room. Glass shattered. The ceiling moaned as if the house itself cried out.
Then, stillness.
Juliette was on the ground. Elias beside her, unconscious.
She pulled herself up slowly, shaking.
Something had changed.
The curse wasn't just memory now.
It had a voice. A face.
And it had found its way through Elias.
She looked at his sleeping form, tears blurring her vision.
"Hold on," she whispered, brushing a curl from his brow. "I don't care how deep the darkness runs… I'll find you again."
The silence wasn't empty anymore.
It was watching. Listening. Waiting.
And it had just begun to sing.