“A botanist,” his voice rumbled, the dark haze coiling around him like an interrogation. “And you propose to… study my malady?” His golden eyes, which had been fixed on Gisela with predatory intensity, now held a flicker of something akin to incredulity, perhaps even amusement. It was hard to tell with a face wreathed in perpetual gloom. Gisela, still riding the high of her brazen declaration, squared her shoulders. “Precisely. You have a fascinating, albeit inconvenient, biological anomaly. I have a pressing need for a unique botanical specimen and access to arcane texts. It seems to me, Grand Duke, we have a mutually beneficial arrangement to forge.” She gestured around the cavernous, dust-choked hall. “Consider your curse the most challenging, and thus most rewarding, cultivation project of my career. And I assure you, my career has seen its share of stubborn soil and recalcitrant rhizomes.” A low, guttural rasp escaped the Grand Duke, not quite a laugh, more like the grind of tectonic plates. “You are… resilient, Mademoiselle von Kessel. Very well. A botanist. An investigator.” The gloom around him solidified for a second, then receded, revealing a tall, gaunt figure draped in heavy velvet that might have once been luxurious. His face, though still obscured beneath the mantle, seemed less monstrous, more weary. “But I warn you, my curse is not a wilting orchid that simply needs a different watering schedule.” “Nor am I a novice gardener,” Gisela retorted, an eyebrow arching. “Now, where are these grimoires? And more importantly, do you have any spare spectacles? Mine were tragically lost to the sea, and I’m finding this entire experience rather blurry.” The master of the fortress led her through winding, dust-laden corridors, past suits of armour that groaned softly as they passed, and faded banners that billowed despite no discernible breeze. The citadel was a symphony of creaks and whispers, a grand, melancholic beast. He deposited her in a vast, circular rotunda of books, its shelves reaching to a dizzying height, laden with ancient, leather-bound tomes. The air here was thick with the scent of aged paper and something else, something metallic and faintly sweet, like forgotten blood oranges. “These are the archives of my house,” the duke indicated with a sweep of his hand, the gesture disturbingly graceful for such a looming figure. “Lore, history, and… the unfortunate specifics of my family’s blight. You may peruse them to your heart’s content, provided you return them to their proper place. This room, like the rest of the fortress, has a rather… peculiar filing system.” Indeed, as Gisela reached for a tome titled ‘The Sanguineous Affliction: A Vantoorn Compendium,’ a nearby armchair swiveled sharply, its plush, velvet cushions seeming to glare at her. When she finally extracted the heavy book, another shelf above her head shuddered, dislodging a cascade of smaller, papyrus scrolls that landed squarely on her head. “The furniture here is… opinionated,” her host supplied, a faint edge of something like long-suffering in his voice. “It will obey me, eventually. But it remembers every indignity.” He waved a hand, and the offending scrolls floated back into place. “As for your spectacles, I have no need for such apparatus. Perhaps Pip can assist you.” Before Gisela could question who, or what, Pip was, a small, moss-covered creature, no larger than her forearm, scampered out from behind a particularly hefty globe. It had large, luminous green eyes and a perpetually twitching nose. A bright glint of brass caught the lantern glow in its tiny paws. It was her wire rims, perfectly intact, if a little slobbery. Pip chittered, a high-pitched, delighted sound, and immediately tried to scurry up a towering bookshelf, the lenses clutched possessively. “Oh, you absolute menace!” Gisela exclaimed, abandoning her immediate inquiry in favour of a desperate chase. “Give me those back, you furry little vandal!” This was the rhythm of her new existence on the island: moments of intense academic pursuit, punctuated by skirmishes with possessed furniture that rearranged her meticulous notes into geometric nonsense, and relentless sprints after Pip, who seemed to possess an uncanny knack for discerning the most vital object to pilfer. Her reading glasses were his favoured prize, but he also hoarded quill pens, shiny buttons, and once, an entire dried specimen of a rare bog-lily she had been pressing. Days blurred into weeks. Gisela, despite the constant disruptions, found herself utterly engrossed. The castle’s greenhouses, a series of magically sustained domes that somehow twisted around the decaying structure, were a botanical wonderland. Plants of impossible colour and form thrived there, glowing with an inner luminescence, their leaves unfurling in slow-motion dances, their roots intertwining with arcane energy lines that pulsed faintly beneath the soil. She discovered a species of glowing fungal growth that fed on pure shadow, and a vine whose sap, when diluted just so, could mend torn parchment. This wasn't just botany; it was an untamed miracle of wild sorcery, and it filled her veins with fierce, dizzying excitement. Her work on the curse, however, was slower going. The grimoires were dense, written in an archaic dialect of Old Frisian, and often contradictory. One evening, after a grueling session attempting to decipher a cryptic passage about ‘lunar alignments and the sanguineous draw,’ the cursed lord materialized beside her, a shift in the air announcing his presence. He held a crystal goblet filled with a viscous, glowing fluid—a distilled draught of life-force, his necessary sustenance. “There is a matter we must discuss, Mademoiselle von Kessel,” he stated, his voice devoid of its usual wry amusement. The dimness gathered thick around him tonight, clinging like soot. “A single, inviolable rule for your tenure here.” Gisela, who had been attempting to untangle an obscure sentence, looked up, the retrieved brass frames perched precariously on her nose. “Oh? I thought the furniture rearranging my notes was the only rule. Is there a dress code for arguing with armoires?” His expression remained severe. “The west wing of the estate is strictly forbidden to you. Under no circumstances are you to enter it.” Gisela’s academic curiosity bristled. “Forbidden? And why, pray tell, Grand Duke? Is it where you keep the overly dramatic chandeliers? Or perhaps a secret stash of self-sorting books?” “It is not a place for idle curiosity,” he said, his voice dropping to a low growl, the air around them suddenly chilling. “The dangers within are far greater than anything I could inflict upon you. They are… remnants of a time before I learned to control my affliction. Before I understood the scope of its hunger.” He drained his goblet in a single gulp, the glowing draft vanishing into the dark cavern of his throat. His warning resonated with an uncomfortable finality, but Gisela, still smarting from her exile from the Lyceum, had never been one to shy away from a locked door. Especially not one with such an intriguing backstory. She nodded, feigning compliance, but her mind was already cataloguing the location of the west wing, the faint, disquieting aura she sometimes felt drifting from that direction. A few days later, the opportunity, or rather, the catastrophe, presented itself. Gisela had finally found a potentially crucial passage in a tome detailing ancient blood rituals, a passage that might shed light on the true nature of Valerius’s curse. She had inked the complex sigils and text onto a sheet of parchment, a task that had consumed her morning. Just as she was about to cross-reference it with another book, a flash of mossy green fur darted past, a delighted chitter echoing between the shelves. Pip. And in his tiny paws, clutched with triumphant glee, was her fresh manuscript. “Pip! You little fiend!” Gisela roared, launching herself from her chair. “Not that one! That’s vital!” Pip, clearly relishing the chase, scampered through the library, leading her on a winding path through the echoing halls. Gisela, driven by the urgency of her research, paid little attention to where her nemesis was leading her. The pursuit was frantic, Pip a tiny green blur, Gisela a breathless scholar in hot pursuit. Then, Pip darted through a splintered archway, one that Gisela hadn't previously noticed. A faint, stifling reek of lye and stale fear immediately assailed her nostrils. This was it. The west wing. Pride and purpose warred against her host's explicit command, but the stolen page was too critical to lose. Gritting her teeth, Gisela plunged into the gloom, her lenses doing little against the heavy dark. The air grew colder, stiller. The walls here were damp, the plaster peeling like desiccated skin. There was a profound silence, broken only by the drip of unseen water. Gisela followed the faint, mossy tracks Pip had left on the grimy floor, her heart thrumming with a mixture of apprehension and defiant curiosity. The corridor opened into a vast, circular chamber, its ceiling long gone, open to the grey, bruised sky. Moonlight, weak and watery, filtered down, illuminating a horrifying tableau. All around her, standing amidst the rubble and overgrown weeds, were figures. Not living figures, but statues. Statues of men and women, young and old, frozen in mid-motion. One woman was caught mid-scream, her hands clawing at her throat, her face contorted in a silent rictus of terror. A man stood frozen, his eyes wide and vacant, his arm outstretched as if reaching for something that was no longer there. A small child, clutching a toy wooden horse, was fixed in a posture of desperate flight, its face a mask of silent anguish. Their clothes were tattered, their skin a dull, grey stone, but the expressions on their faces were sickeningly vivid, perfectly preserved moments of ultimate despair. Nausea churned in Gisela's gut as ice settled behind her ribs. These weren’t sculptures. They were people. People turned to stone. And then she saw the pale, luminescent lichen clinging to their garments, identical to the growth on Pip. The same moss that pulsed with the castle’s arcane energy. These were the ‘remnants.’ The victims. A terrifying, guttural roar echoed through the chamber, shaking the very stones beneath her feet. The air crackled, growing heavy and oppressive. Darkness curdled violently at the broken threshold. The cursed lord stood there, his outline wavering like a guttering torch, his mantle replaced by an unstable, thrashing storm of raw power. His golden eyes blazed with a terrifying, unbridled fury, not at her, but at himself, at the weakness this place represented. “I told you,” he rasped, his voice ragged, distorted by a barely contained rage that threatened to rip him apart. “I told you to stay out of here.” He gestured wildly at the petrified figures, his hand shaking, the shadows around him thrashing like tormented beasts. “These are what my curse does, Gisela. What it did. Before I learned to rein it in. Before I understood the precipice I stood on.” He took a staggering step forward, floor flagstones groaning beneath his boots. “These were trespassers. Unfortunates who stumbled ashore. I drained them, not of blood, but of their marrow, their hope, their light. Consumed them until they were nothing but husks, turned to mineral by the backlash.” His clawed hand closed around her wrist with bruising strength, hauling her away from the graveyard of statues and back toward the central halls. Gisela stumbled after him, boots catching on loose rubble, her gaze fixed on the frozen faces of the dead. Her captor's outline continued to judder and fray, every stride costing him ragged breaths of agony. As the shadows of the corridor swallowed them, Gisela could not scrub the sight of the petrified child from her thoughts, nor the terrifying question left in its wake: what had triggered a catastrophic collapse violent enough to petrify an entire company where they stood?

Rules of Cohabitation and a Kleptomaniac Lemur