The draft behind Stellan gathered mass, stiffening against his spine like packed snow, while the lament from the keyboard swelled into an ache that vibrated through the floorboards. He pivoted, staggering clear of the ivory and marrow, his gaze tracking the corner dark. The dark stretched along the wainscoting, knotting into shapes that possessed neither true limbs nor stillness. A murmur, dry as locust wings, brushed the shell of his ear. “*Do not retreat, little bird. You are already caught.*” Stellan clutched his chest, the metallic tang of fear sharp on his tongue. “Who… what are you?” His voice came out reedy and cracked, stripped clean of the easy grin he kept between himself and the world. The music softened, becoming a delicate, sorrowful arpeggio. “*My name is Alisa Volkovna. Or what remains of her.*” The voice was clearer now, distinctly feminine, imbued with a sharp intelligence beneath the veil of ancient pain. “*And you, Stellan Varik, are my unwitting salvation.*” “Salvation?” He scoffed, a nervous, almost hysterical sound. “I’m merely the last idiot to inherit this mausoleum. And I certainly didn’t volunteer for… this.” He gestured wildly at the soundboard, then into the biting draft, then toward the silhouettes twitching beside the heavy velvet drapes. Alisa’s presence seemed to shift, a faint current in the air, like a breath drawn across a frozen pane. “*No, you did not. Few volunteers walk into their cages. But you touched the keys. You awakened me. Now we are linked.*” Stellan frowned, the panic beginning to give way to a flicker of his natural curiosity, though it was tinged with dread. “Linked? To a clavichord? A *bone* clavichord?” He remembered the unsettling texture beneath his fingers, the faint, almost imperceptible scent of dried blood. “*To me,*” Alisa corrected, her tone edged with brittle patience. “*I was murdered in this room, Stellan. A century ago. My spirit was bound to the instrument—to my own ribs and fingers, which form its keys and frame—by a dark ritual meant to contain something far older, far more malevolent than myself.*” The gloom twitched, and frost bit the nape of his neck, a raw, famished breath. His shoulders seized against the chill. “The… the ‘singing pipes’ Oskar talks about?” “*The Murmuring Choir,*” Alisa clarified, a note of urgent warning in her voice. “*It is the entity sealed here, a parasitic hunger that thrives on fear and consumes souls. My death was the final lock on its cage. Your family, the Variks, made pacts with it long ago, built their fortunes on its power, and paid the price in blood and terror to keep it contained.*” “My family?” Stellan’s cheerful facade crumbled further, revealing the raw confusion beneath. “But… my father never spoke of such things. Only that the estate was… a burden.” “*Because the truth would have been too much for your fragile line to bear,*” Alisa said, a hint of bitterness in her tone. “*The Choir’s essence permeated this place, whispered temptations, drove men mad. I sealed it, but my binding is weakening. And now, Stellan, it sees you.*” The chill behind him surged, and Stellan lurched forward, his palms slapping down against the key-bed. The moment his skin met the polished bone, a seizure of alien memory ripped across his skull. He saw, in a flash, not his own memories, but a kaleidoscope of images: a grand ballroom filled with masked dancers, a flash of silver moonlight on a blade, a pair of desperate, pleading eyes. Alisa’s eyes. “*When your skin meets the keys, we are… bound,*” Alisa’s voice rang inside his skull, crisp as struck glass, as if she stood level with his shoulder. “*I can speak to you, guide you. And, as you’ve just experienced, I can perceive your memories.*” Stellan snatched his fingers back, grinding his palms against his temples. “My memories? You can rummage through my head?” He felt peeled open to the marrow, every brick of his bright front tumbling down. “*Not rummage, Stellan. Perceive. It is an echo, a resonance. A side effect of our forced tether. And believe me, it is as disorienting for me as it is for you.*” There was a pause, and then her voice softened, a genuine empathy threading through her words. “*I’m sorry. I saw… a small boy, in a vast, empty house. Long corridors, silent meals. A mother’s distant smile, a father’s perpetually closed study door. Always alone. So much loneliness, hidden behind such a bright, eager mask.*” Her words were a blunt instrument, shattering his defenses. He felt exposed, stripped bare. No one had ever seen past his act, not truly. He jammed his fingernails into his palms, fighting to knit his customary shrug back together. “It’s… it’s fine. I was always good at entertaining myself.” Before he could laugh it off, the air collapsed into him. It was not a recollection of drafty nursery rooms, but a foreign, sickening dread that seized his lungs. Rigor seized his knees; his tongue tasted of brine and raw zinc. He tasted copper and fear. He heard a distant, mocking laughter, felt the sharp, agonizing impact, then a growing coldness as life bled away. The vaulted ceiling tilted away through blurring vision, floorboards drinking the tallow glow, a hooded silhouette leaning down through the dark. A phantom blade tore through his ribs, followed by the sickening slide of draining warmth. He choked, pitching back until his spine met a mahogany display cabinet, his vision graying at the edges. “What was that? I felt… the blade. The floor.” “*The night I died,*” Alisa said, her tone hollow as an empty well. “*An uncontrolled resonance. A brief glimpse of my final moments. They killed me, Stellan. They left me to rot in this room, bound to my own bones, a sacrifice to keep the Choir caged.*” Her voice hardened, a steely resolve replacing the sorrow. “*I need you to help me find out who. I need you to find my killer. It is the only way to truly break my binding, the only way to strengthen the seal on the Choir, and the only way to free your soul from its hunger.*” Stellan stared at the bone-toothed instrument, then out toward the restless dark and the encroaching frost. His own fate, his family’s ancient, cursed burden, Alisa’s century-old murder—it was all tangled together. He was just Stellan Varik, a man who preferred to joke his way through life, but here, in this decaying room, he felt a strange, undeniable pull. He was tired of running, tired of pretending. This was real. He took a deep breath, the metallic scent still in the air. “Alright,” he said, his voice stronger now, surprising even himself. “Alright, Alisa. I’ll help you.” The syllable had barely cleared his teeth before the parlor dissolved around him in a blinding vertigo of foreign thought. His perception warped. He saw his own hands, calloused and pale, but they were not his. They were slender, calloused from bronze wire, and rigidly, irrevocably dead. He felt the stifle of pooled blood in his throat, the downward rush of an unavenged ending. The timber planks rushed up to meet his cheek, followed by the walnut case of the instrument, and then, locked in those dying fingers, a hard fleck of silver. A locket, intricately carved, depicting a stylized raven mid-flight. He could almost feel its cold metal against his palm, the tiny, sharp edge of its wing. Then the circuit tore free. Stellan dropped, his kneecaps striking the parquetry with a hollow crack. He flexed his raw, broad knuckles, staring at skin that felt borrowed, the stamped raven scorched behind his retinas. He scraped the sweat from his brow, his pulse thumping against his teeth. A pendant. A raven carved in silver. He dragged himself upright by the arm of a brocade chair. The bone keys gleamed mutely under the sconces, yet the predatory profile of that silver bird remained etched in his sight. “Alisa!” he rasped into the stillness, but only a faint harmonic trembled from the strings, dying out against the moldering carpets. The silence returned, cavernous and biting. He had given his word, and in return, her final second had been burned into his skull. The silver bird. He had to uncover whose neck had worn it.

A Prison of Bone