“We need to find the other seals, Stellan. Before it finds a way to break through.”
The oppressive shadow outside the music room churned against the doorframe. He could still feel the faint, insidious hum vibrating against his teeth. It hadn’t gone; it was merely held at bay, pacing just beyond the threshold.
He tore his hands from the keys, the polished bone feeling suddenly slick beneath his fingertips. Air grated raw in his throat. “Seals? What seals?”
Alisa’s presence within his mind felt frayed, like a thread stretched thin. *“The pact… it wasn’t just one act. It was reinforced, woven into the very foundations of this manor. My death was one. There are others. Places of power. Things tied to the Varik bloodline.”*
Stellan looked around the music room, its ornate, faded grandeur suddenly seeming more like a cage. “And where would we find information about… pacts with parasitic entities?” He tried to infuse his voice with his usual light sarcasm, but it came out flat, edged with a fear he couldn't quite mask.
*“Your ancestral records room,”* Alisa supplied, her voice gaining a touch of its customary sharpness. *“Hidden away, no doubt. Filled with the inconvenient truths your ancestors preferred to forget.”*
He swallowed, the taste of metallic fear in his mouth. The muniment room. A place he’d deliberately avoided since his arrival, a musty vault of his forebears' less-than-illustrious history. But the spectral mass outside the door was a compelling argument.
He moved, almost stumbling, towards the door. The moment he stepped over the threshold, the discordant hum intensified, pressing against him from all sides. It didn't touch him directly, but it swirled around, an invisible current tugging at his resolve. He felt a phantom chill on his exposed skin, a crawl that prickled his nape.
“Lead the way, then,” he muttered, more to himself than to Alisa, and began a brisk pace through the dim, echoing corridors. The manor seemed to groan around him, the very air thick with dust and old mildew. He could hear Oskar somewhere in the distance, grumbling about a leaky cistern, the mundane sounds a bizarre counterpoint to the cosmic horror now stalking the halls.
Reaching the repository felt like stepping into a different century. The air was colder, thick with the scent of decaying paper and dry rot. Shelves taller than Stellan stretched into the gloom, heavy with leather-bound tomes and forgotten scrolls. Dust motes danced in the slivers of light that pierced the grimy windows, looking like trapped spirits.
“Where do we even begin?” he asked, running a hand over a particularly thick volume titled ‘Genealogies of the Vorlag Barony’.
*“Look for records concerning the estate’s construction, or perhaps the Varik family’s early land acquisitions. Anything from the period just before or after the manor was built. Your great-grandfather, Ignati, was obsessed with consolidating his bloodline’s ‘gifts’.”*
Stellan moved along the shelves, his fingers tracing the spine of books with titles like ‘The Serpent’s Coil: A Treatise on Terran Energies’ and ‘Whispers of the Underearth: Local Folkloric Accounts’. None seemed to fit. The Murmuring Choir wasn’t merely folklore; it was a hungry, present reality.
He found a section dedicated to private journals, a long shelf of leather-bound books, some thin, some thick, spanning generations. He scanned the spines, finally spotting a dark green volume, its gold-leafed title almost entirely faded: ‘I. Varik: Musings and Memoranda’.
As his fingers brushed the journal, a faint tremor ran through the floor. Alisa’s voice sharpened in his mind. *“That’s it. Be careful, Stellan. His mind… it was fractured by the Choir even then.”*
He pulled the heavy book from the shelf, its binding creaking in protest. Settling himself at a dust-laden table beneath a high, arched window, he carefully opened the journal. The pages were brittle, the ink faded, but the patriarch's elegant, looping script was still legible.
The early entries were mundane: estate accounts, notes on harvest yields, complaints about the neighboring nobility. Then, the tone shifted. The entries became cryptic, boasting of ‘the Patron’s benevolence’ and ‘the wellspring of power within the soil’.
Stellan flipped through, his eyes scanning for keywords, for any mention of the Choir. He found it, tucked amidst a series of increasingly manic scrawls. The author detailed the initial pact, framed as a glorious triumph, a ‘binding of the spirit of the land’ that would elevate the Varik line to unparalleled heights.
*“He speaks of it as a source of strength,”* Alisa observed, a cold dread seeping into her mental voice. *“They saw it as a tool, not a parasite.”*
Stellan’s gaze snagged on a particular passage, his breath catching. ‘The Patron asks for little,’ the entry read, the words precise even amid mounting madness, ‘only a vessel. A temporary dwelling, easily provided by those too weak to resist its song. And in return, a clarity of purpose, a potency unmatched.’
“A vessel,” Stellan whispered, the word a bitter taste. “It hollows out its host.” He felt a phantom ache in his chest, a fear that the Choir was already working its insidious way into the core of him, that the cheerful facade he presented was precisely the kind of emptiness it craved.
He continued to read, the entries growing darker, the promises of power twisting into laments of ‘insatiable hunger’ and ‘unending whispers’. He reached a page that was noticeably thicker than the others, almost two pages glued together. He carefully pried them apart, revealing a hidden entry, scrawled in a frantic, illegible hand, and then, below it, a tight, precise script in a different ink, written in an obscure cipher.
‘The Choir’s song is potent, but not without discord,’ the coded section began, as Alisa worked swiftly within his mind, translating the symbols as he absorbed them. ‘There is a flaw, a weakness woven into the initial binding. A counter-frequency. A place where its roots are thinnest, a conduit to the outside, if only it could be found. It is the only true means of severing its grip on the Marrow-Bound.’
Stellan stared at the translated words, a sliver of hope piercing the gloom. “A counter-frequency… a flaw.”
He was about to delve deeper into the coded message when his fingers brushed against a loose scrap of paper tucked between the pages, a recent addition. It was a note, scrawled on the back of an old requisition form. His name, ‘Stellan’, was crudely written at the top, followed by a list of grievances. ‘Still no pressure in the north wing’s lavatory. Boiler room making a racket again. Water’s practically a trickle. Checked valve in the east wall, but no good. Think it’s a blockage deeper down, near the old service line.’
Below the text was a crude, hand-drawn map. It was a simple sketch of the room's layout, with a thick, winding line marked ‘old service line’ running beneath the floorboards, ending in a crudely drawn 'X' near the main support pillar. Oskar’s handiwork, undoubtedly.
Stellan snorted, a humorless sound. “Oskar and his pipes,” he muttered, crumpling the note and tossing it aside. “Always with the plumbing.” He dismissed it, his mind already returning to the complex cipher on the hidden leaf, blind to the fact that the grumpy groundskeeper had just sketched a fracture point in the manor's subterranean masonry.