The easel shuddered under Bastien’s hand, the wood still damp from the residual frost. Héloïse’s eyes, rendered in quick, furious charcoal strokes, held a silent scream he hadn’t intended, a raw dread that made his own stomach clench. He had painted her as Léonie had presented her, a docile, unassuming girl. Now, the canvas glared back, mocking his naivety. This wasn’t a victim of circumstance. This was a soul systematically dismantled. *Héloïse… I didn’t mean…* Léonie’s voice, a thin thread in his awareness, sounded genuinely bewildered. It was an unnerving disconnect, the sincerity of her regret clashing violently with the malice he’d just witnessed through her memories. He had been so quick to pity her, to champion her cause. He had let her soft cadence soothe away his skepticism, allowed her to shape his perception of their shared tragedy. What a fool he’d been. He pushed away from the easel, the scent of turpentine suddenly acrid. The Valois Manor itself seemed to mock him, its ancient timbers groaning beneath centuries of buried spite. Léonie had been a fragment, a siren’s song. But the house, with its cold stone and decaying grandeur, had always been brutally honest. It was a repository of history, not just a stage for one girl’s undoing. “The house,” he muttered, rubbing a hand across his jaw. “The house knows.” He found Céline in the library, perched on a precarious stack of tomes, her brow furrowed over a thick, leather-bound volume. A spill of yellowed pages fanned out around her. She looked up, her expression sharp, discerning. Even without words, she knew something fundamental had shifted. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said, her tone dry, but her eyes held genuine concern. “Or perhaps, finally, the true face of one.” He gave a humorless laugh. “Something like that. Léonie… she wasn’t the victim I thought. Héloïse was.” He gestured vaguely towards the drawing room where the easel stood. “The memories. They were a lie.” Céline nodded slowly, absorbing his words. “I suspected as much. She’s too… perfect. Ghosts rarely are. And the way she reacted to the mention of Héloïse… it was too strong.” She patted the book beside her. “This old thing is called the ‘Chronicles of Cendrebourg.’ It mentions the original builder of this manor, a certain Alaric Valois. He had a reputation for… eccentricities.” Bastien leaned against a dusty shelf, the spines of forgotten novels pressing into his back. “Eccentricities?” “More like a fascination with ‘psychic imprints’ and ‘etheric energies’,” Céline explained, quoting from the book. “He believed certain strong emotional events could leave a residue, a… ‘Shade,’ if not properly contained. He even wrote about methods for trapping them.” She frowned. “But it’s all very vague.” She slid off the books, landing softly on her feet. “What we need are the blueprints. The original plans for the manor. Maybe something was built into the structure itself.” They spent the next hour sifting through the study, their initial optimism waning with each empty drawer and hidden compartment. The air grew heavy, the quiet punctuated only by the rustle of old paper and the distant wail of the sea wind. Bastien’s earlier rage had curdled into a cold, determined focus. He wouldn’t be misled again. Just as he was about to give up on the massive, ornate fireplace, Céline let out a small gasp. “Here!” She was kneeling before a low, carved cabinet built into the wall, usually obscured by a heavy moth-eaten curtain. With a small, almost imperceptible click, a section of the dark wood swiveled inward, revealing a shallow cavity. Inside, nestled amongst cobwebs and dust, were two items: a rolled parchment, brittle with age, and a slender, leather-bound diary. Céline carefully extracted them. The parchment unrolled to reveal the manor’s original architectural plans, meticulously detailed, drawn in faded sepia ink. But it was the diary that drew their immediate attention. Its cover was blank, unmarked, but the pages inside were filled with elegant, sloping script. “It’s a journal,” Céline murmured, her finger tracing the faded ink. “Belongs to a Margaux Allard. Alaric Valois’s granddaughter, I think. She lived here in the early 1900s.” She began to read, her voice hushed, the words weaving a chilling narrative. Margaux’s entries detailed a growing unease in the house, a sense of being watched, drained. She wrote of the “Ancolie’s Hunger,” a parasitic shade that fed on sadness and strife. “It takes root,” Céline read, her voice tight, “when a spirit is broken, a heart is laid bare by profound despair. But it cannot anchor itself without a willing host, a soul so ravaged by bitterness or a hunger for power, that it invites the Ancolie to merge, to become one.” Bastien felt a cold dread settle in his bones. *A willing host. A soul ravaged by bitterness or a hunger for power.* The description fit the newly revealed Léonie far too well. Not the docile victim, but the petty tyrant. “It promises to amplify desires,” Céline continued, her eyes wide as she scanned ahead, “to grant strength, influence, to make others bend to its will. In exchange, it slowly consumes the host, twisting their memories, blurring their identity, until only the Ancolie remains, tethered to this place.” He closed his eyes. “Léonie,” he said, his voice flat. He felt her presence, usually a soft hum, now a faint, almost defensive buzz in the back of his mind. “Did you know about this, Léonie? Did you make a deal?” There was no immediate answer. Only a cold, heavy stillness that seemed to press down from the rafters overhead. “The diary specifies that the host must actively invite it,” Céline added, her voice a stark pronouncement in the quiet room. “It can’t just possess someone. There has to be a conscious choice.” Bastien opened his eyes, staring at a patch of peeling wallpaper, not really seeing it. He felt a surge of cold fury, sharper than any he’d felt before. He had tried to save her. He had risked everything for her. And all the while, she had been a willing accomplice, a puppet master pulling the strings of his sympathy. “Léonie,” he repeated, his voice dangerously low, “Tell me. Was this… entity… your ‘best friend’ too? Did you invite it in to finally crush Héloïse?” The quiet stretched, thick and suffocating. Then, a sudden, jarring shift. The faint hum in his mind sharpened, hardening into a razor’s edge. The very air around him seemed to crackle with an unseen force, colder than any psychic attack he’d faced before. Her voice, when it finally came, was no longer a fragmented echo, nor the sweet, plaintive melody he’d grown accustomed to. It was sharp, venomous, utterly devoid of the warmth she’d so carefully cultivated. *She was nothing. I gave her everything.* The words vibrated in his skull, raw with unbridled contempt, a seething resentment that stripped away every layer of her carefully constructed facade. Then, just as suddenly, the connection snapped. The voice, the psychic pressure, the faint hum—all of it vanished, leaving behind an unnerving void, a hostile chill that promised no further words, no further pleas. Bastien stood utterly alone in the chilling room, the spectral absence a more potent threat than her ghost had ever been. He knew, with a terrifying certainty, that he had just faced the true Léonie Allard, and she was not done with him yet.

Rue Ancolie