The Stillborn Locket
By @john1208
Lady Isolde Blackwood, still cloaked in the sepulchral silence of Ashwood Manor, clings to the silver locket bearing her stillborn daughter's miniature. Six months after the tragedy, a fragile comfort emerges: whispers in the wind, faint lullabies from empty nurseries, and childlike scrawls appearing on dusty mirrors – messages she believes are from her lost Elara. This phantom solace offers a balm to her lacerated soul, anchoring her in the crumbling, isolated estate that has been her family's tomb for generations. But the whispers grow possessive, the lullabies more dirge-like, and the scrawls begin to form unsettling demands. Isolde’s desperate hope curdles into icy terror as she suspects the entity communicating through Elara's voice is not her beloved child, but an ancient, parasitic presence that has long fed on the Blackwood lineage’s sorrow, its tendrils now tightening around her grief-stricken heart. Will she succumb to its insidious embrace, or unearth the manor's dreadful secrets before Elara's memory is twisted into a cage?
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