Elior dreamt of roots.

  They twisted and coiled beneath an endless earth, faintly glowing in the dark like veins beneath translucent skin.

  They pulsed in rhythm with something vast and ancient — something breathing deep within the soil.

  The sound of burrowing filled the air: the scrape of wood upon earth, of wood upon wood, the groan of a living forest shifting in its sleep.

  Beneath it, another sound — faint, out of place, wrong.

  Crunching.

  A slow, patient rumble, as though something enormous were chewing its way through time.

  The roots stirred — and somewhere in the dark, something listened back.

  The Roots bent toward Elior, not to seize, but as if they yearned for him.

  The Ash stirred.

  Elior woke with a sharp gasp.

  For a heartbeat, he didn’t know where he was. The room was dark and unfamiliar — tall ceilings, old timber, the faint scent of salt and dust.

  His hand ached and Burned. When he looked down, thin red lines traced his palm, curling and intersecting like half-formed runes.

  A dim light seemed to fade from them.

  He blinked hard, almost falling out of the bed as he reached towards an old lamp on the bedside table.

  Weak gold filled the room. The marks were gone.

  Only the echo of the sting remained.

  “Dreams don’t leave scars,” he muttered to himself acknowledging how obtuse the thought sounded.

  Yet it hadn’t felt like a dream. It had felt close.

  He pushed himself upright, trying to remember how he’d gotten here in this unfamiliar room.

  The drive north.

  The manor rising from the cliffs.

  The fall.

  The world folding in.

  A voice that wasn’t his, whispering through the mist.

  Now, silence.

  A clock ticked where he could not see it. The sea sighed beyond the walls.

  The room was spacious, austere: a simple double bed, tall dresser, old trunk at the foot, a single window half-curtained against early light.

  Everything tidy, worn, faintly mismatched — as if the house had been furnished by many over the years.

  He tossed back the covers. His warm feet screamed in protest at the cold floor, but his mind was already fixed on the window across the room and what lay beyond it.

  The boards creaked beneath his bare soles.

  The air smelled of rain.

  Outside, a small courtyard lay framed by weathered stone.

  In its center grew an Ash Tree — immense, silver-barked, branches reaching like skeletal hands into the pale morning.

  The sight rooted him.

  Memories surged — graves, the preacher’s hollow voice, the thud of soil on wood. His chest clenched, sharp and cold.

  He gripped the sill until his knuckles whitened and forced air into lungs that had forgotten how.

  When the wave passed, he looked again — and for a heartbeat, the tree moved. Not with the wind, but against it.

  A whisper touched the air. Faint.

  Breathless.

  Not in his head.

  “Remember.”

  Elior froze. The word was clear, carried by no wind he could feel.

  He unlatched the window and leaned into the cold. “Remember what?” he asked softly.

  No answer.

  Only the sea and the clatter of branches.

  He let out a shaky laugh. "great.. I’m talking to trees now — Brilliant."

  Turning back to the room Elioir took notice of three travel bags by the dresser — his own, the ones from camping trips with his parents.

  Someone had brought them up. Beside them sat something entirely out of place.

  A small mahogany chest.

  Dark, worn wood carved with faint etchings that seemed to creep in the lamplight. Brass corners dulled by age.

  At its center, an intricate lock — the same one that had fascinated him as a child.

  His father’s trunk.

  Elior’s breath caught. It was the one thing in his father’s study he had never been allowed to open.

  He remembered trying every key in the house, tracing the engravings, certain it must hold secrets — and being gently scolded for his curiosity.

  Now it waited.

  A letter was pinned to its lid familiar and waiting. Yellowed paper, curled edges, ink faintly blurred by time.

  The scent reached him from here — oil, parchment, dust. His father’s study his mothers perfume.

  He reached for it — longingly

  A knock startled him. The door creaked open.

  “Ah! You’re awake then” Auren said, relieved.

  His head appeared around the frame, hair disheveled, a faint grin tugging his mouth. “You gave me quite the scare yesterday.

  Fainting like that.

  Thought I’d have to break out the smelling salts — not that I own any.”

  Elior blinked, somewhere between amusement and irritation.

  He had forgotten all about his uncle, now as he looked at him he almost did a double take.

  Seeing the uncanny resemblance of his father features, only more worn by grief and time.

  “I’m making coffee,” Auren went on.

  “Coffee? Tea? My selection’s pitiful, but I can manage eggs and toast.

  How about breakfast before the house decides to eat us both alive?”

  It was a strange phrase, confusing but somehow exactly right for the man. Elior’s stomach answered with an unmistakable growl.

  “That settles that,” Auren chuckled.

  “Get dressed in something less… funerary.” He gestured vaguely; only then did Elior realize he still wore yesterday’s clothes.

  “Meet me in the hall after.”

  The door closed softly. His footsteps made almost no sound.

  He moves like smoke, Elior thought. Almost inhumanly quiet.

  He looked back at the chest. The letter seemed to watch him, paper trembling in the draft. Hunger gnawed louder than curiosity.

  “Later,” he said, though it didn’t sound like a promise.

  He dressed quickly — jeans and a hoodie, simple armor against the day — and stepped into the hallway.

  Auren waited with hands in his pockets, perfectly at ease despite the shadows that clung to the corridor.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Follow me. Easier than getting lost.”

  Elior wasn’t sure one could get lost in a house like this — yet, as they walked, he began to doubt.

  Hallways turned in quiet, deliberate ways.

  Shelves and glass cases lined the walls, filled with things that didn’t belong in any home:

  fossilized feathers; shards of stone etched with unfamiliar runes; a mask whose expression shifted when Elior looked away.

  He slowed at a case. “What is all this?”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  “Artifacts,” Auren said, not breaking stride. “Remnants from… other places.”

  “Other countries, you mean?”

  Auren’s mouth tilted into a humorless smile. “Something like that.”

  The corridor opened into a kitchen: large, warm — and not quite right in some imperceptible way.

  The fire crackled in the hearth, but its shadows lagged behind their flames, as if light were uncertain how to behave here.

  The scent of cooking met him — eggs, bacon, the faint bitterness of coffee.

  “Sit,” Auren said, pouring two mugs. His movements were practiced, almost ritual.

  Elior sat at the long wooden table. A silver cloche waited — absurdly formal for breakfast. When he lifted it, steam carried warmth that nearly broke him.

  “I hope you don’t mind simple fare,” Auren said, stirring milk and sugar.

  “I haven’t been home long enough to restock. But it’s food, and that’s a start.”

  Elior didn’t mind. He was starving. The days before the funeral had stripped him of appetite and sleep. He ate slowly,

  as if relearning what it meant to be alive — each swallow an act of defiance against the silence that had followed him from the graves,

  his gaze drifted back to the hallway — the cases, the strange runes and relics — then to his own life,

  suddenly emptied. An orphan at seventeen. No job. No plan.

  “What now?” he murmured.

  He’d finished school early, studying alongside his parents — languages, mythology, history — then the extra classes in math and science for a certificate he didn’t know what to do with.

  Their research fit nowhere in an ordinary world. Could he continue it? Could he even understand it?

  He barely noticed Auren sit across from him until the older man spoke.

  “I know you have questions about your parents,” he said gently.

  Elior froze, the mention of his parents ripping him out of his thoughts.

  “I suppose you knew Sólvi — loving, curious, a historian and mother — and Eirik, respectable, responsible, a businessman and father.

  That said, did you know who they were when no one was looking? Their dreams. What they aspired to. Their legacy?”

  “I know they researched mythology,” Elior managed. “It was a passion. A hobby.”

  “They weren’t ordinary researchers,” Auren said. “Their work was… unconventional. Mythology, yes, but not as story."

  Auren Leaned forward as if he had a secret to share "Patterns. Structures that repeat. Threads that connect every myth, every god, every dream humanity’s ever had.”

  “Symbolically?” Elior frowned.

  “The myths are just that — myths. Old stories.”

  Auren’s eyes caught firelight and held it like tempered steel.

  “No,” he said softly. “I mean worlds — tangible, beside us and all around us, as we speak.”

  The house shuddered.

  A low groan moved through the walls.

  Elior turned toward the sound. Books rattled. The fire dimmed for half a heartbeat, shadows crawling longer across the floor.

  Outside, lightning flashed — sudden and silent — illuminating the sea beyond the windows.

  But it was no longer the sea.

  Beyond the window Elior saw roots — colossal, skeletal roots, twisting through the cliffs beneath them.

  They pulsed with faint light, veins of silver threading the deep.

  He blinked.

  Waves again.

  “Did you see something?” Auren asked, quiet, probing.

  Elior knew the answer before he spoke it. “No.” His mind had been unreliable since the funeral.

  Auren’s mouth made the beginning of a smile.

  He turned his mug a fraction — the gesture of someone who already knows the answer and chooses not to press.

  “Good,” he said. “Then the Veil hasn’t thinned completely.”

  Elior shifted under the weight of that gaze. For a moment, it felt less like doubt than study — as if Auren were measuring how far the truth could bend before it broke.

  “The what?” he asked, voice thin.

  Auren didn’t answer. He looked past the window, toward a distance Elior couldn’t see. “The world,” he murmured,

  “is larger than you think… and smaller than it should be.”

  He rose and smoothed a palm over the tabletop — a small, reassuring gesture, as if to tell the wood it had done nothing wrong.

  “I have business in the study,” he added, his tone turning practical by degrees. “Correspondence. A stubborn lock. A memory that needs filing — Eat —Walk the house.

  Walk it slowly — Let it learn your weight.” Aurens words were almost like a second thought

  "Houses, like grief, prefer you when you do not hurry."

  He left with the softness of someone who has learned not to startle the dark.

  Down the corridor — past cases that looked as if they were holding their breath — and around a corner that seemed to exist only for him.

  Elior finished chewing what he could no longer taste and listened to the manor, feeling as though it listened back.

  He meant to return to his room and open the letter.

  Instead, his feet drifted and the house allowed it.

  The corridors turned like pages; doors opened at the speed of curiosity.

  In some halls, the air held the cool of cellars and old chapels. In others, the light clung to objects a breath too long, reluctant to let them go.

  He found a library whose windows were taller than the courtyard trees.

  The curtains breathed without wind, a long inhale and exhale that matched nothing else in the room.

  A ladder shifted itself a handsbreadth and then pretended it had always been there.

  In the corner, a great globe turned by its own mind, bearing constellations he did not recognize; faint lines connected stars no atlas had admitted.

  When he touched it, a hum gathered in his bones — like a tuning fork struck far away, traveling to find him.

  He came upon a small observatory — more suggestion than room: an iron stand, a cracked brass telescope aimed at a corner of sky that carried no name he knew.

  The lens was spotless.

  The eyepiece was warm. When he leaned to it, the glass showed a darkness that felt near, as if the sky had leaned back to look in.

  He found two doors that would not open.

  At the first he pressed his ear to the wood and heard water traveling beneath stone — roots growing in rain.

  At the second, something spoke in a way that was not speech; the shape of words existed, but meaning had yet to arrive. He could not bring himself to try the handle again.

  Afternoon thinned into that gray-blue hour that is more color than time.

  In a map room where walls refused to hold to known borders, a narrow seam of light appeared beneath a far door. Not firelight: a cool, blue-white slit that made dust look like slow snow.

  Murmuring bled through the wood. One voice was Auren’s — grief worn smooth. The other did not sit comfortably in the category of voice.

  It sounded like the pause between branching, the hush a forest holds when it waits to decide which way to grow.

  Elior did not knock.

  When his feet could carry him no longer, the manor delivered him back to his room.

  He struggled to sleep.

  When sleep found him, the dream returned — the roots closer now, not seizing, not threatening, only holding their breath as if waiting for him to match them.

  He could not bring himself to reach back.

  Morning arrived as if the house had to petition for it. Light came first to corners, then reluctantly to the middle of things.

  Auren met him in the corridor with a tray balanced in one hand, hair more unruly than the night before, shirt buttons attempting but not achieving agreement.

  “Morning, nephew,” he chimed.

  “Let’s get you fed.” He gestured for Elior to follow.

  In the kitchen, breakfast waited beneath another dignified silver dome — ceremony surviving where other certainties had thinned.

  Eggs and coarse bread tasted exactly like themselves.

  The coffee did not forgive, but it apologized by doing its work well.

  “You eat,” said Auren, already drifting back toward the hall.

  “I forget to most days unless commanded. I do however accept bribes in toast on occasion.” He winked, thieved a slice, and vanished down the corridor.

  “Thank you,” Elior said into the room, as if gratitude needed air to finish itself.

  He ate. He walked the house more. The letter lay forgotten for the sake of curiosity. The day folded itself uneventful.

  On the fifth morning, light found the edges of things without addressing the center. The air in the kitchen held the hush inside a bell after it’s struck.

  Auren had laid the table and stood at the window, hands in his pockets — a man reading weather on a map most people could not see.

  “You sleep?” he asked without turning.

  “Not well,” Elior said.

  “Good,” Auren answered, then caught himself. “I mean — it’s working. The house.

  The not-sleep.

  It loosens the tight places in the mind; makes one’s sight more malleable.” he rolled the word in his mouth.

  Elior frowned confused, but the coffee was ready, and certain questions allow delay if the cup is warm enough.

  He lifted it — the surface trembled a fraction though his hand did not.

  Lightning flickered somewhere that wasn’t the sky.

  No thunder followed.

  A draft moved against the pull of the fire.

  Auren poured his own and forgot the milk. He did not sit.

  Elior raised the cup to his mouth. In the black oval he saw the window behind him and, within it, his own too-pale face.

  The Ash Tree stood beyond. For the smallest fraction of a moment he saw it from an angle the glass could not provide — from beneath, its roots lit like an inverted constellation, a night sky burning under the earth.

  He blinked.

  Only a reflection again.

  A careful hinge whispered. Far down the corridor, a door opened the way a thought opens when it is almost ready to be said.

  The clock ticked once, twice, then changed its mind.

  Auren set his cup down with the care given fragile truths. He looked at Elior the way one looks toward a horizon where a storm is practicing its lines.

  Gentleness weighed on him like iron.

  “Whatever you think is true,” he said softly, “we’re nearing the place where it won’t matter what we think.”

  Elior tried to answer and found the answer had gone ahead to wait inside his next breath.

  Outside, the Ash Tree’s branches did not move.

  The air arranged itself around them.

  Along the far baseboard, a thin knife of brightness appeared and went out — as if the house had woken, checked the hour, and chosen silence.

  Elior set his cup down.

  Porcelain met wood with a small, precise click that sounded larger than it had any right to be.

  Auren’s eyes softened, broke, and mended in a heartbeat.

  “We’ll talk soon,” he said, almost a whisper. “Before it thins again.”

  He left by the corridor that sometimes existed for him.

  The blue-white breath under the study door rose once and stilled.

  Elior stood very quietly, careful not to move in a way that might encourage the room.

  The manor listened. The sea pressed its slow heartbeat against the cliff. Somewhere in the walls, something arranged itself to be remembered.

  He did not open the letter.

  He did not sit.

  He did not leave.

  He watched the coffee until the surface was only a mirror and saw nothing but his own eyes and the ghost of the Ash Tree.

  The light did not change.

  The day waited at the threshold, undecided.

  And the house beyond the fog drew one careful, almost inaudible breath — and somewhere beneath,

  "The Ash Remembered."

  Sleep did not come easily that night. When it did, it came in fragments — flashes of silver bark, whispers threading through the dark like roots through soil.

  Every time his mind drifted toward rest, something vast seemed to turn its gaze inward, brushing the edges of his thoughts.

  He felt the house breathing beneath him — slow, patient, alive.

  The rhythm of it settled in his bones until he could no longer tell if the pulse he heard was his own or something older, remembering itself through him.

  Grief blurred at the edges, bleeding into wonder, then into dread.

  His parents’ faces surfaced in the dark behind his eyes — smiling, then fading, like constellations swallowed by storm light.

  What if the dead did not rest? he wondered.

  What if they only waited for us to listen?

  The thought lingered, quiet and cold.

  When the whisper came again — that single, shivering word — it no longer sounded like the house at all.

  It sounded like memory itself, exhaling his name.

  "Elior, remember."