Golden morning light spilled through the emerald canopy, dappling the forest floor in shifting patterns of sun and shadow. The air hummed with warmth as the first rays kissed the dew-laden grass, sending up tiny spirals of mist. Flowers unfurled their petals, breathing in the dawn, while the rich, damp scent of earth rose with the heat.
From burrows and nests, from hollow logs and hidden thickets, life stirred. A beetle scuttled over a fallen leaf. A rabbit twitched its nose at the edge of its warren. High above, a four-winged blackbird stretched inside the hollow of an ancient oak, its feathers ruffling as it woke—not to the usual chorus of the forest, but to something else. A melody.
It curled through the trees like a living thing, carried on a breeze that tasted of honey and sunlight. The blackbird cocked its head, entranced. Without thought, its wings spread, lifting it from the safety of the trunk as the song wrapped around its mind, pulling it forward. It was not alone.
Through the undergrowth, creatures emerged—horned foxes with ears pricked, deer with an azure flame on their antlers lifting their heads mid-graze, even the smallest mice pausing in their foraging. Birds of every color and shape took flight, their wings beating in unison as if drawn by an invisible thread. The forest itself seemed to lean toward the sound, the leaves trembling in anticipation.
And then—the voice.
Clear, resonant, weaving through the trees like a spell. It was called without words, sang without language, and every living thing that heard it knew, deep in their bones, that they must follow.
The forest hummed in eerie harmony as the voice wove through the trees—soft, lilting, almost mournful.
"The bridge of oaths and vows will take you there... take you there... take you there♩♫♪"
Each word dripped like honey, sweet yet suffocating, as if the air itself clung to the melody. Beneath the weight of a tattered black cloak, small feet, whiter than snow moved in a rhythmic, almost playful cadence. Twigs snapped, leaves crunched, but the singer paid no mind, their voice a whisper half-lost to the wind.
"Step too lightly... or tread with care♩♫♪"
A child? No—something else. Ebony hair spilled from the hood, swaying with each exaggerated skip. Pale fingers curled and uncurled at their sides, as if conducting an unseen orchestra. The blackbird, still ensnared by the song, perched atop branches, its beady eyes glazed, unblinking. It did not stir, even as the figure's voice dipped into something darker.
"It only leads... to empty promises♫♩♫"
The path ahead twisted, shadows stretching like grasping hands. Yet the singer moved forward, untouched by the forest's unease. Their song was a spell, a lure—and the woods held their breath, waiting to see who—or what—might answer.
A hush fell over the forest as the girl's voice curled through the trees, sweet and chilling.
"Silver nails, and iron crown♪♪𝅘𝅥"
The words slithered between the trunks, wrapping around gnarled roots and rustling leaves. The creatures trailing her—foxes with glazed eyes, birds perched on swaying branches, even the insects in the soil—all stood frozen, caught in the honeyed snare of her song.
"The witch will take it, stone by stone♫♪♫"
Then—she stopped.
The cloak's hood slipped back, revealing a face too young for the emptiness in her ink-black eyes. Ribbons strapped at either side of her head, the same night black as her eyes. Her lips stretched into a grin, wide and unnatural, splitting her face like a wound.
A gust of wind. A shift in the earth.
The trees twisted away, branches creaking as they bent like bowing servants. The path ahead yawned open, dirt spreading into a broad, barren clearing.
And then—her voice again. No longer a whisper, no longer a song, but a lullaby that dripped with something thick and cloying.
"You're dear sister is home♥♥♥"
Her voice spilled into the clearing like syrup—thick with tenderness. A toothy smile carved itself across her face, too wide, too bright, the kind of smile a child paints on a doll with clumsy fingers.
Then she moved.
Not a step, not a run—a launch, limbs unfolding like a marionette cut from its strings. The crumbling mansion loomed ahead, its sagging bones groaning in the wind, but she paid no mind to the rot. She danced. A wild, weightless thing, spinning through the debris as if the air itself carried her. If she'd held a fiddle, she would have sawed at it like a mad bard, fingers flying, bow screeching—but even without it, the music was there, humming in the twist of her wrists, the arch of her back.
She wove through the hanging laundry, sheets bleached gray with age, their frayed edges brushing her cheeks like phantom hands. A pirouette here, a sway there—each motion precise, deliberate, as if she followed the steps of some long-forgotten waltz. A lady at a ball? No. Something far older. Long forgotten.
The creatures did not move. Did not dare.
Foxes stood rigid, their russet fur bristling in silent awe. Birds perched frozen on trembling branches. Even the insects held their breath, wings stilled mid-tremor. They could not understand—not truly—the terrible grace of her movements, the way her limbs carved through the air like a blade through silk. Yet they were ensnared all the same, their wide, glassy eyes reflecting the whirl of her shadow.
At the edge of the clearing, an unseen line held them back. Instinct, perhaps. Or fear. The forest ended here. The rot began beyond. This was her stage—her decaying palace, her crumbling ballroom—and they were only spectators, permitted to watch, never to cross.
Then—
A final spin. A breathless pause.
The phantom music sighed into silence.
She stood before the mansion's gaping doorway, her cloak fluttering like a tattered curtain call. With a slow, deliberate hand, she gathered the fabric at her hip, dipping into a bow so deep it felt less like courtesy and more like a blade being sheathed.
The mansion exhaled as she straightened—a slow, putrid breath of damp wood and spoiled meat curling through the cracked doorframe. It slithered into her nose and lungs.
The girl barely flinched.
Her nose wrinkled—not in disgust, but in the same fleeting irritation one might spare for an overcast sky threatening rain. How tedious, that expression said. Must everything here reek of endings?
She tilted her head, black eyes reflecting the yawning darkness beyond the threshold. Somewhere in those depths, something shifted. Something waited.
A smile, slow and syrupy, spread across her face.
"Now," she sang, her voice dripping with joy, "to take my dear sister home♥♥♥"
The door creaked wider, as if beckoning.
The rot sighed in welcome.
"Tsk, tsk, dear sister~~"
The girl's voice dripped with saccharine disapproval as she surveyed the crumbling estate, her fingers curling playfully against her cheek. A half-muffled giggle escaped her lips—light and airy, yet it carried an edge like a razor wrapped in silk.
The mansion stood defiant against time, its wooden and painted walls were gnawed by ivy and moss, emerald tendrils slithering up weathered stone like possessive lovers. The forest had begun its reclamation, yet the structure remained—proud, stubborn, waiting.
With a push, the door groaned open, its protest echoing through the hollow halls. Sunlight stabbed through the dark, cutting a golden path across the dust-choked air. Particles swirled in the sudden intrusion, a ghostly waltz of neglect suspended in time. A suffocating silence greeted her.
Not merely absence of sound, but something thicker—a vacuum that swallowed even the memory of noise. The creak of settling wood, the scuttle of tiny legs, the whisper of wind against cracked glass—none of it reached here. This was a place between breaths, where time had paused mid-sentence.
Inside, the air was thick with the scent of aged wood and forgotten memories.
"Ohhh, sister~~" the girl sang, her shadow stretching long across the floorboards. "Did you leave everything just as it was? Waiting for me?"
Despite the rot outside, the interior stood in eerie preservation—furniture untouched, surfaces bare but for a fine layer of dust. As if the occupants had merely stepped out… and never returned. The floors were powdered with years of abandonment. Cobwebs draped the corners like tattered lace, their architects long since perished.
Caked with grime, the windows allowed no mercy of light—only the single sliver from the open door, a fragile beacon in the suffocating dark.
"How odddddd~"
Her voice curled through the stagnant air like smoke, mocking. A single finger tapped against her porcelain cheek—the picture of exaggerated innocence. Her head tilted, her ebony ribbons and hair swaying with the motion while her black eyes scanned the shadowed interior.
"And here I thought my dear sister would rush to greet me..." A pout, theatrical and sharp. "Arms wide, tears streaming, such a dramatic reunion~"
Her smile didn't waver. If anything, it grew—lips stretching until the expression bordered on grotesque.
"Ohhhh," she crooned, stepping forward. The threshold swallowed her whole. "Were you hiding instead?"
The moment her foot crossed the threshold, the door slammed shut behind her—a thunderous crack that shook the walls. Dust rained from the ceiling as the sound reverberated through the halls, a violent greeting from the house itself.
She didn't jump. Didn't gasp.
Just a glance over her shoulder, a slow blink, as if mildly inconvenienced by the tantrum of an unruly child. How dramatic. A shrug, and she turned back to the darkness, unbothered.
The air was thick with the scent of mildew and old wood, the kind of damp that seeped into bones. What little light pierced through the rotting ceiling fell in narrow, fractured beams—pale fingers groping through the dark, too weak to illuminate anything beyond the immediate. She could barely see her own outstretched hand, yet...
She walked.
Surefooted. Unhesitating. Each step leaves an imprint of her bare soles.
The hallway stretched before her—impossibly long, warped in a way that defied the mansion's crumbling exterior. Walls leaned inward, sagging. New corridors split off without warning as she passed. The floor groaned beneath her feet, each creak louder than the last.
And then—the humming.
Not a voice. Not music.
The thick, droning buzz of flies.
The stench hit her next—spoiled meat clotting the air, iron-rich blood long since dried to a crust. It clung to the back of her throat, viscous and sweetly rotten. Above, dark stains spider-webbed across the ceiling, flaking like old paint. Below, on the ground, chunks of flesh—gray and glistening with squirming life—littered the floorboards. Maggots writhed inside the corpses, a grotesque feast, their pale bodies undulating in the rot. Walking while avoiding stepping on the puddle— liquefied from the long wait.
The buzzing grew louder. Deafening.
Ahead, the hallway darkened further, walking past paintings hung on the wall, all the while avoiding the decaying bodies littered across the floor. A shape lay slumped against the wall—a corpse, bloated and ruptured, its skin split like overripe fruit. Flies clouded around it in a living veil, their drone rising and falling in a perverse lullaby.
The girl tilted her head, unblinking.
"Ohhh, sister~~" she cooed, stepping over a strewn rib bone. "You've let the house get so... messy."
The flies scattered as she approached.
The corpse did not move.
"Of my~~ the treasured dear sisters of mine are so violent, and it seemed like this sister is no different."
Her singsong voice slithered through the cavernous dining hall—not a grand ballroom, not a manor's feast, but the skeletal remains of an orphanage's last supper. The long wooden tables, scarred with decades of scraped chairs and children's elbows, stretched into the gloom. Bench seats stood uneven, some toppled over as if fled in haste.
The air tasted of sour milk and rust.
Dusty tin plates still held fossilized crusts of bread. Bowls of lumpy porridge had hardened into concrete-like mounds, sprouting strange fungal blooms. A single overturned cup leaked a dark stain across the tablecloth—juice, perhaps. Or something else.
High above, the ceiling beams sagged like the ribs of a starving beast. Faded crayon drawings still clung to the peeling walls—stick-figure families with too-wide smiles. One depicted two girls holding hands, their sun a smeared yellow hole in the corner.
She skipped past a tiny apron hung on a hook, its fabric brittle as dead leaves.
"Sisterrrrr~~" she trilled, knocking over an abandoned tin soldier with her toe. It clattered across the floorboards, the sound impossibly loud in the suffocating silence
The stench of rotting flesh clung to the air like a living thing—thick, cloying, buzzing with the restless hum of flies. Bodies lay slumped against the walls, their bloated forms blackened with decay, spilling open like overripe fruit. Maggots seethed in the ruin of eye sockets and gaping mouths, their squirming a wet, ceaseless whisper against the silence.
The girl didn't pause. Didn't flinch.
Her steps were light, almost playful, as she picked her way through the carnage. The door at the far end yawned open before her, revealing yet another hallway— walking through another procession of the dead. Their limbs tangled together in a grotesque mockery of an embrace, fingers curled as if still reaching for something just out of grasp.
She didn't need to see them to know they were there.
The house guided her.
An unseen pull, a thread wrapped around her bones, tugging her ever forward. She followed without hesitation, her black eyes gleaming in the dark. The floorboards groaned beneath her, the walls exhaling damp, rotten breath as she passed.
Passing through dormitories where small beds stood in military rows, their sheets stiff with old blood. Children still lay tucked beneath thin blankets, their throats opened. Maggots infest their closed eyes. A stuffed rabbit had been carefully placed over one girl's face, its fur matted where the blood had soaked through.
The kitchen smelled of curdled milk and rust. The sink was filled with pots and pans, while plates were stacked in the corner of the sinktop. Her feet clicked faster now.
Then—
The library. The only room the decay hadn't swallowed whole. Sunlight speared through the collapsed roof, illuminating floating dust like fireflies. Coloring books lay open to half-finished pictures—houses with smoking chimneys, stick-figure families holding hands.
"Sisterrrr~~" Her voice dripped like a leaking faucet. "You can't still be cross with me?"
She was nearly skipping now, her ribbons fluttering as she whirled through the endless hallways and rooms.
The air hung thick with dust, stale and motionless, as the little girl's footsteps echoed hollowly through the abandoned halls. Her voice, sweet yet edged with impatience, cut through the silence like a knife.
"Hmm, seems dear sister isn't here?" A sigh, theatrical and drawn-out, slipped past her lips as she tapped a finger against her chin. "How careless of me~ Did I overlook something again?"
She had scoured every room, every shadowed corner, but the mansion offered no answers—only the oppressive weight of its own ruin. Now, she stood in a chamber that bore the scars of violence. A great mirror, its surface split like a wound, reflected fragments of the destruction around it. The bed's skeletal frame was buried beneath layers of dust and grime, its covers rotted with time. Deep gashes marred the walls, as though some monstrous blade had carved through the room in a fit of rage.
A small table sat beside the shattered mirror, its surface obscured beneath the same suffocating filth. A lone oil lamp rested atop it, its fuel long since dried up, its wick blackened and brittle.
A pout twisted her lips as she surveyed the wreckage. "How troublesome~" she mused, her voice lilting with mock disappointment. "The first ordeal is about to begin, and we still don't have enough witches prepared. Really, now… what a bother~"
The mansion remained silent.
She let out an exaggerated sigh, letting herself collapse onto the moth-eaten bed, sending up a cloud of dust that shimmered in the dark. Unfazed by the grime, she crossed her legs and let her gaze drift lazily around the ruined room, her expression one of bored indifference.
"Well then~" she mused, tilting her head. "What do you think, dear sista Folfnird~~ Won't you grace your poor, clueless little sister with your infinite wisdom?" She cast a glance toward the hallway, waiting.
Only the whisper of wings answered.
A shadow flickered at the threshold of the doorframe. Walking past it, a massive raven materialized—its twin heads bobbing in eerie unison—swooped into the chamber. Each glossy black feather seemed to suck the remaining light in the room, and its beady eyes gleamed with unnatural intelligence. Though its size would have been monstrous in another world, here, a raven standing as tall as a child's knee was nothing out of the ordinary.
One head tilted, studying her. The other let out a low, guttural croak—almost like laughter.
The girl kicked her legs impatiently against the bedframe, sending another puff of dust into the stale air.
"Heyyy, sista Folfnird?" she whined, flopping onto her back. She didn't mind the dust-covered bed cover as her head was blanketed with her hair. "Where do you think our dear sister scampered off to? Every village nearby is just... empty. The only place left is that wretched city—but I highly doubt she'd be there."
The raven remained silent, its twin heads swiveling in opposite directions—one scanning the shattered mirror, the other peering up at the cracked ceiling. The girl's eyes narrowed.
"Heeey!!" she barked, voice sharp enough to cut glass. When the bird still ignored her, she sat up in a huff, cheeks puffing out like an offended chipmunk. "Sista Folfnird! Stop pretending I don't exist!" She hurled a moth-eaten pillow at it, missing spectacularly. "Ugh! You're such a jerk! I swear, one of these days, I'll pluck every last feather from your stupid heads!"
One of the raven's beaks finally clicked in response—a dry, dismissive sound. The other let out a croak that suspiciously resembled a chuckle.
The girl gasped in theatrical betrayal. "Ohhh, so NOW you acknowledge me?! Rude!"
The raven ignored her outburst entirely, its great wings stirring the stale air as it landed heavily on the bed beside her.
"W—what!?" she sputtered, recoiling as dust billowed up from the disturbed bedding, clinging to her fingers like powdered ash. "Hmph! Don't think acting all chummy now will make me forgive you, sista Folfnird! I'm not that easy!"
She turned her face away with an exaggerated pout, but the raven paid her no mind. Instead, it stalked across the mattress, its talons sinking into the rotten fabric as it nudged the mildewed pillow with one beak.
The girl's sulk faltered. "...Huh?"
Curiosity flickered in her eyes as she leaned forward, something glimmered—unnaturally bright against the decay. Her fingers darted out, plucking it from the pillow cover.
A single strand of hair.
Not just white—luminous. It lay across her palm like spun moonlight, its surface so smooth it seemed to reject the very dust around it. Even in the gloom of the ruined room, it gleamed, cold and perfect.
Her breath hitched.
"...This is..."
The raven's twin heads tilted in eerie unison, watching her. Waiting.
A slow, knowing smile curled across the girl's lips.
"Ohhh~ So that's where you've been hiding, dear sister♥"
The girl twirled the luminous strand between her fingers, her black eyes glinting with delight.
"Ohhh~ How exquisite~~" she crooned, "So cruel... and yet so beautiful♥♥♥" With a flick of her wrist, she sent the hair fluttering toward the raven, which caught it deftly in one beak.
The other head swiveled toward her, its gaze sharp—unnervingly intelligent. It studied her in silence, then tilted at an unnatural angle, black eyes boring into hers.
A voice, cold and clear, slithered into her mind—not through the air, but directly into her skull.
"Use titles. Names are dangerous beyond these walls."
The girl's smirk widened. "Yeah, yeah~ Sista Fol—" She caught herself, rolling her eyes with exaggerated drama. "Ahem. I mean... the illustrious Debtless Witch~ First Seat of the Grand Coven~" She gave a mocking little curtsy from her perch on the ruined bed.
The raven didn't humor her. In a rush of ink-black feathers, it took flight, vanishing into the mansion's hungry shadows without a sound.
Left alone, the girl giggled, kicking her legs against the bedframe.
"So stingy with the fun, sista Folfnird~~"
Her only company had gone along with the strand of hair. Leaving her in the gloomy room, half destroyed.
"Tch—so cold, sista Folfnird~~ Always so thorny with me~~" The girl's lower lip jutted out in an exaggerated pout as she glared down the vacant hallway.
"Why just me? Elsurienz gets sweet whispers, Vökur gets patient explanations... but me? Nothing but clipped orders and that awful mind-voice of hers." She hugged her knees to her chest, sulking like a scolded child.
A flicker of hope brightened her face. "Maybe my new sister will treat me better! She has to—" Then her nose wrinkled as she recalled the mangled corpses strewn in the manor. "...Well. Probably not. Though, to be fair..." She tapped her chin, considering. "Vökur did drown an entire kingdom in eternal nightmares, and Elsurienz... well." A giggle bubbled up. "At least this one leaves the bones!"
Her attention drifted back to the dusty pillow where she'd found the strand. A slow, calculating smile curled her lips as she raised a delicate hand, counting off on her fingers.
"First Seat: The Debtless Witch, Folfnird." One finger folded down. "Second Seat: The Slumbering Witch, Vökur." A second finger joined the first. "Third Seat: The Unsatiable Witch, Elsurienz." The third finger dipped obediently.
One remained.
"And now... the Fourth Seat." Her remaining finger trembled—not with fear, but anticipation. "Ohhh, I wonder what kind of love you'll bring to this world, my dear~~"
With a snap of her fingers—
—She was simply gone.
No ripple in the air. No lingering scent of magic. Just an empty room, a disturbed bed, and the vague, nagging sense that something had been forgotten.
Even the shadows couldn't quite recall what they'd just seen