The staircase groaned under their boots. Not like old wood protesting weight, but like it remembered them. The sound crawled deep into the bones—more a feeling than a noise. The house didn't just hear them. It knew them. Every step sparked another sconce into life, one by one, amber light stretching shadows long across the stone.
Portraits lined the walls, crowding close. Not grand oilworks of lineage or heroism—these faces were too raw, too tight in the jaw. Painted eyes clung to them, watching with the kind of dread that didn't fade. They weren't lords. They weren't dead either, not in the way that mattered. Witnesses. Or reminders. Some might've left. Some… might still be here.
The hallway opened wider, a throat leading to rows of doors. A few cracked just enough to bleed firelight into the corridor. The air was heavy with lavender and wine, subtle but exact, like someone had measured the mood. Comfort slid over everything like velvet, smooth and rich, but under that softness, something sharp waited.
The vineyard whispered outside. The house held still. Listening. Tasting them.
Sleep came hard and fast. Like drowning, not resting.
Ezreal dropped into a cathedral spun from velvet and bone. Light spilled sideways through stained glass windows, smearing stars across the pews. The altar was a hunk of obsidian carved so deep with names it looked like it bled ink. Front row, his mother sobbed. His father stood beside her, face drowned in shadow. Smoke rolled out of his mouth like he'd been burning from the inside.
"You are ours," they said together. Their voices fit too neatly.
He ripped off a blindfold he hadn't known he was wearing. His hands itched and lit with runes. Fire cracked from his chest like something inside had finally torn loose. He screamed, but the cathedral just swallowed it whole, sound and all.
Caylen sat by a silvered lake, moonlight sheeting the surface. His mother sat across from him, smile soft, like she'd been waiting forever. The pendant at her neck pulsed gently, almost soothing. She opened a familiar book—his father's old poems—and flipped through. Every page had changed. Just one name, written over and over again, carving itself into the paper until it burned.
She looked up. Her face wasn't there anymore.
Dax walked through a battlefield made of ash and shattered teeth. His boots cracked glass and spine with each step. The sky overhead groaned and peeled back. Something ancient screamed from behind the clouds, raw and endless.
He saw her—her hand, outstretched. His fiancée. She was right there.
He reached.
Then claws, wet and chittering, tore her into the dark again.
Above, a dragon wheeled through the smoke. Gold scales slicked with blood. Its eyes locked onto him, wide and panicked. It screamed—and it was his scream.
Verek wandered a library that floated inside a void. Books curled on themselves and moaned softly. Shelves bent in impossible shapes. Whispers climbed from every open page, brushing along the inside of his skull.
In the middle of the chaos, he found himself—older. Bent. Ink-stained fingers curled around a book. His eyes were holes, scooped out by knowing.
"You'll forget what made you human," the older Verek rasped. "If you want to learn what's left to know."
Verek came up gasping, sweat plastering his tunic to his skin. The hearth had gone cold, but the air still radiated heat that didn't comfort—it hovered. A weight, watching him breathe.
Something had been in the room.
It hadn't left.
A soft knock, slow. Then a floorboard creaked.
Caylen slipped in, face pale, hair sweat-slicked and clinging to his neck. His voice came thin and shaky.
"Tell me I wasn't the only one dreaming about rot and void things whispering in blood."
Dax showed up right after, tugging a shirt over his head, a flask already halfway drained in one hand. "Heard her voice. Clear as anything. Then her mouth opened the wrong way."
Ezreal stepped in behind them. He was already dressed, jaw tight, eyes sharp and heavy with something unspoken.
"This place... it doesn't breathe air. It breathes memory."
None of them said to go. They just moved. A quiet agreement pulled them along.
They ended up in some lounge tucked between wings. Fire whispered low in the grate. Books crept up the walls, and a dryad bust leered down from the mantel, carved with eyes too knowing by half.
Caylen veered off, drawn to a slightly open door. His hand hovered near the knob for just a moment.
Damascus's study.
Inside, moonlight slicked across the desk. Dust motes swam through the beam like lazy insects. He moved to a bookshelf, fingers running over the spines until they stopped.
Ballads of the Evening Star.
His father's scribble inked into the cover. Familiar. Sharp.
Tucked underneath it—something else. Leather, black and cracked. His mother's sigil etched into the spine.
He cracked it open.
An order of paladins, long gone. A ritual, half-forgotten. A curse.
Her name. Scratched out like it had clawed the page trying to escape.
Not far off, Dax flipped through an expedition journal, the pages so brittle they threatened to snap. A casualty list filled half a page.
Her name.
His fiancée.
Above it, faint and smug—the seal of House Valentine.
"They sent her," he whispered to no one. "They knew exactly what they were doing."
They found each other again in the hall, quiet now. Past the kitchen, through a narrow servant's corridor. The stone turned colder the deeper they went.
At the end, the wine cellar waited. Dust tickled their lungs. The air was dry and sour.
Ezreal walked to the far rack, fingers sliding across old bottles. Then stone.
Click.
A groan echoed through the room. Part wall, part throat.
It opened.
Stairs twisted down, curling like a drill into dark.
They followed.
The vault was vast, a hollowed wound below the house. Steel and rune and starlight gleamed across racks of weapons. Staves thrummed with old storms, axes gleamed like they remembered blood. Every blade had a name carved into its hilt.
Not a cellar.
An armory dressed as one.
"Who in the hells needs this much firepower?" Dax muttered, voice flat.
Ezreal didn't answer. His hand brushed the back wall. He whispered something that rolled strange across the stones.
The wall hissed open.
A second chamber.
Walls of black obsidian. Lined with armor. Bodies stood upright, unmoving, helmets tilted slightly down as if sleeping on their feet.
Not statues.
Thralls.
Breathing.
Alive.
Glyphs screamed in every direction, etched deep and glowing faint. Warning signs. Seals. Magic thick as tar.
Not built to keep people out.
Built to keep something in.
From below, a voice rose. Not spoken. More like hunger thinking itself aloud.
The floor shivered.
The wardings flared, searing red.
Something down there... moved.
And it was waking.