The days after Lillian's first visit to the mortuary felt like a shift in the fabric of Ethan’s world.

Before, his life had been routine, measured, wrapped in the silence of the dead. The embalming room had been his sanctuary, the mortuary his monastery. The world of the living moved outside of him distant, uninviting. But now, it felt as if something had stepped into that stillness, disrupting its perfect order.

And that something was Lillian.

She returned the very next evening, and the one after that.

She never knocked, never called ahead. She simply arrived, as if drawn by an invisible thread, stepping into his quiet world like she had always belonged there.

At first, Ethan resisted.

Her presence unsettled him,not because she was unwelcome, but because she made something stir in him. Something unfamiliar. Something he wasn’t ready to name.

She spoke of death like it was art, a story written in stillness and preservation. And she looked at him not with fear, but with understanding.

No one had ever understood him before.

Not like this.

A Strange Courtship

They fell into an unusual rhythm.

Lillian would arrive in the evenings, always unannounced, her presence slipping into the mortuary like a whispered secret. Sometimes, she brought her sketchbook, curling up in the corner of the embalming room, sketching in charcoal while he worked.

Other nights, she simply watched.

Her gaze followed him as he prepared bodies for burial, her gold-flecked eyes deep with curiosity rather than revulsion.

She asked questions,not the kind that made him feel like a curiosity, but the kind that made him feel seen.

“Do you ever wonder about them?” she asked one night, sitting on the edge of a steel table, her dress pooling around her legs like ink.

Ethan glanced up from his work. “Wonder what?”

Lillian’s fingers traced the surface of the table absentmindedly. Her touch was slow, deliberate, as if she could feel something beneath the metal.

“Who they were. What they loved. If they had regrets.”

Ethan hesitated. His hands, steady from years of practice, faltered for just a moment over the stitching of the corpse’s wrist.

He had spent his life treating the dead with quiet reverence, but he had never thought to wonder about them as people. Not like this

He had always been drawn to their stillness ttheir silence.

“No,” he admitted. “I don’t.”

Lillian smiled then, small but knowing.

She didn’t seem surprised.

That was the thing about Lillian, she never tried to change him. She simply pulled him closer, gently unraveling the spaces between them.

The First Touch

It happened on a night when the air was thick with rain, the mortuary dimly lit by the weak glow of flickering bulbs.

Lillian was seated across from him, sketchbook in her lap, eyes flicking between him and the page.

She had been sketching him for weeks.

At first, he had ignored it. But tonight, something made him move.

He stepped forward, stopping just beside her, close enough to feel the faint heat of her presence.

 She didn’t flinch.

He looked down at the sketchbook.

She had drawn him in exquisite detail, every sharp angle of his face, the cut of his jaw beneath the dim light, the way his hair fell just 

slightly out of place when he was lost in thought.

But it wasn’t just a portrait.

She had captured something else. Something deeper.

In the drawing, his expression was softer than he had ever seen it.

Not just quiet, but… vulnerable.

Ethan swallowed. He didn’t recognize the man she had drawn, but something about it made his 

chest tighten.

Slowly, she lifted her gaze, meeting his. Her eyes glowed in the low light, deep brown tinged with gold, watching him with something unreadable.

“Is this how you see me?” he murmured.

Lillian didn’t look away.

“Yes.”

His fingers curled into his palms. Something shifted in the air between thema weight, an understanding, something that felt like a secret only they shared.

And then, slowly, she reached out.

Her fingertips brushed against his wrist, a whisper of contact, featherlight, hesitant, but deliberate.

Ethan stiffened. He had spent his life untouched, distant, removed. But this, this was different.

It was warmth pressing into cold. A pulse against silence.

His breath caught.

Lillian’s fingers lingered for just a second longer before she pulled away, her expression unreadable.

But the space she left burned.

Where the Dead Do Not Rest

Something was changing.

Ethan felt it in the way the air seemed heavier in the mortuary, the way the whispers of the dead 

grew stronger in Lillian’s presence.

She didn’t hear them. Not like he did. But she felt them.

“The air is different here,” she murmured one evening, standing in front of a closed casket, her fingers trailing along the polished wood.

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Ethan’s throat tightened.

“What do you mean?”

Lillian tilted her head, curls shifting over her shoulder. Her lips parted slightly, her breath slowing as if listening to something just beyond reach.

“It feels… awake.”

A chill spread through Ethan’s spine.

The dead did not wake. Not in this world.

And yet, since Lillian had arrived, the mortuary no longer felt entirely still.

Something stirred beneath the surface.

Something waited.

The Blood Moon Calls

It was Lillian who spoke of the ritual first.

She brought the book one evening, old and worn, its leather cover cracked with age.

Ethan had seen many books on death, embalming, on decomposition, on the science of what lay beyond life. But this was different.

The pages smelled of time itself.

As he ran his fingers over the brittle parchment, the air in the room felt heavier, as if the book had a pulse of its own.

Lillian’s voice was quiet, reverent.

“There’s a ritual,” she murmured. “One performed under the Blood Moon. A ritual to bind a soul beyond death.”

Ethan’s breath slowed.

For weeks,

 he had felt the shift in the air, the way the dead seemed closer, pressing at the edges of his world.

Now, standing here, with Lillian watching him in the dim glow of the mortuary, her presence coiling around him like something inevitable, he realized that he had never had a choice.

This had always been leading here.

To her.

To the ritual.

To the night when the dead would no longer stay buried.

And so, when she whispered, “Meet me in the graveyard tomorrow night,” Ethan did not say no.

He only watched her leave, her shadow slipping through the door, vanishing into the rain-drenched night.

And as she disappeared, the whispers of the dead followed her.

The night was alive.

The wind moaned through the skeletal trees, a restless sigh that sent the leaves into a slow, trembling dance. Overhead, the clouds churned, thick and heavy, dragging their shadows across the pale face of the moon. But the moon was different tonight.

It was bleeding.

A deep, haunting crimson stained the sky, casting its eerie glow over the world below. The graveyard behind the mortuary stretched out like an ancient kingdom of the forgotten, its tombstones jagged and uneven, jutting from the earth like broken teeth. The rain from earlier had soaked the ground, leaving the scent of damp stone and churned soil hanging thick in the air.

Ethan stood at the edge of the cemetery, the iron gate behind him swaying slightly on its rusted hinges. The air around him pulsed, thick and weighted, as if the night itself was pressing inward, watching. He had seen many strange things in his life, but this… this was something different.

And Lillian was at the center of it.

She stood a few feet away, her figure bathed in the moon’s crimson glow. Her black dress clung to her body, rippling slightly in the cold wind, the fabric moving as if it breathed. Her wild curls, no longer damp, had come alive in the night air, shifting and twisting like ink spilled into water.

She was holding something in her hands. A small, leather-bound book, its cover cracked with age, its spine worn and frayed.

Ethan’s throat tightened.

“Where did you get that?” His voice was steady, but his chest felt heavy, weighed down by something unspoken.

Lillian lifted her gaze, and in the glow of the Blood Moon, her eyes burned—deep brown, flecked with gold, but now tinged with something darker, something ancient.

“I’ve always had it,” she murmured.

A gust of wind howled through the graveyard, rattling the branches above. The trees seemed to groan in protest, their gnarled limbs creaking as if trying to pull away from whatever was unfolding beneath them. The tombstones stood still, but Ethan swore he could feel them watching, waiting.

Lillian took a slow step forward.

The earth beneath her boots shivered, the wet grass parting as if unwilling to touch her. She opened the book, her fingers running over the brittle pages with something that looked too much like reverence.

“I read about it once,” she said softly. Her voice carried through the night like a lullaby sung in the dark, gentle, but laced with something that did not belong to the living. “A ritual performed under the Blood Moon. A ritual to bind a soul beyond death.”

Ethan’s jaw clenched. The air around them felt… off. The wind had stilled, the graveyard falling into an unnatural silence.

Even the insects had gone quiet.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he warned, stepping closer.

Lillian smiled. It was slow, deliberate, curling at the edges like smoke rising from dying embers.

“Yes, I do.”

She reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a small, silver knife. The blade caught the crimson glow of the moon, drinking its color, reflecting it back like liquid fire.

Ethan’s breath hitched.

She pressed the tip against the delicate skin of her palm. A single drop of blood welled up, dark and glistening, rolling down her wrist like a ruby stolen from the sky. It fell onto the open pages of the book, sinking into the parchment, spreading like ink through ancient words.

The moment it touched the page, the wind returned with a vengeance. It howled around them, tearing through the graveyard like a furious whisper, rattling the iron gate behind Ethan.

The world trembled.

The trees groaned louder, their branches twisting, writhing, reaching toward the sky as if grasping for something unseen. The ground beneath Ethan’s feet pulsed, as though the very earth had taken a breath.

And then

The whispers began.

Low at first. Distant. A murmur that coiled through the night like a serpent stirring from its slumber. But it grew.

The voices.

Thousands of them.

They whispered from the graves, from the spaces between the tombstones, from the shadows that stretched too long beneath the bloodstained sky.

Ethan’s stomach tightened.

“Lillian”

She lifted her chin, her eyes closing for the briefest moment. Her lips parted, and for the first time, she looked truly at peace.

Then, slowly, she turned to him.

“This is where it begins,” she whispered.

And beneath the glow of the bleeding moon, the dead stirred