The air thickened as Gareth stepped deeper into the house. The floorboards groaned beneath his boots, old wood bending like brittle bones under his weight. Dust motes danced in the slices of amber moonlight bleeding through the cracked windows, and the scent of ancient decay clung to the walls like cobwebs. It was not the smell of ordinary rot, but something fouler like scorched marrow and old wax, burned offerings to gods that never answered.
A narrow hallway led him forward, walled on both sides by rotting tapestries. Their colors had long faded, but shadowy patterns remained depictions of horned figures crowned in fire, veiled women casting incense over chained silhouettes, and geometric spirals that twisted the eye when stared at too long. Each image seemed to crawl toward some great center the heart of the house.
He paused before a mural partly veiled by time. His gloved hand brushed across it, clearing years of grime. The texture beneath his fingertips pulsed just once and he flinched. Hidden in the folds of the paint were black sigils, like the serpentine scripts from the Clavicula Obscura, symbols of summoning and binding. Some had been scratched out violently, others covered with crude ash marks.
This place was not merely abandoned. It had been locked.
The symbols drew him further. Not just as a scholar or a practitioner, but as a grieving man clawing toward something darker than death answers. Secrets.
A door loomed ahead, heavier than the rest, flanked by carvings etched deep into the stone frame. The surface pulsed with ancient energy, and Gareth could feel it his presence was unraveling whatever spell had been woven into the wood and mortar. Each step closer brought a shift in pressure, like descending beneath a cathedral's crypt where the air remembers too much.
He placed his hand on the doorknob. It was ice.
The moment he turned it, the walls around him sighed. Not wind. A sound like something released.
Inside, the chamber was circular and windowless. Candle holders lined the walls, some still cradling wax long melted into blackened fingers. In the center of the room was a sigil drawn in something darker than ink, still visible beneath the dust.
It was the Seal of Stygian: a forbidden mark only whispered in apocryphal texts. The walls here were too thick, as if hiding another structure within. The house was built around something or to contain it.
Gareth stepped forward, crouched beside the seal. He whispered to it.
"Voco qui latet..."
The flame of a long-dead candle sparked to life behind him.
The floor groaned beneath Gareth’s boots, a groan not just of age, but of protest. It echoed faintly through the hollow ribs of the house like a breath from something sleeping beneath. The air grew still. Thick. As if dust had conspired with silence to entomb whatever lay ahead.
He stepped deeper into the hallway, where moonlight lanced through broken slats in the boarded windows, slicing the darkness into jagged patterns across the walls. The house was strangely alive not with rodents or rot, but with presence. A watchful quiet. Something listened.
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The corridor led to a room whose door had long given up standing guard. It hung ajar, swollen from dampness, its iron hinges bleeding rust down the grain like veins. Gareth pushed it open with the tip of his staff, cautious. The room beyond greeted him with a stench a mingling of old incense, burnt marrow, and forgotten blood.
Tapestries drooped from the stone walls, their once-grand depictions lost to mold and smoke. He moved closer. Beneath layers of decay, scenes began to reveal themselves: hooded figures in a circle, their arms raised to a blackened sun; a beast with seven heads rising from what looked like a sea of eyes; a man torn in half, his soul ascending and descending simultaneously.
Gareth’s breath caught as his eyes landed on a symbol beneath one tapestry’s edge. He peeled it back slowly. There, carved into the stone, were sigils crude, ancient, and still warm to the touch. Not drawn. Carved. Into stone. Their edges shimmered faintly as though inked with something still living.
The Clavicula Obscura pulsed in his satchel, the leather tight around it. It had brought him here. Or perhaps… the house had called to the book.
He traced one of the sigils circular, with spiraling interlocks and a central glyph resembling a closed eye. As his finger brushed the cold groove, he felt something jolt inside him. Not pain. Not quite. A memory not his own.
A child screaming in Latin. Salt being poured into her mouth. A priest with no shadow. A door opening beneath the altar.
He recoiled, but the room didn’t let go. The walls moaned. Behind one of them, the stone felt too thick like it wasn’t wall at all, but a door.
He placed his palm flat against it.
And the sigils began to glow.
Faint at first. Like dying embers kissed awake. Then brighter like coals stirring in a forgotten hearth. The tapestry nearest to him twitched. Not from breeze there was none. But as if reacting to breath. From the wall.
Gareth backed away slowly, eyes never leaving the carvings.
Suddenly a low, groaning hum. The sigils bled light across the floor in spidering lines, forming a crude circle that encircled Gareth entirely. The house shifted. No... the enchantment shifted.
He realized then: his presence hadn’t just awoken a memory. It had disturbed a seal.
And the seal was older than the house itself.