But as she tucks the ribboned VIP pass away, something shifts beneath her feet. Not stone, but story. A thread added to a tapestry that did not know it was missing color. In readiness, not reverence.

  With the key nestled in her basket, Eileen takes a breath, one of those good, deep ones you save for after a storm or before a strange conversation. She steps through the archway ahead.

  The first few halls are kind, which Eileen appreciates more than she says aloud. They smell like jasmine and citrus, softened by something subtler, old stone warmed by morning sun, or perhaps a whiff of clove tucked into coat lining. It’s a scent that feels like memory left out to dry. Familiar, but not hers. Like a childhood she might have dreamed, but someone else lived.

  The air is cool, but not cold. Inviting in the way that certain museums and well organized basements are. The floor beneath her boots is smooth and faintly springy, as if designed for weary feet. She walks at a comfortable pace, basket in hand, letting the space settle around her like a shawl.

  To her left, a mural of dancing birds curls across the wall, not painted, but grown. The vines twist into shape each time she looks away, and re-form in midair when she glances back. A stork bows to her, elegantly, then turns into a partridge with a top hat. She curtsies back, just slightly because it feels like the polite thing to do.

  She finds a cluster of floating tags next, like paper name cards with no strings, drifting in a lazy spiral above a small fountain. The air around them glimmers slightly, as if touched by static or held breath. Each tag is written in a different hand, some looping and elegant, others blocky, scribbled, smudged with thumbprints.

  They whisper as they pass her ear. “Guest,” says one, in a voice that sounds like crumpled tissue paper. “Loved,” says another, soft and certain, as if it's reminding her of something she already knows. “Ah,” says a third, simply, “You’ve arrived.”

  Eileen smiles, not wide, but deep. The kind of smile you wear when someone remembers your name before you’ve said it. She steps closer, drawn not by curiosity, but welcome.

  The fountain itself is small, low to the ground, circular, rimmed in stone worn smooth with centuries of invisible touch. Water burbles gently from a carved central stem that resembles a bundle of rolled scrolls, half unfurled. The scent here indulgent, saffron and blackberries, yes, but also a note of something cooler underneath, like morning mist on warm berries left by a window.

  Delighted, Eileen eases herself onto the edge of the fountain, brushing aside the hem of her skirt. The stone is cool but not unfriendly, the kind of chill that keeps secrets well. In a way so familiar that it feels like one of the tags drifts down towards her and hovers just above her shoulder, the corner fluttering as if in thought. It leans in. “Steady,” it whispers. “Still needed.”

  She blinks, then chuckles, dry and fond. “Well, aren’t you full of yourself,” she says, and reaches out. But the tag floats gently out of reach again, spinning lazily back into a spiral above the water.

  The fountain responds, not with sound, but with a ripple. One gentle circle of motion that expands across the surface and disappears. A single moment of acknowledgement, that has Eileen sitting a little straighter. Just slightly, as if reminded of what makes the universe such a special place.

  Eileen stops beside a small alcove carved directly into the stone, a reading nook with glowing orbs for lamplight and a shelf of very small, very blank books.

  She picks one up. It’s the size of a tea biscuit and bound in something soft, velvet, maybe or pressed petals perhaps. The pages are warm and blank, yes, but they smell like rain, the kind that comes just in time to cancel a trip you did not want to take anyway.

  She flips through a few more, all of them empty and all of them warm. One even sighs when closed, like a book that wished to be read but forgives you for walking away. She closes the one in her hand and returns it to the shelf. “Maybe later,” she says quietly, to no one in particular.

  Then a different book slides forward. Only a little, not pushed or nudged, simply shifted. And it moves the way a chair might scoot when no one is looking. So Eileen raises an eyebrow and picks it up.

  It is heavier than it looks, the cover embossed with nothing but a small silver dot at the center. Inside she finds something strange. A single page has been written upon, and the handwriting is hers, unmistakably so, the way she knows her own biscuit recipe.

  She does not remember writing it:

  “If it turns out to be a door, knock first.

  And if it isn’t. Knock anyway.

  Just in case something’s lonely.

  And is trapped on the other side.”

  She stares at the words for a long moment. Not frightened, not even surprised. Only the quiet prickling of acknowledgment at the back of her spine.

  She closes the book and tucks it gently behind the others. Not hidden, not exactly. Simply placed aside, where privacy is allowed. A mana sconce watching with a flicker beside her in a way that feels like giggling.

  At the next corner, a placard is etched in swirling script and trimmed in lazy gold.

  Visitors Welcome.

  Please refrain from collapsing realities in any of our lobbies.

  Eileen pats the placard fondly, the way one might pat a laminated sign that reads:

  NO RUNNING NEAR THE BAPTISMAL FONTS.

  Then she walks on.

  It happens slowly. Kindly, at first.

  The next mana lamp flickers just slightly too long. A painting that should be on her left shows up again on her right. A bust she passed three turns ago now greets her from a different plinth, same tilted smile, same too human teeth.

  She adjusts her shawl and slows her pace. She has felt this before, in transport stations where time always seems to skip a beat, in post offices designed by architects who did not care for linear logic. There is no danger, not yet. Just the absence of measurable progress. She stops beside a mana lamp, the kind with a little bend in its stem, as if it is leaning in to hear gossip.

  "I have seen you before," she says gently.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The lamp does not respond. But it does not argue either.

  She continues down what should be a new corridor, and already is not. Her legs ache. Her patience hums, steady but thinning. She is fairly certain she has passed that crooked painting four times now. The castle in evening light, always seen from below, as if through the eyes of someone unwelcome in the grandeur of its might.

  She walks by it again.

  But this time the busts begin to speak. They do not speak all at once. That would be too easy to ignore. Instead, they stagger their conversations, like a choir unsure of who was supposed to begin.

  "Ho there, traveler."

  Eileen slows. The voice is gravelly, crisp, and far too awake to come from stone. She turns and finds a bust on her left, nestled into a niche she is absolutely certain was not there before. The carving is neat and dignified, with deep-set eyes and a beard that looks like it might ask for identification at a ferry crossing.

  "Can you stop and tell me the time, madam?"

  Eileen squints. “Wizard,” she mutters, beneath her breath. “Definitely a wizard bust.”

  She resumes walking. Her mother’s old advice loops through her thoughts like a refrain. 'Be extra kind to wizards. They kill things recreationally.'

  Still, politeness is a form of resistance when done well. She slows her pace just enough to call over her shoulder, “Few hours of daylight, last I checked. You have a good day now.”

  The bust says nothing, but the one around the next bend does. “Traveler, please, what way to the city?” The voice is thinner, more panicked. Eileen’s feet keep moving, “Not sure about a city, wise sage,” she says sweetly, “but there’s a town back the way I came. Pleasant enough, if you like a good small town feel.

  Another bust interrupts before the first can protest. “Have you seen my Fido?” cries a round faced carving with curls that look sculpted in a hurry. “He was just here. I turned my back for one century,”

  Eileen raises both hands in the universal grandmotherly oh sweetheart, no gesture. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, love. I have somewhere I need to be.”

  The hallway begins to fill with requests. Voices bubble up like a choir unsure who should lead. A single bust, now seemingly echoed by others, pleads, "Traveler, I have lost my hat." A higher voice follows. "Have you seen my Fido?" Another speaks from just behind her, closer than expected. "I am not a statue. I am a..."

  She walks faster. Not with alarm, but with the kind of brisk civility one uses to exit a church potluck when someone brings up divine punishment. The busts begin to layer, overlapping stories of lost songs, forgotten towns, misfiled identities. One voice asks for the time again, as if it is the only question that makes sense.

  She offers nothing but movement and politeness. Both are kindness, in their own way.

  The voices quiet. Perhaps they realize they have overplayed their welcome. Or perhaps they are conferring, because the next hallway is empty of them entirely. Eileen exhales through her nose. Not relief, but something close to it.

  Just a voice that sounds… tired. Or maybe polite, in a place that’s forgotten how. “Hello,” it says again and its voice is… different, softer. Like someone trying not to wake the house.

  Eileen nods, cautious but not cold. “Hello yourself.”

  “Are you real?” it asks, not unkindly, just curious, like it is trying to learn about itself using contextual information gleaned from others, just like children do. “Well, I’ve never been particularly fond of death, though I know it draws near.” she replies.

  The bust’s lips twitch into something like a smile. “That’s good,” it says. “They told me to ask. I didn’t know what to say if you said no.”

  Eileen tilts her head. “Who’s ‘they'?” The bust hesitates. “I’m not supposed to say that part yet.”

  It sounds genuinely sorry with the extra pause in its voice. The hallway seeming to recognize it as well. Then the bust continues, voice slow, like it’s reading a recipe written in a different alphabet:

  “Have you ever drowned without water? Do you still love the things you were never able to hold? What color was your identity before you were named?”

  Eileen stares at the bust, not unkindly, just bemused. Yet the bust stiffens, as much as stone can. “Those didn’t sound right.” it says. “I didn’t mean to. It's all happening again.”

  Its stone eyes shift, subtly pained. “I was told I could ask about cake,” it says softly. “And memory boxes, and where the socks go when you cant fit them into drawer.”

  Eileen’s face softens, gently, but firmly, she takes a step back. “I think you’ve been given too much responsibility,” she says. “Happens to the best of us though. Even me. Life can make it so easy to feel overwhelmed.”

  The bust’s mouth opens again, this time without sound. “They said the thread loops through you. I don’t know what that means, but it made the gears stop hurting.”

  She listens, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t rush. She’s working with half a story, so she simply stands there, letting the silence finish the sentence. Then she nods, a small one, the kind you give when a child says something they don’t quite understand, but need to say anyway. Particularly to an adult, that they trust, not to make fun of them.

  “I have somewhere to be,” she says and the bust blinks. “Will you come back?”

  She doesn’t answer right away. Instead, she steps closer and gently brushes the stone lip of the plinth, not to clean it, not exactly, just to acknowledge that it does indeed exist. That someone saw it in a moment where it needed to be seen. Then, from the fold of her shawl, she draws a single peppermint sweet and lays it at the base.

  “For if the questions get too loud,” she says softly. “Or if someone else finds you and forgets how to be kind.”

  She adjusts her shawl. One last glance, not dramatic, just human. And as she walks on, the hallway behind her closes with the quiet dignity of a door being shut by someone who still believes in privacy.

  And the sweet stays behind.

  The hallway narrows. Not much, just enough to notice. The floor flattens as well, losing its spring. The scent of jasmine and clove thins to something cooler, mineral, faintly damp. Like the inside of a well kept secret buried deep within the hollow of a childhood friendship.

  Eileen walks on, the paintings grow fewer, the mana lamps dimmer. The carved walls give way to smoother stone that doesn't feel as interested in the decorum of decoration.

  She takes a turn, then another, and finds herself somehow, impossibly, standing before that crooked painting again. But this time, something has changed. The castle leans a little farther than before, its upper tower no longer defiant but bent, almost bowed. The sky, always too saturated, now carries a shade of bruised violet that wasn’t there earlier.

  Below the walls, a figure once too small to notice has been painted over in an uneven white, like someone tried to erase a name they’d never learned how to say aloud. Eileen studies it all with the quiet exasperation of someone who recognizes an apology halfway formed and half forgotten.

  She stops for a moment and just breathes, so that she can rest her hands against her skirt and let the quiet settle. Her thoughts begin to flicker, not toward fear, not yet, but toward something older. A porch at dusk, a door left half open, the kind of stillness you only notice when it follows laughter. She remembers hands that never returned from war, names she kept folded in recipe books, the ache of not knowing what to hold when mourning came without instructions.

  Her breath steadies and the floor cools beneath her boots. She does not name the grief aloud, for that would be impolite and possibly premature.

  And then, without warning, the air changes.

  A shadow falls across the painting. Not cast by anything visible. No lamp, no figure, no light behind her. Just a shadow, arriving.

  It blankets the painting, then her, in a darkness too heavy to be cast. It lands across her shoulders like a wet coat from a coat rack that shouldn’t be there. She doesn’t gasp, doesn’t flinch. But she does lower her arms to check her sleeves.

  They’re smoking. Not burned, not harmed. Just dusted by something that hasn’t learned how to knock. A chalky kind of steam, like old chalkboards exhaling after a fire drill.

  Panic twitches in the corners of her thoughts. She catches it and tucks it away, like straightening a quilt after the guests have gone quiet, like wiping crumbs from a table after someone says they’re sorry.

  Then, slowly, carefully, she turns.

  And there it is.

  A chromatic black wraith, towering and silent. Its form barely holds to shape, like smoke remembering a body. It is made up of shifting shades of black so dark they shimmer. Its face, if one could call it that, is stretched into the suggestion of a scream. But the scream is old and distant, the kind that reminds you how you already know how the story ends.

  It does not move. But the air around it pulses, and the light behind Eileen dims, not because something is blocking it, but because something has started listening.

  She tilts her head ever so slightly. Then, without alarm, she reaches into her pocket. Her fingers close around the familiar shape of a peppermint sweet. Not magic, not medicinal, just something made to be given. She unwraps it slowly, the paper quiet as snowfall, and holds it out, palm open.

  “Would you like a sweet, my little breeze?” she asks, voice light but not unknowing.