For a long while, Cain's mansion was much colder and far quieter than it had ever been before.
Such things tended to happen when a once vibrant and commanding lord suddenly became nothing more than a shadow of himself.
At first, Cain spent weeks searching for Violet—his lover, his anchor, the one being that had made the weight of existence bearable. Those weeks stretched into months, each passing day eroding what little hope remained. His searches yielded nothing. Not a trace. Not a whisper. Not even the faintest magical residue that suggested she still existed within reach.
Uva, the mansion's resident witch, was threatened repeatedly—cornered, screamed at, and ordered to use spells to find Violet. Spells meant to track, to locate, to divine. But every attempt failed so completely that the magic itself might as well have been meaningless.
