The Sleeper in the Wood
There is a silence that lives beneath the oldest houses. It isn't the quiet of an empty room. It's the dense, velvet silence of soil, of rot, of things buried and forgotten. Ravenswood Manor held that kind of silence in its bones.
In a sub-chamber that hadn't seen a candle flame for two hundred years, it lay: a coffin of blackwood, longer and narrower than any modern design. The carvings on its lid were not decorative. They were a language of containment whorls that trapped, lines that bound, angles that barred. The symbols seemed to shift if you stared too long in the faintest light, not moving, but threatening to move.
Inside, he did not dream. Dreaming was for the living, for those whose hearts beat a rhythm of hours and days. He existed in a state of pure absence, a void wrapped in ancient velvet and the faint, lingering scent of dried roses and cold earth.
He was waiting.
Not for time. time meant nothing. He was waiting for a key. The key was not metal. It was not a word. It was a taste.
The taste of a specific life, blooming in the dark.