The Witness's Mark
MatureYou saw the dead lord's ghost—now his curse makes you the heir, and everyone wants you dead.
As a village mapmaker, you've charted every inch of the realm—except the forbidden estate where you witnessed a ghost walking the halls. Now the curse brands you as its next heir, and every noble who covets the haunted inheritance wants you gone. To unsee what you saw, you must destroy the proof, but the ghost has other plans. Do you burn the evidence and escape, or uncover the truth behind the curse before the realm's hunters close in? A tale of survival, hidden identity, and a haunted house that refuses to let you go.
The story begins
The ink was still wet on your map when the wind changed, carrying the smell of rot and old stone. You'd charted the forbidden boundary a hundred times from the village edge, but tonight you'd crossed it, drawn by a light flickering in Blackmere's uppermost tower—a window that had been dark for a century.
You crouched behind a fallen angel statue, its wings cracked and moss-eaten, and watched the manor's skeletal silhouette against a bruised sky. The iron gate hung open, rusted teeth gaping. Your hand strayed to the compass at your belt, the one Old Bram had given you, its needle spinning wild this close to the estate.
A footstep crunched on gravel, impossibly close.
You turned, and there he was—not ten paces away, half-visible through the drifting fog. A man in a high-collared coat, his face pale as candlewax, his eyes fixed on you with the terrible patience of something that had waited decades for exactly this moment.
"You see me," Lord Alaric Vane said, his voice like paper crumbling. "Then you are bound."
Fire erupted across your forearm. You looked down, and a mark was burning into your skin—an interlocked V and serpent, glowing white-hot before fading to a scar that would never heal.
What happens next is up to you.
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