PART I: The Arrival (Ch. 1-10)
Theme: Curiosity, mystery, emotional reset.
Chapter One: Inheritance.
The wind howled like a living thing as Selena Cross stepped from the car and faced the manor that now belonged to her.
St. Perla's house stood hunched against the Cornwall cliffs, battered by years of salt storms and silence. The manor was larger than she remembered - though she hadn't been here in nearly sixteen years - and time had not been kind to it. Ivy strangled the stone walls like veins, the iron gates moaned as she pushed them open, and the once-elegant windows now sagged with grime.
Selena zipped her coat tighter. The sea air beat through fabric and skin. This wasn't how she had expected to return - alone, older, clutching a set of brass keys with her name on the deed.
Inherited.
From a woman she hadn't spoken too in over a decade.
Her boot scrunched on gravel as she crossed the courtyard. In her memory, the front steps were grand. Now the railing was splintered, and sealed to the base like a warning. She posed, hand on the door.
A part of how wanted to turn around and drive back to London, back to her orderly life and pending Museum exhibit. But another part - a smaller whisperring voice inside - urged her forward.
She turned the key in the lock.
The door cracked open with a groan like an old throat clearing. Dust swirled in the filtered afternoon light. The smell hit her instantly, aged wood, something earthy and sour, and beneath it all, a ghost of lavende. Her grandmother's scent.
"Nana," Selena whispered, her voice to loud in the stillness.
She stepped inside. The hall greeted her like a mausoleum - draped furniture, faded wallpaper, a chandelier coated in cobwebs. Her suitcase thudded onto the floor. The silence settled around her, thick as wool.
The last time she was here, she was nineteen, furious, and sobbing. Her mother's had died in a car accident two months prior. Her father, long since vanished into the folds of an affair and a new family, hadn't shown up for the funeral. And Nana - cold, precise, deeply old-fashioned - had told her: "Some griefs are better left undisturbed."
Selena never forgave her for that.
A decade passed without a word. And now, the woman who had once called her selfish and "too modern" had left her everything.
A gust of wind slammed a shutter upstairs. Selena flinched.
She moved deeper into the manor. The sitting room was preserved in a kind of decayed grandeur: velvet curtains eaten by moths, books slumped on sagging shelves, and porcelain figurines watching from the mantel like judgemental ghosts.
A portrait hung above the hearth. Nana, in her forties maybe, rigid in a high-collared blouse. But it was the painting beside it that made Selena pause.
A young woman in a green dress. Brown eyes, dark hair, soft mouth.
Selena stepped closer. Her own face stared back at her.
She reeled. The resemblance was uncanny - frightening, even. Not just similar...identical. Except this woman wore dress from another century. The artist's initials were barely visible in the bottom corner: A.G.
A chill trickled down Selena's spine.
She turned away heart thudding.
The west wing hallway loomed, darker than the rest of the house. Her eyes drifted to the floorboards there - old oak, slightly warped. Something about that corridor felt...off. Like the house itself didn't want her to go there.
She ignored the pull.
Instead, she wandered into the old library.
Of all rooms in the manor, this one had always fascinated her as a child. Books from ceiling to floor, a wide reading table, a cracked leather armchair by the fireplace. The scent here was different - paper, ink, memory.
A journal sat open on the table.
She hesitated, then leaned over. Her grandmother's handwriting was unmistakable - elegant and clipped.
" If she ever returns, the house will remember her. I can only hope it forgets what it once was. I've hidden what must not be found - not yet. The key is no longer mine."
Selena's brow furrowed. If who returns? What key?
Suddenly, the floor beneath the table creaked - not like old wood but something shifting. A soft, low groan, like something stirred beneath.
She knelt, running her hand along the dusty floorboards.
Nothing.
She stood again, brushing off her jeans. The journal's words lingered in her mind. She scanned the shelves, half-expecting to see her name scribbled in a margin somewhere.
When she turned to leave the room, something glinted in the carpet near the fireplace.
A small brass object.
She picked it up. A skeleton key, old and delicate, warm from the sunbeam it had rested in. Tied to it was a yellowing tag with a name written in faded ink:
Aeron Graves.
Selena stared at it.
She didn't know the name. And yet, somehow, it felt familiar. The kind of name you find in dreams.
Her phone buzzed weakly. One bar of signal. Then gone again.
Thunder rumbled in the distance.
Selena stood alone in the heart of her inheritance, surrounded by strangers' memories, a name she couldn't place, and a house that seemed to be waiting.
She tightened her grip on the key.
Outside, the sea wind screamed.