“If you were torn from me,” he whispered, “I could not bear what the earth had to offer.”

Her breath hitched, a soft tremor in the candlelit gloom. The fire crackled, spitting sparks. Outside, a storm combed the cliffs with salt and fury. But within the crumbling walls of Gloaming Manor, the tempest of their hearts made the wind seem tame.

Evangeline had arrived two months prior, summoned by a letter from a guardian she had never met. Her uncle had died suddenly; something about a fever, something about locked doors.

And now, the estate was hers, the heir to a legacy steeped in secrets. But it was he—the mysterious caretaker, Lucien—that had truly claimed her.

Lucien had eyes like dying stars and moved as if haunted. He had lived at Gloaming since childhood, he told her, though no records showed he was ever born. He knew the manor’s every corridor and spoke to its portraits like old friends. It was said he never left the cliffs.

At first, Evangeline kept her distance, suspicious of his somber air. But the house had a way of unraveling her, drawing her nearer to the only soul who seemed to understand the chill behind its velvet curtains.

They began to walk the grounds together. She’d catch him staring at the horizon with a sorrow so immense it cracked her. He spoke of love in riddles, of memories he shouldn’t have known; moments from her childhood he described in startling detail.

“I dreamed you before I met you,” he told her once, brushing a strand of hair from her cheek. “Or perhaps I remembered you from a life where we died together.”

She laughed nervously. He did not.

Then came the vision. In the north tower, in a mirror veiled with dust, she saw herself; not as she was now, but robed in white and weeping. Beside her, Lucien, his face bloodless. It passed in seconds, but it left her shaking.

When she confronted him, he confessed: he was bound to the manor; not living, not dead. The last heir had made a bargain with something beneath the cliffs, a promise sealed with blood and desire.

Lucien had loved her once, long ago, and in that love, he had refused to let her die. The house had granted his wish. It would always bring her back. But only to him.

“It is a cruel mercy,” he said. “You return. You forget. I remain.”

She touched his face, pale and trembling. “Then let me remember. Let me stay.”

“But if you stay, you cannot leave. If you stay, you are no longer of this world.”

The storm howled. The windows screamed. “I would rather haunt this house beside you,” she said, “than walk the earth alone.”

And so, the manor claimed her too.

To this day, visitors to Gloaming Manor say the library door opens by itself. They speak of shadows that dance in the ballroom and the faint smell of roses blooming out of season. Some say they hear laughter echoing from the tower when the moon is full.

Two lovers, bound by love stronger than death, live on—not alive, not gone—forever in the house that remembers.

The End