The house no longer smelled of food, or warmth, or anything remotely human.
It reeked of rot and sweat, the way a corpse festers in silence before someone finally remembers it exists.
The parents were ghosts of themselves—
....though ghosts would have been kinder...
The mother wandered the streets at night, her body not her own anymore, but a coin tossed into filthy hands.
She came home with strangers' scents clinging to her like parasites, her laughter hollow.
Rehearsed.
The father was no better. still shackled to Joslyne's phantom strings, a marionette dancing on the whims of poison.
His veins screamed of need, his eyes glazed, as though the world outside her shadow had ceased to exist.
But it was the children who bore the weight of hell...
Samuel's arms were a battlefield.
Red lines like railroads carved into flesh, a desperate attempt to outrun the storm in his head.
His friends didn't help. no, they shoved him deeper, holding open the same abyss he had glimpsed that night. And each time, he swore it would be the last.
EACH TIME, the blade whispered otherwise.
Clara was gone. Not dead, but something worse.
Eight years old, yet her eyes stared like those of a ninety-year-old who had seen kingdoms burn.
She sat still, unmoving, as if someone had pulled the plug on her soul.
When her teacher discovered the truth, instead of rescue, he only became another set of hands reaching where they should never go.
Another shadow whispering poison into her ears.
No screams came from her anymore. Only silence.
Silence so heavy....It made the walls cry instead.
The home itself seemed to decay alongside them.
Wallpaper peeled like dead skin.
The floorboards groaned like coffins shifting underground. The kitchen—once the heart of a family—was now nothing but broken plates and empty bottles.
And yet… despite all this ruin, the house lived.
It pulsed.
It fed.
The family didn't realize it, but the more they sank, the more the house itself seemed to breathe deeper.
Their despair was its air. Their suffering, its meat. And soon…
"It would want more..."