The minivan smelled faintly of coffee, and snacks.
They had been on the road, for which feel like eternity.
Isolde leaned her head against the cool glass, watching the landscape of Romania devour the last traces of modernity. Hours ago, the world had been a bustling, friendly green. Now, it was a charcoal study in mist.
"Seriously, Isolde, are you sure this is the right road?" Leo, their team's pragmatic research lead, peered over the GPS unit clamped to the dashboard. His voice held the familiar, stressed cadence of a New Yorker lost in the wilderness.
"The legend says 'the forgotten pass, where the pines weep over stone.' I think we're exactly where we should be," Isolde replied, pushing back a stray wave of dark hair. She tightened the scarf around her neck, but the chill she felt wasn't from the air.
The cold that began to seep into her bones brought with it a familiar, sharp spike of defiance. Two weeks ago, in her parents' Upper East Side apartment, her mother's voice had been barely concealed panic.
"This doesn't makes sense, Isolde. You're chasing a fantasy. Throwing away your master's program for a ghost story in the middle of nowhere. It's not a research project, it's pure madness!"
Her father, always the silent partner in condemnation, had only offered a clipped, professional warning: "No reputable journal will touch this, darling. Stick to the Renaissance. It's safer."
Isolde had felt the heat rise in her chest, that familiar, scalding mix of anger and hurt that they couldn't see the validity, the raw structural narrative, in this pursuit.
Her thesis wasn't just about ancient architecture, it was about the forgotten era of a fallen kingdom, the story encoded in the stone walls of Aethelred.
Her entire academic life, the late nights at the university archives, the meticulous study of obscure medieval texts was dedicated to proving that these so-called legends were history, and that the emotional weight of a place could leave an indelible mark.
This trip was her declaration of independence from their predictable expectations.
"We're fine, Leo," she said, her voice firmer this time. "We have the LiDAR, the thermal cameras, and Ben to document our inevitable hypothermia."
Ben, their historian and documentarian, chuckled softly from the back. "I have flares, iodine tablets, and a very large journal. We're ready for the inevitable discovery of both academic validation and historical doom."
They were a team of four art history graduate students from NYU, here for a thesis project that had somehow ballooned from a study of Byzantine influence into an archaeological hunt for a ghost story.
Their target the legendary, five-hundred-year-old Castle Aethelred, supposedly the site of an ancient tragedy and now a near-mythical ruin in the Carpathian foothills. Maya, their technical expert, bundled up in a brightly colored ski jacket, mumbled something about hostile road conditions, but Isolde barely heard her.
Leo slowed the van to a crawl. The paved road had given way entirely to a track choked with gnarled roots and moss-covered stones. The air was silent save for the dripping of moisture from the tall, skeletal trees.
"Okay, according to the topographical map, the ridge should be right there," Leo pointed, his flashlight beam slicing through the gloom toward a massive, sloping curtain of rock.
Isolde's breath hitched. She didn't need the map. She felt it, a profound, visceral pull that had been guiding her since they crossed the border. It wasn't the excitement of discovery, it was the suffocating weight of history,
It was everything her parents feared, and everything she desperately craved.
Suddenly, the pines thinned.
Standing sentinel over the valley, clinging to the highest, most jagged peak, was the castle.
Aethelred....
Blackened stone rose into broken towers, vast and impossibly vertical. It was too huge, and desolate, too perfectly preserved in its ruinous state to feel merely abandoned.
The architecture spoke not of defensive strength, but of profound, eternal isolation. Even from this distance, Isolde could feel its presence, a dense palpable wrongness that made the hair on her arms stand up.
"Holy… Aurelius," Maya whispered, using the rumored name of the dead prince, which had become their team's code word for anything impressively ancient or terrifying.
"Five centuries," Leo breathed, utterly dropping his pragmatic façade. "Five hundred years of winter."
Isolde stepped out of the van and let the chilling
mountain air buffet her. She ignored the mud, the cold, and the rising panic in her teammates' eyes. The castle was magnificent, terrifying, and utterly magnetic.
It was exactly as she had dreamed it, down to the single, massive, broken window in the highest tower, which looked like the vacant eye of a dead giant staring out across the kingdom he commanded.
Aurelius...Isolde whispered
They were here. The art project had begun.
The anger that had fueled her journey finally dissipated, replaced by a deep, terrifying certainty.
Now, they just had to figure out how to survive the night before they could even attempt to enter the obsidian heart of the legend.
She returned to the van, and they drove off.
The grandeur of the castle sighting had been replaced by a lingering dread. They drove for the village they planned to spend the night.