The winter air clawed through the naked branches outside the Evermore estate, the trees groaning beneath the relentless weight of ice and wind.
Snow battered the windows like silent fists, and the skies above the forest hung heavy with slate-colored clouds, promising more of the same relentless cold.
Inside, the house creaked under winter's touch. The halls whispered with every gust, as if the walls themselves held secrets too old and too fragile to speak aloud.
The warmth of the hearth in the main rooms did not reach the far corner of the house where a small, quiet room lay preserved in unnatural stillness.
Odette Evermore stood at the threshold, her gloved hand resting lightly against the doorframe, though she could not say why she had wandered there. The room—tucked neatly away behind a forgotten corridor—had not been entered in years as what she knew, and yet something had pulled her here that night, as the snow began to fall more aggressively with a whispering vengeance.
