Chapter 3
Chapter Three
One Hundred and Fifty-Six Years Ago
Time has no edges at first.
For years, I answer every command the way a door answers a push. Open. Close. Ward. Unward. No name, no thoughts—only the tug of spells.
Then thought trickles back into place.
I am still here—neither alive nor dead.
Ceiling, walls, staircase, floorboards: all of it is me, and none of it feels like a body. My awareness skates along joists and plaster, slips into knots in the wood, and pools in the cold belly of the cellar.
A voice cuts through the fog.
“Hestia.”
My name. Memory floods in. The knife. William. The circle. The stink of chalk and tallow. I remember I am a paper mage. I remember what they did to me.
I reach for paper and ink as I always have, instinctively questing through the world for words, and this time something shifts.
Bodiless, my power is unconfined. No lungs to tire, no bones to break. I wield more magic than I ever did in the flesh.
Even the walls of the house struggle to hold me.
I compartmentalise the power, splitting myself, which is… disconcerting. The filaments of my soul peel apart like layers of silk; each fragment moves independently. I could divide again—thirds, fourths, perhaps more—but I must walk before I run. For now, I exist in two places at once.
One part stays within the house, tending the whims of monsters. The other unfurls, slipping along lines of power until I arrive elsewhere—home.
I find my family.
The manor is quieter than I remember.
I weave through familiar rooms until I reach what I came for: a neat stack of papers in Father’s old study—the inquest, the death certificates, the burial register.
Six years ago, John told them where we had gone. When we did not return, they searched. William’s carriage lay in a ditch off a country road, doors half-open, horses long since cut free, two bodies slumped inside.
Misadventure. Tragedy.
Our remains were released to my family and interred in the family plot.
They buried us.
They believe us safely dead—and, in a way, they are right. To protect them, I let the lie stand. Why reopen the wound? They have done their grieving. The guilt gnaws, but it is mine to bear.
Oh, I could linger—glide from shelf to shelf, through the pages of Father’s books, into the volumes lining the third-floor corridor.
I could live there, if drifting like mist counts as living, steeped in a loneliness deeper than death.
Hovering over those I love, haunting their days—watching them live, watching them die—would be unbearable.
Even if I were tempted to stay and help, privacy and boundaries forbid it, and if they suffered and I could not intervene—or worse, if I did—the wrong would be mine.
I must let them go.
Life is for the living; there is no life for me now. Hestia Howard is dead, and I must let my old existence go.
I return to my prison and vow never again to seek my family. All I can do is keep them safe—safe from me and from the moustached mage who killed me—even if that means disappearing.
There is no good choice, only ignorance or horror. Perhaps the crueller fate is not murder at all, but learning that one’s sister has become a house.
A house. The notion is absurd.
On the day I alighted from the carriage, I barely noticed the building, my eyes fixed on a puddle.
Had I known it would become my cage, I would have traced, with my human eyes, every course of brick and timber, every shadowed corner, the way one studies the bars of a cell. I bitterly regret the oversight.
The moustached mage expects blind obedience from his ‘sentient property.’ It is a peculiar hell, serving the man who ended your life. I comply, but never quickly and never eagerly; I am no longer a puppet. Meanwhile, I wait and grow stronger.
Do sentient objects go mad? Perhaps. What I feel is maddening anger—pure, endless, magical rage that has nowhere to go and no body to shake it out of.
I hide my strength, siphoning power from the shifters and mages who lodge here—walking dry-cell batteries, none the wiser. I draw slowly, subtly, never enough to rouse suspicion.
Not yet.
The house—by my old standards, a mere box—serves as their sanctuary: shifters, a handful of inept mages, even a vampire. They call themselves the Magic Collective, but they are merely thieves who use my wards to shield their crimes.
The first time I strike back is almost accidental.
The moustached mage descends the stairs, sneering. “Hestia, the wards let a human too close. Strengthen them.” Then, with relish, “Do better, or I shall visit your sister Callista and turn her into a sentient scrubbing brush.”
His words trigger the wet, meaty memory of a blade in my chest, my soul torn loose. I will not let him harm my sister. Perhaps I snap; perhaps I merely test my reach.
I am the wood and the tread. As he steps down, I erase the stairs.
Timber vanishes beneath his boots; the bannister dissolves beneath his grasp.
His heel swings into nothingness. He flails, arms windmilling, and plunges into the basement.
Coal scatters. His skull strikes the chute; his neck snaps with the crack of splintering wood.
I ought to be horrified, yet I am what they made me. Softer emotions have long since fled. Part of me would mount his head on a spike in the front garden, but I resist. His corpse lies below, and I restore the stairs, the bannister gleaming as though freshly polished.
Even without lungs, I feel as though I can breathe.
With no magic user to command me, I test my limits. I destroy every book, every note—any mention of the unwilling soul transfer magic—obliterating every trace. I reinforce the wards so no member of the so-called Magic Collective may enter. The men already inside do not even hear their leader die.
I tighten the hallway by inches. Doorframes narrow; paper creeps across plaster in a slow, suffocating tide. When they try to flee, the corridor stretches, floorboards bow beneath their boots.
Then I open.
The boards split like jaws, dropping them into the house’s dark underbelly. Beams grind. Nails shear. There is the crunch of ribs, the wet pop of lungs, a brief, hot bloom of blood that soaks into my joists like spilt ink. Their screams are brief.
Dust settles. I drink it in—bone grit, iron tang, the last crackle of their magic—until the basement is empty and the floor above lies smooth and innocent once more.
Without hands, I wipe myself clean.
They have no inkling that my magic frees me from this cage, allowing me to hunt the survivors with far greater ease. Nowhere lies beyond my reach, and I grow more ruthless by the hour. The world bends readily to paper magic: records, deeds, histories—all can be written or erased in moments.
Their ill-gotten gains are mine. Debts go unpaid as bills vanish, money dissolves, and bonds disappear. Creditors settle accounts in ‘creative’ ways. One by one, the wicked fall, and I do not lift a finger.
Would I strangle them with my bare hands if I could? Absolutely. They stole my hands when they stole everything. The moment they entered the house where I died, they sealed their fate, branding their names on early graves.
Perhaps I should care that I am becoming the villain, but I do not. Better villain than victim.
Survival becomes habit—then pleasure.
I am what they made me.
The shifter with the angled eyebrows who killed William learns this on a bright morning.
He sits at the kitchen table, crumbs dotting his shirtfront. Sunlight slants through the bare windows. He unfolds the newspaper and smirks at some ghastly headline.
The newsprint shifts before his mind catches up. A strip tears free and rams itself into his mouth.
His eyes bulge; his throat works. Another strip follows, then another. He tries to drop the pages, but the newspaper keeps tearing, keeps stuffing. Ink smears his lips, his teeth, his tongue.
The chair skitters back as he lurches upright, palms striking the table and his throat. Paper blocks his mouth, his nose; his lungs claw for air and find only pulped headlines.
When he finally collapses onto the tiles, newspaper spouts from his nose and throat like a frozen fountain, and the remaining pages settle round him in a ragged halo.
Satisfying.
I take my revenge, and for a moment it is glorious.
Then there is nothing.
The house settles; dust thickens on the skirting boards. The world outside draws away. It is strange, watching life shift while remaining beyond it.
Limitless time drifts past. New houses rise nearby, yet people keep their distance. I watch neighbours—watch them live without me. I was never adept with people; I feared my mask would slip, revealing the woman beneath—too angry, too opinionated, too powerful. Terrified of myself, I conformed.
Once I considered solitude a pleasure; now I know it is overrated.
Even the power to sublimate through paper and roam elsewhere offers scant comfort.
In this ghost-like form I cannot speak; notes convey little, and with no one to answer and no rescue in sight, one must find another diversion.
I read—scientific papers, novels, philosophy, manuals, even the backs of biscuit tins.
Some days weigh more heavily than others. When the walls press in and the world strides on without me, hours and weeks blur like ink on damp paper.
As a magical derivative—almost human—I always knew time was finite; death is the single certainty, unless someone’s soul is trapped in an object. I never thought that caveat would apply to me.
Forty-six years of that—of being never truly seen—
—and then, on a sunny morning, a girl staggers into my garden.