Dearest Reader
Sylum believes I am asleep.
He carried me to my chamber as though I were something breakable and beloved, and for a brief, shimmering moment I allowed myself to rest within that illusion.
He sat at my bedside until the trembling left my limbs, pressed a cool cloth to my brow, murmured soft assurances meant to soothe a frightened child.
He asked me once—only once—what I had seen.
I told him fatigue had unstrung my senses. That his aunt’s sharp tongue had merely caught me at a vulnerable moment.
He accepted it.
Or pretended to.
I do not know which frightens me more.
When he finally slipped from my room, believing (or hoping) that I slept, I reached under my mattress—not for my diary, but for you. For the page upon which I might anchor myself before the world slips again.
Because if I do not lay the truth bare somewhere—if I do not confess it to someone—then I fear it will unravel, strand by strand, until even I cannot distinguish what is real from what the house demands I see.
Reader, you must understand this:
I know precisely how I sound.
Every whisper in this manor already strains toward the word madness, eager to tether it to my name as it was once tethered to my mother’s. A legacy I never asked to inherit, yet one that clings to me.
But listen to me—truly listen—for I have no one else.
I am not mad.
Something or someone twisted that room around me.
Before the visions came, I felt it. The air tightening, the fire pressing too hot against my skin, the light sharpening unnaturally as though the walls themselves were drawing breath.
And then the tea.
God preserve me—the tea.
I still see it when I close my eyes: the trembling surface, the slow roiling darkening into something thick and vile. Not a sudden nightmare, not a blink-born distortion, but a deliberate corruption—as though it wished to be witnessed.
Flies do not rise from tea.
They do not crawl from sweetness like omens dripping with honeyed rot.
I know this.
I am not ignorant.
I am not a child telling ghost stories to amuse herself.
And Isolde…
Reader, her face changed.
Not with the softness of illusion nor the blur of tricked light, but with a grotesque, sliding defiance of nature. Her skin seemed to slough from her bones, her features warping, splitting, melting—her mouth speaking without moving, her expression peeling away to reveal something horrid beneath.
And I sat motionless as stone. Trapped inside my own body, a prisoner behind my eyes, begging myself to flee and finding no strength to obey.
That helplessness…
That is what has carved its mark deepest.
They would call this illness.
They would say the curse in my blood has ripened at last.
But if this were mere madness, would it have loosened its grip so neatly? Would the world have snapped back into its familiar shape the moment others arrived? Would Poe—merciless, uncanny Poe—have erupted into violence the very breath after the vision shattered?
Yes, Poe. My dreadful, devoted sentinel.
He saw something.
He knows something.
I am certain he attacked her not from mischief, but defense.
So now I ask myself:
Where did the illusion end and the truth begin?
Was it exhaustion? Fear? Nervousness?
Or was something placed before me intentionally, crafted with care to unmake my sanity thread by thread?
Yes… yes, I feel it even now.
A presence. A pressure.
As though the house itself presses its hand upon the back of my neck.
Someone here wants me to believe I am losing my mind.
Someone wants my fear.
Someone wants me to be silent.
I did not tell Sylum.
I could not bear the fleeting shadow that crossed his expression—the one that promises sympathy while whispering doubt beneath it.
If I am losing my mind, then madness has come with remarkable precision.
And if I am not—
Then a far darker truth prowls these halls.
Either way, I must stand before it.
I must heed Poe and explore this mystery.
I must peel back these shadows and see what bleeds beneath them.
Please, dear reader, you must believe me. You must…
—L