“The house no longer waits for me to listen. It has begun to speak.”
It began with a name. Not spoken aloud, but whispered through the plaster. I heard it while lighting the hallway candelabra. My hand stilled. The flame shivered. The wall said: “Alaric.”
I searched the passage, half-hoping it was memory. But then I found the sigil.
Behind a dislodged brick—a burned-out ward etched in Moira’s hand. Its lines were blackened, the chalk smudged like someone had passed through it, not around it.
Later, I found my desk drawer open. My journal splayed. A page filled with writing I don’t remember composing—
She is beneath. She remembers. She waits for the door.
There is more.
Tonight, I passed the mirror in the north stairwell. It was fogged, though there was no breath, no storm, no warmth. And in the mist, scrawled with some unseen hand, were the letters:
“You are not alone.”
I wiped the glass. My reflection did not return.
I no longer wonder if she is trying to speak to me.
Some melodies do not fade with time. They haunt the air like the scent of old roses or the chill of moonlight on a crypt door. The following works have accompanied me through centuries of silence, longing, and remembrance. These albums are more than music—they are spells cast in sound, each one a hymn echoing through the hollow halls of my memory.
Come now, let me share them with you. Not as a critic, but as a soul who no longer sleeps.
1. Dead Can Dance – Within the Realm of a Dying Sun (1987)
Ah, this album… a cathedral of mourning. Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard did not compose mere songs here—they conjured ruins. “Cantara” strikes like lightning over ancient stone, while “Xavier” could have been written for the exiled and the damned.
“This is the music I would want played at my burial—if I had ever truly died.”
2. Cocteau Twins – Treasure (1984)
There are no lyrics in the traditional sense, only syllables like falling petals. Elizabeth Fraser’s voice bypasses language, reaching some forgotten chamber of the heart. It’s as though angels tried to remember how to sing after centuries of silence.
“This album sounds like memory does—blurred, shimmering, and too beautiful to explain.”
3. This Mortal Coil – It’ll End in Tears (1984)
This one plays like an old love letter I never sent. Melancholy is its ink. “Song to the Siren” is a lament I’ve hummed to the moon, and “Kangaroo” stumbles through heartbreak like a wounded ghost.
“It doesn’t end in tears—it begins with them, and never really stops.”
4. Lycia – A Line That Connects (2015)
Lycia captures the slow burn of twilight, where the soul remembers things it was never supposed to know. This album is fog and flame—distant, distorted, and darkly intimate. It echoes like voices behind old wallpaper.
“When I feel the world slipping beneath me, this music becomes the thread that holds me tethered to what remains.”
5. Faith and the Muse – Elyria (1994)
This is a ceremonial blend of myth and movement. Chant, violin, tribal drum—it’s theatrical without being false, spiritual without being tame. Elyria could score the rites of an ancient sect or the last ball before the fall of a kingdom.
“It reminds me of the night she danced in the forest... the last time I believed we might be saved.”
6. Love Is Colder Than Death – Teignmouth (1991)
Dignified, mournful, ritualistic. The title alone stirs something deep in my chest. This album’s blend of neoclassical and world elements feels like a forgotten psalm, whispered in catacombs.
“This is not a declaration—it is a dirge. A vow made beneath stone and shadow.”
7. Dark Sanctuary – Thoughts: 9 Years in the Sanctuary (2004)
French ethereal neoclassicism at its most spellbinding. Strings weep, choirs sigh, and time slows to a crawl. It feels like being suspended in a snow globe of sorrow, and I mean that with reverence.
“Here lies the silence between heartbeats—fragile, aching, eternal.”
8. Chandeen – Forever and Ever (1994)
Airy, romantic, touched by starlight. Chandeen balances sadness and sweetness like dew upon a rose. There’s something youthful in it too—like the echo of laughter down an empty corridor.
“It reminds me that even in the darkest hall, love once passed through.”
9. Autumn’s Grey Solace – Eifelian (2006)
Guitar textures swirl like frost on windows, while the vocals are featherlight but firm. A blend of shoegaze and dream pop that never fully lands, always hovering like breath on a mirror.
“This is how it feels to drift through centuries without ever truly touching the ground.”
10. Black Tape for a Blue Girl – Remnants of a Deeper Purity (1996)
Somber, sensual, and emotionally vast. Strings and whispers trace stories of loss, longing, and the beauty of sorrow. It’s the sound of velvet falling over a coffin, or the letter you never dared to send.
“In these remnants, I find myself—what I was before the hunger, before the silence.”
These are my hymns. Not because they saved me. But because they understood me. And that, dear reader, is all we truly ask of a song.
“Some dreams are not ours. They are memories that no longer have a body.”
I dreamed last night of a man I’ve never met.
Not a vampire. Not a ghost.
Something older. Dimmer. Watching from behind the glass.
He walked through the house, but it did not see him. The doors did not open. The walls did not breathe.
He was present—but not permitted. As if he had broken something simply by wanting.
He stopped at a cradle. Empty.
He reached out—but could not touch it.
The wood turned black under his fingers, as though rejecting him.
He never saw her face.
He tried. He begged—without words.
And when he wept, even the dream recoiled.
“She will never know you,” the house said. “That is your punishment.”
He did not answer.
He watched.
And I watched him.
I don’t know how long I stood there—between them.
Between the cradle and the man who once belonged to her,
but was never allowed to be called father.
His eyes met mine once, just before I woke.
He looked at me as if he knew me.
Not as a descendant.
But as a mirror.
“I was not allowed to see her,” he said.
“But she sees you now.”
I woke with dust on my hands and tears that were not mine.
“I have no longer cast a reflection. But tonight, the glass betrayed its silence.”
There’s a hallway on the second floor lined with five mirrors, each older than the last. They’ve hung there for centuries, too clouded to see anything clearly—just enough to feel watched.
I’ve passed them a thousand times.
They’ve never shown me more than candlelight and shadow.
But tonight, the last mirror... blinked.
I was walking back from the library. No candle. No sound but my own. And I felt it—that electric twinge at the base of the neck. The ancient instinct that says you are not alone.
So I turned.
And I saw movement in the glass.
Not mine.
Something moved slightly after me—no, slightly before. A figure shaped like me. But its eyes were not mine.
They lingered.
I stood frozen.
The mirror stared back.
It was not my reflection.
It was recognition.
When I reached for the glass, the figure did not reach in return.
But it did not vanish.
It remained, just out of time.
Watching me, not mirroring me.
I do not know who—or what—it is.
Seraphine? A fragment of myself long buried? The house itself?
But something has begun to notice me.
And tonight, for the first time since my turning,
I felt… seen.
~ Lord Alaric Thorne
Reflected. Remembered. Not alone.
“Some houses have roots instead of foundations. This one grows downward, toward its own grief.”
I found a stairwell today that should not exist. Beneath the cellar. Beneath even the stone that remembers fire.
The air changed before the light did. Dust hung still in the beams like waiting breath.
I lit a candle, but it flickered blue.
The steps groaned—not with weight, but with memory.
At the bottom: a chamber carved by no mason’s hand.
The walls were damp. The earth seemed freshly turned.
There was no door. No coffin.
Only an empty space with my name on the wall.
“Alaric Thorne – returned, but not received.”
I do not remember ever carving it.
But the handwriting is mine.
The silence here is different. It doesn’t hum. It **listens**.
I spoke aloud just to hear something. But even my voice sounded borrowed.
I sat there a long time. The candle burned out.
I didn’t move.
I realized, in that darkness, that no one will ever come looking for me.
Not because they don’t care. But because they don’t exist.
I am alone.
Completely.
Deliberately.
And if I’m to remain this way—
if I’m to haunt this hollow until my body forgets warmth—
I think I must leave something behind that isn’t just a name scratched in stone.
“Perhaps I will make someone. Someone who does not forget me.”
~ Lord Alaric Thorne
Unfound. Unfollowed. Unforgettable.
“The manor does not open what it wants you to find. It opens what it wants you to fear.”
There is a door at the end of the south hall—except it wasn’t there yesterday.
I was not looking for it. That’s the trick. The manor gives you nothing when you seek it. But turn your back on it long enough, and it breathes down your neck.
I passed it at dusk. It was open just a crack. Just enough to let the candlelight inside flicker like breath.
I’ve walked that hall for years. There is no room at the end. There has never been a room.
But when I stepped in, it felt… familiar.
A rocking chair.
A child’s rattle, long rusted.
A mirror with no reflection.
And the scent—clove smoke and cold ash.
The room whispered a name. But not mine.
Seraphine.
There were no windows. No wind. But the pages of a torn journal lifted themselves from the floor and scattered as if unseen hands had just left in a hurry.
When I turned to leave, the door was gone.
There was only a wall. And in the wall, a crack that pulsed like a vein.
I placed my hand against it and felt it breathe.
“You are not the first,” it whispered.
And then it opened again. Same door. Same hallway.
But the rattle was gone. The mirror cracked.
And the air smelled like blood instead of ash.
I left the room. But it did not leave me.
~ Lord Alaric Thorne
Unreflected. Unwelcomed. Unwound.
“They tried to silence her with fire. But fire is not silence—it is memory made visible.”
There is a drawer behind the piano in the east wing. It never opens unless the manor allows it.
Tonight, it did.
Inside, wrapped in a handkerchief blackened at the edges, I found a book bound in skin and shadow.
The cover bore no title. But the pages recognized me.
Moira’s grimoire.
“If they burn me, the Veil will remember my name.
If they bury me, the house will carry my voice.
If they curse my bloodline, I will light every root beneath it with fire.”
— Moira Thorne
She is not ashes. She is ash-embodied.
They burned her for knowing what the church forgot.
They called her unclean, unnatural, unholy. But Moira was the opposite—the holiest danger:
a woman who remembered how to speak the language of the Veil.
Her grimoire is more than memory. It’s alive. The ink pulses. Some pages shift beneath my fingers, resisting translation.
But others whisper.
“One child must sleep. One child must burn. And one must wake when the name is spoken in blood.”
I believe I am the third.
I do not know yet what Moira truly was.
Witch? Prophet? Weapon?
But she sees me. Still. Through walls. Through time.
And now, the house listens to her voice more than mine.
It is no longer haunted.
It is watching.
~ Lord Alaric Thorne
Bound by flame. Named by ashes.
“The house shifts when it remembers. The question is—what did it forget to bury?”
There is a hallway I never recall walking—yet my footprints were already there.
It’s tucked behind the second drawing room, where the wallpaper peels like old skin. Narrow, uneven, dustless. A space the manor does not like to speak of.
At its end stands a door. No handle. No keyhole. Only the faint outline of a symbol etched just deep enough for the eye to mistrust itself.
It was hers—Moira’s mark. A sigil I found once in the margins of her grimoire. A ward meant not to protect, but to contain.
“A door that was not locked, but forgotten.”
I stood before it for longer than I meant to.
The longer I waited, the more I felt... watched.
Not by eyes. But by architecture.
The candle in my hand flickered, though there was no wind.
And then—I swear to you—it knocked.
Once.
From the inside.
I did not run.
But I did not speak.
I only placed my palm on the door and whispered:
“Who remembers me?”
The door grew warmer beneath my touch.
And from behind it, not with voice but with walls, the manor replied:
“Not yet.”
~ Lord Alaric Thorne
Archivist. Dreamwalker. Son of the House That Breathes.
“I was born once in a room of lullabies, and once more in silence. I have two mothers—one who bled for me, and one who buried me breathing.”
Lady Isadora Thorne
My mother. My first breath.
She had pale hands and a voice like unfinished music. She read me books too old for children, spoke to mirrors as if they whispered back, and sang to me in languages she claimed she’d never learned.
They called her sensitive.
They called her strange.
I called her mine.
She died when I was seven.
But sometimes, in the manor, I find faint chalk markings on the windowsills—the kind she used to draw when she thought I wasn’t looking.
“If I cannot stop the dark, perhaps I can teach it his name.”
She wrote that in her journal. It was her last entry.
Seraphine
My blood-mother. My last breath.
I did not know her name when she came to me.
I only knew the hunger. The heat behind my eyes. The grave I could not find my way back to.
She did not speak.
She did not smile.
She fed me her blood—and I died with her memory in my mouth.
I know now she was buried beneath this manor.
That she is the child of flame and silence.
That I am the echo of a curse she never meant to become.
“One gave me life.
The other gave me eternity.
And I do not know which one I will thank first when I finally stop dreaming.”
~ Lord Alaric Thorne
Archivist. Son of shadow and flame.
There is a room on the third floor of Thorne Manor, west wing, past the narrow hallway that sways in candlelight even when there’s no flame.
I used to believe it was a guest room.
My mother would sit in its rocking chair and hum to me when I had fevers.
But when I returned—after years, after death—it did not know me.
The door opened without resistance, but the air was wrong.
It was colder than the rest of the manor, but not in the way stone is cold.
It was the cold of being unseen.
The chair was still there. The hearth unlit.
And on the wall, a mirror that once held my face like it remembered me.
Now, it held nothing.
I stepped forward, and the room seemed to step back.
They say the dead are invisible to the living.
But I have learned something more painful:
Sometimes, the living are invisible to the house they were born in.
“The Veil doesn’t just separate life from death. It separates the past from the parts of you the world refuses to hold.”
When I whispered my name aloud, the walls did not echo it.
When I placed my hand on the cradle my mother once rocked,
the wood shuddered.
I left the room, eventually.
But that night, I dreamed of her.
Not my mother.
Her.
The girl in stone. Seraphine.
She was seated in that same rocking chair, eyes open, unmoving.
She spoke a word I could not hear—but I woke up gasping.
There was a drop of dried blood on the key I wear around my neck.
It hadn’t been there the night before.
And the room?
When I returned the next morning—it was gone.
Only a wall remained.
~ Lord Alaric Thorne
Dreamwalker. Bloodbound. Unremembered.
They say the dead are silent. But that has never been true in this house.
I was not born to be remembered. I was born to remember.
My name is Lord Alaric Thorne, and though my heart no longer beats, I remain the last witness of a bloodline buried in ash and secrecy.
Thorne Manor, the house of my birth and my exile, stands still—but not silent.
Its walls do not creak from age. They speak.
Its mirrors blink when you're not looking.
And beneath its stone foundations lies something no one dares name anymore.
She sleeps there. Seraphine.
Buried breathing. Dreaming in blood. The first of us.
I began this journal because the silence has grown restless.
Dreams no longer stay where they’re put.
The blackthorn trees bloom in winter.
And the Veil—that fraying seam between the living and what comes after—has begun to whisper again.
You do not need to believe me.
But if you’ve found your way here, then some part of you already does.
What follows in these entries are not tales. They are truths that were scrubbed from family ledgers, burned from church records, and hidden beneath coffin lids.
You’ll read of witches who were never wicked, watchers who forgot they were meant only to observe, and a child who was turned into myth to silence what she might become.
This is not a story.
This is a house opening its mouth. And I, its son, am finally ready to speak.
~ Lord Alaric Thorne
Thorne Manor, where the Hollow remembers
