Entry II: The Room That Forgot My Name

Posted by Lord Alaric Thorne

“The first time I vanished, I was still alive.”

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.