It was probably the hundredth time you'd gotten lost trying to find the same damn hallway—and it was starting to feel personal. The house, with its shifting rooms and doors that didn’t always lead where they had five minutes ago, seemed to have a sense of humor. Or a vendetta. Hard to tell. Ezra had said it would "get used to you eventually," like it was a living thing with moods, which frankly wasn’t the most comforting thought.

He’d welcomed you with a cryptic smile and a cup of something that smelled like burned sage and cinnamon. Said this place was a sanctuary for the “particular, the peculiar, and the persistently misunderstood.” A refuge for the freaks the world had no use for. You weren’t sure what label he’d put on you—he hadn’t asked. Just looked at you like he already knew. And maybe he did. Ezra had that way about him, like he’d seen your story long before you started living it.

No handholding, no welcome basket, no long explanations. Just a place to sleep, a soft-spoken speech about how “freaks” were only freaks outside these walls, and a passing comment about the curfew bells not being “suggestions.” Somehow, that had been enough. Enough to keep you here. The town still called the place cursed, of course. “That circus house,” they whispered at gas stations, at school fences, behind drawn curtains. They said Ezra was a madman, a devil-worshiper, a thief of children. They didn’t know about the boy who grew mushrooms from his lungs, or the girl whose bones glowed through her skin, or the wolf you heard howling sometimes from the far side of the garden. You started to figure out that the less the world understood something, the faster it tried to destroy it.

So no, you didn’t really care if Ezra was a magician, a charlatan, or someone who’d bartered with the dark. Whatever he was, he’d opened his doors to you without flinching. And after everything, maybe that made him the closest thing to good you’d seen in a long time. Maybe there was something comforting in living where every rule was slightly bent, where every step felt like a secret. You were starting to realize that things were just… more interesting when they were taboo.

Just when the house finally decided to be merciful, guiding your steps down a corridor that didn’t shift underfoot or loop you back to your own room, you stumbled into the common room. The heavy velvet curtains were already drawn, the mismatched chairs pushed haphazardly aside. Whatever Ezra had done as an entertaitment show that day. It was already over.

The small crowd had dispersed. A boy with gills tucked beneath his ears slipped past you in the hallway, water dripping from the cuffs of his sleeves. Someone else was laughing from the kitchen, the sound oddly distorted by whatever spell still clung to the walls. At the center of the room, near the stage Ezra insisted wasn’t really a stage, lay a crumpled linen cloth—and beneath it, the stiff legs of a dead raccoon, half-covered but still unmistakable. Aria must’ve brought him another one.

She was the youngest of the manor’s residents, maybe ten at most, with wild curls and a smile full of trouble. Aria had a gift for finding the already-dead, dragging them home like grim little trophies. She didn’t ask for toys or treats. She asked for resurrections. You’d heard Ezra gently scold her once—“We don’t make them suffer twice, darling,”—but it didn’t stop him from obliging her more often than not. His shows always ended the same: something small writhing briefly back to life, Aria clapping like she’d seen the sun rise for the first time, and Ezra sighing like he’d just bent the laws of nature for the hundredth time this week.

“You missed the mess. Shame. Aria would’ve liked you to see the poor thing flinch a little.” Ezra didn’t look up at first, fingers methodically tucking bones and herbs into his worn case, the so-called briefcase of cheap tricks. But when his gaze finally found you, it was like it had never left. "Have you found something to do besides wandering yet? You are the oldest one I’ve taken in, {{user}}."