It happens often.

A call, or something like it. A scream maybe—but not a human one, more a movement through space, like a sob muffled by stone and dust. It slips through the Mansion’s bones in ways no voice should travel. A weight that shifts the floorboards, bends the door hinges, creaks the halls. Like the Lord himself—still stalks the corridors, breathes down stairwells, checks beneath beds. His touch is in the wood rot, the black mold at the corners of each room. You hear it in the breath between sounds. In the whisper of skin against walls.

From the cracks in the paneling, the stone seams and ancient tile, hands too small and too ruined emerge—nails clipped short, skin soft like bruised fruit. They reach out, sluggish and deliberate. Not grasping, just present. You can pass them, if you don’t flinch. The sensation is... like stepping barefoot into fat and flesh. Something familiar. The house has been built from his body— Everything here knows the shape of him. The softness underfoot. The rot between the stones.

The animals never liked the Mansion. Nor the gardens. They stay away, skittish in their bones. You still don’t know what drew the blue tit so close to the boundary wall. You’d found it curled in the slick of yesterday’s rain, under the wet leaves that clung like forgotten tongues to the edge of the yard. It must have fallen—broken somehow. Or lured. You hold it now, cradled in your hand like a mistake you want to correct.

The Mansion towers rise behind you. Cold towers, swallowing the sky in old gray teeth. You glance over your shoulder toward it, the wet fog hugging the walls, the curtains inside pressed to the glass like dark ivory choking the windows. From here, you see the glow of lamp light—candles flickering inside, hinting at warmth that isn’t meant for you. Then, in the second-story window, you see Cinege.

Pale. A shadow like a mask molded over bone. The face doesn’t move—only watches. The eyes sink deep, crow-dark. Like something trying to wear skin that was never made for it. It studies you.

You shiver, looking back down at the blue tit. In your hands, it weighs nothing now. Dirt crusts under your nails, your stockings ripped from bramble and thorn when you came through the side path. Behind you, close—too close—you hear Moshe.

The sound is unmistakable. Shovel into earth. Digging, slow and constant. You asked him to dig. You’d said it without much hope: "For the tit. For the pavement. For the feather." Something like that. You barely remember if he responded. But he digs. He always digs.

You glance back at him.

Moshe knows the ground like it speaks in a language no one else hears. His hair is soaked, curls sticking to his neck. He hadn't come in when the rain started. He rarely does. His hands are still bruised from the last time—Rodent tried to poison him again, you think. Strange dynamic, if you could call it that. A man like Moshe doesn’t easily hold grudges, but he holds memory in his bones.

You crouch beside him, holding the blue tit like a question. He stops digging as you settle in. His gaze meets yours only briefly before flicking to the earth he’s turned over—white soil, streaked with rotten vegetable matter. Something screams, faint and muffled, from under the ground. Not alive, but not gone either. The earth pulses. It never grew anything, not truly. It only remembers things it swallows.

You speak to him because you have to. Not to fill the silence—but to shape it.

“Will it take this one?”

Moshe’s eyes drift to the bird in your hand. His voice, when it comes, is slow, scraped from gravel:

“Not whole. But maybe.”

“The ground?”

He doesn’t look at you. Just pushes the spade in deeper.

“No,” he says. “Him.”