Private House of Wolves

[Daniyah]

The road up to the house was choked with thornbrush and nightshade, but most weeds had second thoughts about even growing here. The path twisted through dead trees and silence. No birds. No insects. Animals refused to step closer than the tree line, and Daniyah didn’t blame them. Animals knew things. Better not to argue with a creature that still listened to the world proper.

The air itself felt like it had teeth. It was cold, damp, and bitter on the tongue. The last stretch had to be taken on foot. Daniyah dismounted, spitting something thick and black from the back of her throat. The ghost-smoke had been worse lately. Residue from the last binding still clung to her ribs like wet parchment.

The house rose out of the forest like a scab, leaning, crumbling, yet somehow alive. Warped timbers leaned under the weight of years and something worse. Slats of bleached wood hung loose like broken fingernails. The upper shattered window watched them like a lidless eye. Moss clung around the doorframe.

She cracked her neck to one side, then the other. Then she reached back and unslung the crossbow from its holder. Simple weapon, brutal lines. The stock was old ashwood bound in copper filigree, the symbols half-burnt and half-etched. A bolt clicked into place with a clean, mechanical sound that seemed so loud in the still air.

“This is it,” she muttered. “The locals call it the House of Wolves. Cute name, right? Supposedly, every tenant since has either fled mad or been found in pieces.” The double front doors stood ajar. It hadn’t been open earlier. Daniyah stepped forward, her boots crunching on gravel.

 

[Janus]

Janus didn't like the woods.

Dense and damp, it reminded him of home. The brushing of mossy bark against his arms as he weaved between the trees was too akin to the feel of rot, too reminiscent of a broken toy, cast aside and beyond salvage. Then there were the animals-- They never spoke to him, not even in passing. Only the chittering sounds of the night, far in the distance, the sounds of a gathering he could not attend.

He'd not have come were Daniyah not leading. Some feared the hunter, found her threatening and intimidating. Hogwash, the lot of it. She was woman, just as he was man. They couldn't look beyond the surface of armor, scars and scowl. She was fine enough company, and she liked his work. That was enough to convince him to join her in this latest trip to a place most detestable.

The house loomed ahead like a tumor threaded through the forest’s veins. The way it sat uninhabited, unwelcoming and unapproachable, drew Janus' curiosity most fiercely. A story formed in his head: visions vibrant of an ambitious architect looking out upon the trees and seeing a sprawling village in his mind. Using his hands, his tools, and erecting but a single home before his dreams faded into the bleak.

It didn’t belong. The forest recoiled around it. And Janus, despite himself, felt curiosity spark like a live wire.

"Lost dreams." His voice was quiet, gravelly, a thing kept for rare occasions. As he stepped forward, he pressed a gloved hand on the railing of the dilapidated porch, flakes of wood rubbing off against his leather-clad fingers. A dreamlike smile crossed his lips, head turning to Daniyah. "They're dangerous. Lonely. The lonely often lash out."

Janus would know as much.

From one of the many pouches at his belt, Janus scooped out a pinch of black powder. He blew gently across his palm, and a spark took--flaring to a weak, steady flame in his hand, no larger than a candle’s wick. It threw just enough glow to carve out a circle of light in the gloom.

"You can help them, I'm sure."

@Daniyah

 

[Daniyah]

The porch groaned beneath them like something exhaling its last breath. Daniyah kept her eyes locked on the yawning dark inside. The house was a ruin, yeah, but it still had that pull, like something under the floorboards was waiting for visitors to come inside and stay forever. The wind had died completely, trees weren’t making a sound anymore. The only thing heard was the sharp flick of Janus’s fingers and the soft hiss of flame as his little fire spell sparked to life.

“Lost dreams?” she echoed. When the fuck did Janus become a poet? She stood still, one foot on the warped threshold, fingers curled around the grip of her crossbow. “Nah. What’s in there isn’t dreaming. It is remembering.”

The lonely often lash out.
He wasn’t wrong.
And that applied to both the dead and the living.

"It wants us inside."

She stepped inside. The moment her boot passed over the threshold, the light changed. A sudden shift, like a veil dropped. The shadows went heavy, as if soaked in oil, pressing in against the walls. The small flame in his hand flared once and dimmed without going out.

“You feel that?” she said, casting a glance to Janus over her shoulder. Pressure drop. Static in the chest. "Like you’re being watched by something too old to blink.”

Then she moved forward, deeper into the house, her voice louder now, crossbow raised and aimed at the walls.“If something’s in here, now’s your chance. You wanna lash out!? Try it! See what happens...” Another step forward. The door slammed shut behind them with a gut-deep bang. Dust burst from the rafters. “That’s more like it,” she growled, cocking her head, listening.

From somewhere above them, a faint creak.
Step… step… step.
Too slow for rats. Too heavy for wood settling.

“Show yourself. Come on! she dares, voice bouncing off the empty walls. “You’ve had years to brood in here. Let’s see what you’ve been saving...!” The walls didn’t answer. She exhaled, but her breath came out as a fine mist. Too cold, too fast.

From the far end of the hallway, a door slammed shut.

Then, in the silence after, a whisper. Right by Janus ear.

It didn’t come from Daniyah.
It didn’t come from anything alive.

It hissed:

“Get out…”

 

[Janus]

"It wants us inside."

Of all the emotions and feelings that this forsaken shell of a homestead dredged up from the deepest pits of his soul, and there were many, Janus did not feel the invitation that Daniyah seemed to. He did not want to enter, did not wish to linger in the presence of these stale memories and dilapidated spirits for any longer than he truly must. But then, that was what set Daniyah apart from him. Her drive, her desire to seek out and vanquish.

He admired it, just as much as he feared it.

She didn't wait for him to answer her questions before she stepped over the threshold, crossing from the porch and into the entryway of the home, or what was left of it. Janus grimaced as he followed close behind, brow furrowed at the rotting wood now surrounding them on all sides, a mossy, musty, and moldy embrace of death and decay.

Paintings faded and corrupted by time and elements hung loose and crooked on the walls, broken glass crunched beneath their feet with every step, and the hall stretching forward seemed to swallow Daniyah's voice, regurgitating it into a distorted, disturbing echo.

Too much of home, indeed. And yet it beckoned him forward, far too eager to poke about the innards of such an ancient and terrible beast. Somewhere in the darkened distance a door swung shut, wood splintering with the impact like cracking bones. Janus drew a sharp breath, but one less of fear and more of excitement. They had come looking for echoes, but the echoes had found them.

They spoke as much in his ear.

"Anger and dread." He muttered, knowing the tone of the voice too well. The boy's eyes slid shut, and his head tilted in the direction of the bodiless whisper. "It suspects our motivations. Loathes the outcomes." That whatever unseen entity witnessed them had even given them the chance to leave peacefully suggested they would rather see them gone than dead. Possible they didn't like their chances against the Wraithbinder.

Janus didn't blame them. He stepped forward and held up that struggling fire in his palm, flickering and sputtering in the overpowering darkness that seeped from every wall of this place. His other palm rested on her shoulder, so that he did not lose her should the dark overcome their sight.

"Shall we?"

@Daniyah

 

[Daniyah]

She stared ahead at the long, crooked hall. The walls pulsed. Not visually, but she felt it. Like something buried behind them was breathing in a hateful rhythm. She could feel the malice in the walls. Not heat, hate. Old and pulsing like infection.

“Anger and dread. It suspects our motivations.”
“Loathes the outcomes.”
Of course it did.

From the top of the stairs came eight slow knocks. Her crossbow rose slightly, tracking the black maw of the upstairs hall. The bolt glinted dully, sickly blue in the glow of Janus’s flame. She felt his hand brush her shoulder. "Aye, we shall." She took the first steps on the stairs. The wood sagged under her weight, old beams groaning in protest. Climbing the stairs, they passed a crooked portrait that seemed to follow them with eyeless sockets of mildew and flaked oil.

"What... is this, boy? I wiiIIiLL noot haaAAve you… meddddlinnng… wiiith my hooOome… DoOo yoUuU… unDerSTAND meEeEE?"

The voice was drawn out, broken in the middle like something trying to mimic speech, wrong in tone, and almost sing-song at the end. Warping human language into something off. Shifting between pitches, stuttering in and out.

Temperature had plummeted. Her breath misted.

"Poking... holes… in my ceeeeeiiiling?" The voice stretched like it's barely holding back rage.

When she finally spoke, it was barely a whisper:
“You smell it yet?”

The air stank of rust and candle wax.
Old blood.
Sulfur.

“It’s not a ghost.”

 

[Janus]

The words scraped across Janus’ ears like rusted nails, and his flame sputtered violently at the sound. Not a draft, not hunger in the shadows—will. Something was shaping the dark. Shaping the voice. His chest tightened. Daniyah was right. That reek...too acrid, too heavy to be lingering death. He dragged a breath through his teeth, tasting the metallic tang at the back of his throat.

“Not a ghost,” Janus reluctantly concurred, his voice low, steady. “Not memory. Something still here.”

He shifted the flame in his hand, coaxing it into a longer tongue of fire that swayed in the stagnant air. The flicker threw the hall into brief relief—stairs bending under their weight, mold crawling thick on the walls, and that portrait, twisted into a grin by the light’s angle.

His grip on Daniyah’s shoulder pressed firmer, grounding himself more than anything. In these moments she was fearless, without waver. Janus hoped he could steal some of that for himself, the dread weighed on him. “Keep your bolt steady. It’s watching. Waiting for us to step wrong.”

Another knock. Slow. Measured. Directly above them this time.

Janus tilted his head up, eyes narrowing into the dark above. ”It sounds..." He muttered as let the fire grow hotter, his lips curling into something close to a smile despite the chill gnawing at his bones. “...Like my father. It wants us to bleed.”

@Daniyah

 

[Daniyah]

The portrait twisted again in the light, and for half a second, it looked like the painted mouth moved. Janus’s flame surged, lighting the mold-caked walls in a brief flash. The knock wasn’t just louder. It was closer. Just above them. Not mindless at all. Like it was marking time. Not a spirit clinging to its grief, not the fractured echo of some tragedy. No sorrow here. No longing. Just malice. Old and patient.

“It sounds… like my father.”
That’s what he said.
The hairs rose on her arms.

No.

The moment the words left his mouth, she felt it. The shift. Daniyah stopped breathing for a moment. Something in her chest went tight, not from fear exactly, but from a sickening understanding. She turned one shoulder toward him. Slowly. Carefully.

"Janus," she said softly. Her hand tightened around the crossbow. Janus was still Janus. But the pressure was building. She could feel it pressing down on him now. It was a psychic noose, and the demon was pulling the slack one whisper at a time. She adjusted her grip on the crossbow, it was pointed down between them. Just slightly. Daniyah reached up with one hand and brushed a thumb near his temple.

"It's using the voice of someone you knew. It’s trying to wear you out. Make you question what’s real. It can’t take possession of you yet. But it’s testing you. Watching where your soul's armor is thin.”

Because possession didn’t start with spinning heads and cascade vomiting and blasphemy. It started with a voice you knew. It started with recognition. It learned his memories. His fears. It knew what door to knock on.

And she had brought him here... Her stomach turned cold. She knew the risk. Never go alone, never bring someone soft. Never someone a entity can get inside. Her eyes didn’t leave him, but they softened in guilt.

It wants us to bleed.

The mold on the walls curled inward. The shadows near the ceiling deepened, refusing the light like oil repelling water. The air grew thick with the stifling stench of something ritual-born.

“Did you bring anything for demons? Something for binding? Holy iron? Bloodstones? A blessed bell?”

Something growled gutural in the dark corner next to the spiderwebs.

 

[Janus]

The voice rasped again, a cruel mockery wrapped in the timbre of his father. It tried to dig under his ribs, to drag him back into that small, cowering boy who had no say in his own fate. Janus’s throat locked.

For a heartbeat the flame in his palm shrank to a quivering ember. It was the same tone that had once barked orders at him, that had filled his boyhood nights with dread. His body remembered even if his mind screamed otherwise. Shoulders hunched. Jaw clenched. His grip on Daniyah’s arm was suddenly too tight.

It’s not him. It’s not him.

But the demon knew. It had plucked the one sound that could reduce him back into a child waiting for blows.

He wasn’t armored in faith, nor in runes or relics. He’d never been a knight or priest. But he had learned how to survive, piece by piece, in places where mercy wasn’t offered. He had jars. He had powders. He had his own brand of magic that he could coax from oil and salts.

Young though he was, Vulnerable too.

But he wasn't soft.

His jaw set. He extinguished the burning power in his hand (It wasn't doing much anyway), then pulled his satchel open with quick, deliberate hands. “No bells,” he admitted, voice taut but not broken. “Smoke, fire, and noise— I can make.”

Janus quickly drew out a squat clay vial, its wax seal already cracked from travel. Sulphur. Another—fine ground saltpeter. He worked as he spoke, sprinkling a measure into a small bowl.

“Not holy,” he said, voice wavering as he glanced at Daniyah, “But to hurt us, it must be real. If it's real... I’ll make it choke.”

The growl from the corner deepened, vibrating through the floorboards. Above, the scraping claws grew frantic, gouging at the ceiling as if it meant to claw its way down. Janus struck the rim of the bowl with a metal striker, and the mixture inside spat a violent spark. He gripped it tight, his knuckles white.

“Flash powder...” he muttered, as much to steel himself as to warn her as he passed the glimmering dust to her quickly. "Dip your bolts, then fire. Blind and stun the bastard..."

There was anger, venom in his last sentence. His own? Or the influence of that knocking evil, trying to direct him despite his refusal?

"Skewer it if you can."

@Daniyah

 

[Daniyah]

The floorboards groaned under their boots, each step a muffled scream of decaying wood. The temperature had changed as they climbed the stairs, from sulphur‑thick and acrid to thin and icy, like stepping into the breath of a crypt. She felt the pressure in the corridor change the moment Janus’ jaw set. Like a tightening behind her sternum. Told her everything she needed to know: the thing had shifted from watching to pressing. It had found the seam in him, and it was trying to widen it.

She felt Janus’s grip tighten on her, the way a drowning man might reach for driftwood. She let him anchor himself on solid flesh instead of the whispering that wanted to be his memory. "Don’t speak to it,” Daniyah told him, low and flat. “Not answers. Not apologies. If it gives you a voice you know, it’s bait."

“But to hurt us, it must be real. If it's real... I’ll make it choke.” She watched Janus’s fingers tremble on the bowl, but he worked fast, pouring, mixing, grinding. He’d done this before, Daniyah knew that he could mix this with his eyes blindfolded and one arm tied to his back.

“It’s real enough to ruin your life, but not like blood and bone."

Janus would soon enough learn they were not fighting a thing in the dark, they were fighting a will. She slid a couple of bolts from her quiver and ran them through the powder in his bowl, the mixture clinging to the iron tips like frost. Another knock reverberated from the far door. The hallway seemed to shrink around them with every step, as if the house itself were breathing. She raised her crossbow, scanning each warped doorframe, each hanging portrait, each splintered rafter for something, anything, that hummed with the wrong kind of power.

She’d been in places like this before. Places where something had been called and never sent back. "A demon unbound will roam." Daniyah kept her voice low, mostly because she did not want to miss any sounds. The demon would hear them not matter how low they spoke. Her eyes swept the blackened beams above them. "This one is tethered to this house. Look for a focus, a token, a bone, a vessel... " It was hidden somewhere within the walls like a heart in a body. Destroy that, and the rest would collapse. Hopefully, sometimes it was not that easy to destroy a demonic object.

"Keep your eyes open. Look for anything that doesn’t belong. Anything that looks… too clean, too new, too beautiful, too terrifying, or too old.”

The gutural whisper returned, curling like fog around their ears: You won’t find it.

Her grip on the crossbow tightened. “We’ll see about that.” The pale-haired hunter smiled a wolf’s smile, “What a nice day for an exorcism!” The corridor ahead looked like a throat. Doors leaned inward at impossible angles, warped under some slow, internal pressure. Black ash floated in the pale moonlight like snow.

 

[Janus]

Janus wanted it to be a physical thing. Something he could strike, choke, burn. Something with lungs to empty and a throat to silence. The thought that it might not be, that the horror whispering in his father’s voice could exist only in his mind, was far worse. His thoughts had always been his refuge. Now, even that sanctuary was trespassed.

This house didn’t help. Every plank and nail seemed alive with decay: the floorboards moaned beneath their weight, the walls pulsed with slow, damp breaths, and the hall stretched endlessly ahead, slick with shadow and rot. His vision warped with every flicker of light, each shape crawling at the corner of his eyes like a memory that refused to stay buried. He began to wonder if even his own sight could be trusted; if the rot had spread that far.

He was thankful for Daniyah's presence. This was not the first time she'd brought him along, and while he was not nearly as adept an adventurer as her, she knew he was not weak of will. His spirit was not so malleable, and if Janus doubted all else that lurked in this cursed demesne, he knew at least that he could trust in the presence of her armor against his palm, the heat from her living flesh that radiated through the metal. It wasn't comfort, but it was something. A light in the void.

“It’s real enough to ruin your life, but not like blood and bone."

Her words dragged him back from the edge. He turned to her, and in the thin light, managed a crooked, almost boyish smile, brief and brittle.

“Oh, that’s all?” His voice rasped, low and tight in his throat. “That voice has tried before, and failed.”

It was half a jest, half an oath. Daniyah might not have realized it, but she’d just handed him his spine again. His father had never broken him in life, why should some echo of that cruelty manage it now?

When the next knock came, slow, deliberate, and much too loud, Janus didn’t flinch. The fear still burned in him, but it was tempered now, forged into something sharp. He let his hand fall from her arm and stepped forward, toward the belly of the beast they'd willingly been swallowed by. The air thickened with a rancid sweetness, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath.

You weren't supposed to go outside, Janus.

Now you're sick again.

Come closer... let me fix you.

The words slithered through the dark, each syllable sinking claws into his chest. And then the sensations came, the real ones, the ones that shouldn’t be real at all. The phantom prick of a syringe in his arm. The burn of leather straps biting into skin. The dull shock of a boot striking his ribs. Every ghost of pain dragged from memory and reawakened in flesh.

Janus staggered once, fingers twitching at his side. His breath came shallow, uneven, but he didn’t stop.
“They’re not real,” he whispered, a mantra for himself, for Daniyah, for anyone listening. “You’re not real.” He kept walking anyway, beyond the moldy and mossed walls, the faded paintings and crumbling furniture, into the thickest part of the hall where the air turned heavy and no light could find the walls. Each step echoed, swallowed by the dark ahead.

And somewhere within that darkness, something breathed back.

It stood before him like an ebony portal into the realm of death itself. Janus hadn't seen it until he was mere inches away, the looming door that seemed to tower over his head, extending beyond the dimensions of house itself. A searing heat pulsed from within every few seconds, like the breath of an ogre against his flesh. Strange lights, dark hues that cast no relfection, leaked from underneath the hellish passage

"Daniyah..." he breathed, "This isn't just an old house."

@Daniyah

 

[Daniyah]

She came up beside Janus slowly, her crossbow leveled, though the weapon suddenly felt absurdly small against the thing looming ahead. The door was alive... or if not alive, then aware. Its surface rippled, glistened, like oil on water, and every few seconds a pulse of air rolled off it.

“What in all hells…” she murmured, the words barely escaping her lips. “It’s a gate.” Her heart kicked once, hard enough to hurt. Daniyah had seen plenty of nightmares wearing the skin of reality, ghosts whispering through walls, spirits chained to relics, demons gnawing at the edges of mortal sanity... but this…

She took a step back from the door, forcing air into her lungs. The symbols burned into the frame weren’t old warding marks; they were coordinates. Her hand tightened on the crossbow. What in all the gods’ names had they stumbled into?

Her eyes wandered back to Janus. He looked like a man trying to see the bottom of the ocean. Daniyah grabbed his arm and just held him, like she was afraid he would open the door and wander inside. Dust rained from the ceiling. She didn’t have to look to know that whatever was on the other side was testing the boundary.

“This is bigger than us,” she said, voice low but steady. “We’re not sealing this door. Not with powder. Not with salt. We need a Doorless.” It wasn’t a nickname used lightly. Only a handful of people could ever stitch such a thing as this shut. Those were mages who dealt with the borders between worlds, people who could close rifts... most of them were half-insane by the time they were done with their work.

There weren’t many who dealt in such things. Aethermancers. Riftbinders. Planeswroughts. Truth was, Daniyah couldn’t name a single weaver who’d ever mastered the art of thresholds. Those who tried seldom came back whole... if they came back at all.

Daniyah took another step back, dragging Janus with her, keeping her eyes on the thing that was not a door. They should mark the place and warn the Denmaster. “We need to get o-" The rest never left her mouth. Invisible claws hooked under her ribs, tearing the breath out of her as she was flung backward.

The wall came at Daniyah faster than her mind could register. Splintered wood bit into her shoulder and ribs as she crashed through, shards embedding themselves in her leather armor. Dust and rotten plaster rained down. She hit the floor on the other side, breath knocked from her, coughing through blood and dust. The air was thick with a foamy, choking mix of rot and corroded magic that clung to her throat.

Something soft begged through the dark. Don’t leave me.