A soft grin touched Anya's lips, then faded just as quickly. She moved her head slowly from side to side, silver strands catching the light. "This place gives what is needed," came her voice, calm and low. Always did."
Each morning, fresh outfits waited inside the wardrobe - dark, sturdy pieces left behind like secrets. Clothes arrived without explanation, stitched from thick cloth, shaped by forgotten styles. Historia guessed them from a time just after Victoria, before Edward settled into reign. Skirts dragged low, necklines climbed high, jackets hugged tight at waist and shoulder alike. There was beauty in their stiffness, something stern yet exact. She wore one blouse only once before stopping cold. Pulling it on felt too right, as though someone had measured every curve beforehand. Fabric pressed close like memory, fitting beyond reason. That moment hit hard - a sudden dizziness that dropped her onto the chair. Even now, sitting still didn't erase how wrong such perfection could feel.
Something about how he saw her stuck in her mind. Not just the shape of her shoulders or the line of her back - the way his gaze settled there suggested he'd counted ribs, mapped hips, noted where light hit collarbones, like he'd memorized blueprints instead of skin. These weren't off-the-rack outfits hanging on her form - they clung because they were built for one person only: her. That quiet certainty, the idea that someone had watched long enough, close enough, to craft garments matching her down to the last centimeter, sat heavier than touch ever could.
Anyway, she put on the clothes he gave her. Torn, dirty, too thin - her old things offered no warmth inside those damp stone walls. Survival usually means bending when you'd rather break. Hating what she had to do stung hard, but hating him hurt worse.
---
Through each hall, past corners thick with shade, within chambers that hummed with quiet - his weight pressed down like breath held too long. Not sight but sense carried him through walls, seeping slow as water into cracked masonry, lingering like smoke after fire has died. Hours might slip by untouched, daylight fading without a glimpse of his form - still, he stayed near. A pulse behind eyes closed tight. The air itself shaped around absence.
A tingling crept across her arms - the same uneasy feeling from the woods, when eyes seemed to follow - and it never left once she stepped inside the fortress. At moments it drifted, soft as breath on glass, barely more than a whisper behind thought. Then without warning it sharpened, pressing like heat from a flame, especially near certain doorways or turns in the hall. Each step forward could shift it - not always, but often enough - turning empty stone into something watchful. Silence made it worse. So did stillness. The air itself felt heavier there, charged with presence.
A hush came first - not loud, just there, like breath held too long. Cold crept in next, slow and thick, pressing against her skin without warning. It wasn't wind, nothing moved, yet the weight doubled, sudden and sharp. She knew it then, deep in bone rather than thought, that eyes were on her though none showed. He didn't need to stand nearby; distance meant less when awareness bent across stone and silence alike. Wherever he lingered beneath those endless halls, a thread stretched taut between them, invisible but real. Space narrowed until only two points remained - he watching, she known.
That invisible stare pressed down without pause - on her shoulders first, then into her chest, along the nape of her neck, a burden that stayed put. It moved with her, shadowing each step through rooms and up stairs. Morning light did not erase it. Nightfall brought no relief. Even during those shallow snatches of rest near sunrise, it seeped through, present beneath exhaustion.
Now she knew it. This place always had company, even if only one body walked its halls. Inside her room, shut away by a door that stayed unfastened, still someone watched. While she peeled off clothes near the copper tub - found tucked beside her sleeping space - eyes remained. That tub drew steaming water from a tap where none should work, vanished the bathwater once done, wiped clean every trace. Most fragile times, least guarded seconds - they saw everything then too.
Maybe not watching. Definitely not like some dirty window-peeker. More like noticing - marking down, filing away, keeping score. How she moves across floors feels to it like tiny shakes along rock veins, just as a spider knows who stirs its silk threads. Pulse checked without touch, air pulled in and out counted somehow, heat given off measured through stone and shadow by something sharp enough to see clear through barriers, making walls seem paper-thin.
Heavy knowing weighed on her chest right away. It did. For seventy-two hours straight, being watched wore her down thin, every sense too awake. A floor groaning underfoot - a hallway door clicking shut - cloth trembling in still air - each tiny thing punched breath from her lungs. Her pulse jumped. Fingers trembled. Thoughts raced ahead, inventing dark turns: his arrival, his moves, possible endings piling up like storm clouds.
Yet people change easier than you might guess, just like Historia learned in her psych classes. With time and repeat exposure, odd things start feeling regular. After a while strange events settle into daily life. Frightening moments grow dull through sheer frequency. Unimaginable shifts slip quietly into view. They get noticed, accepted, then folded without protest into what counts now as usual.
Week one closed with small shifts in how she moved through each day.
It wasn't surrender, yet moving through days became possible. Even while plotting escape routes, spotting blind spots along stone corridors, still eating meals without being told - hunger decided timing. Sleep arrived whether welcome or not, so rest came anyway, taken like breaths between thoughts. Walking each hall again and again shaped something close to routine, though never comfort. Watching eyes followed always, stitched into every moment like thread too thin to cut. That gaze settled deep, not gone, just folded inward like old bruises that ache only when weather shifts.
She began to notice, though she did not want to, how the old stone moved through its days.
---
Footsteps would stop mid-hallway when he arrived - no warning, just presence. His entrance never followed a pattern, yet it froze every room.
There he stood. Not stepped, not moved into view - just appeared. One moment empty air where now a shape took place. It happened without warning, without steps or sound, nothing like how people usually come around. The change felt deeper than sight, more like the silence between heartbeats had changed its mind. Space adjusted before eyes could catch up. Out of nowhere, the air turned colder - no slow fade, just a sudden plunge that bent the candlelight sideways and raised goosebumps along Historia's skin. Then the shadow changed - not like shadows do when lit differently, but on its own, sliding opposite the lamp's glow, thickening into one spot like night piling up where it wasn't invited.
He'd appear like that. In a doorway, suddenly. A chair she knows was vacant now held him, still as stone. Against the wall he leaned, arms crossed, gaze locked - those black eyes measuring every breath, making her vanish yet burn under their weight.
It was the fourth day when she found the ballroom.
Eastward, maybe - her sense of direction never quite trustworthy - it sat along the castle's edge, down a hall she'd walked two times already, each trip ending at nothing more than solid rock. This time, though, the stone had vanished, swapped out for high double doors yawning wide into an emptiness huge enough, broken-down enough, to freeze her feet right where they were.
Huge - that's how the space struck her, bigger than any other inside the stone walls, even more so than the grand entryway. Overhead, the roof curved high into a domed arch, held up by tall pillars made of pale marble, smooth and straight as ancient tree stems turned to stone. At their tops, leaves of acanthus curled outward, mixed with roses always showing up again. Underfoot lay an old wooden floor laid in complex shapes, though time has twisted it since then - dampness seeped through year after year, warping the design, puffing boards upward, staining them uneven. Sections split apart now, leaving cracks where glue gave way long ago.
From the dome dangled crystal chandeliers, spaced apart - one followed another until five stood in silent rank. Huge they were, layered with prisms that seized the weak glow slipping past high eastern windows, splintering it into ghostly shards of color leaping over broken flooring. Draped in webs dense as fabric, each fixture wore its decay like a shroud; inside those filmy veils, clusters of glass showed only as lopsided blurs, vague forms seen beneath skin.
Along the space between pillars, mirrors stretched from floor to ceiling - wide sheets of glass caught in ornate gold borders, fogged with the same decay she'd seen in her room's looking glass. Not quite solid, her shape drifted there like something half-remembered, flickering, never fully matching what she did; it would twist without her twisting, stop while she kept going. Over time, she came to see this wasn't about her eyes playing tricks - it was how these reflections lived slightly out of step, as if time itself bent differently inside each frame.