A Broken Inheritance

Chapter 49: The Diary of Edouard Marchant

"They call us myths. And if not myths, then, anomalies— monstrosities."

Her eyes met mine then, unblinking, heavy with something I could not name.

"Tell me, scholar—what do you see?"

I could not respond.

I did not think she'd like my answer.

+

September 16, 1681
Normandy, Voclain Estate

She showed me today.

Her magic.

It was—

I do not have the words.

She did not speak. Did not lift a wand. Did not perform an incantation.

And yet, when her skin broke—when she let a single drop of blood fall onto the wooden floor—

The room breathed.

The very air seemed to bend around her, the candle flames stretching higher, the wood beneath our feet groaning as though something ancient had stirred awake. The pulse of it was not violent, not uncontrolled—it was steady, rhythmic, like a heartbeat, like a whisper threading through the walls of the estate.

Selene did not look at me as it happened.

But I looked at her.

And I knew, then, that I would follow her into the dark if she asked me to.

+

The candlelight flickered against the pages, casting shifting shadows that danced over the ink.

Anastasia had long since lost track of time, the rest of the world fading beyond the edges of the worn leather binding. She traced the delicate, looping script with careful fingers, the weight of the words settling deep in her chest.

The earlier entries had been meticulous, thoughtful—recorded with the precision of a man who sought to understand, to analyse, to categorise.

But as the months stretched on, something had shifted.

The diary no longer read like research.

It read like devotion.

Like a man who had stepped too close to the edge of something vast and endless and did not mind the fall.

She flipped through more pages, the ink becoming more frenzied, sentences scratched out, rewritten. And then—

Torn pages.

A handful of them, ripped straight from the book, jagged remnants of words barely legible along the remaining edges. Months worth of entries, gone as if they never existed at all.

She turned to what remained.

The ink was darker, deeper, like he had pressed too hard, like his grip had been too tight.

+

March 18, 1682
Voclain Estate

I am beginning to believe she knows.

Not about my research, not about my theories, but something else. Something unspoken, something I have been careful not to acknowledge.

It is in the way she looks at me, the way her eyes linger just a fraction too long when she speaks, the way she tilts her head as though she is reading something written across my face.