The stairs rose upward in never-ending succession. When one staircase ended, we simply crossed through a hallway and found another. I couldn't reconcile the image of the outer building with the one I was walking inside. They were two different places.
Darius and I never passed a window. Not a single one. The nagging sense of claustrophobia prickled the hair at the base of my neck. Aggravated, I continually rubbed the spot, wishing we could find just one opening to alleviate the horrid sensation. Wandering the corridors of Crow's End felt like traipsing through the various chambers of a heart. The air was muggy and a distant thrum of a heartbeat reached my ears, as if the manor truly was breathing.
Every so often the Sin would step into one of the adjoining halls and open a door. Behind every door was the same plain, unadorned bedroom. Each time the bedroom was revealed, Darius would slam the door with increased ferocity. He finally stomped his foot and shouted at the ceiling. "Dammit, Peroth! Stop jerking me around!"
We climbed another flight of stairs and entered a final windowless corridor. Darius opened a door and I fully expected to see the same bedroom—but I was wrong.
"Finally," the Sin muttered as we crossed into a dark parlor. I saw the vague outline of a blackened hearth and a winged armchair before Darius shut the door, sealing us inside. Unable to see, the cloying feeling of being trapped intensified. I reached out to grip the hem of his jacket as Darius moved deeper into the room.
"Darius—."
"A moment." The Sin sucked a breath through his teeth as light blossomed. He cradled a small flame in the palm of his upheld hand, letting the fire roll over his fingertips. I wrinkled my nose against the smell of burning flesh as the demon reached the mantle and lit several of the squat candles waiting there.
The parlor was small, equipped with the solitary armchair, an unadorned table beneath a shuttered window, and a mid-century end table. As the demon went to the window, I gazed around the cozy space, taking in the bookshelves, the faded wallpaper, and lack of electrical outlets. There weren't any lamps or fixtures, only the sparse handful of candles on the mantle and a rusty oil lamp on the table.
There was one chipped door connected to the parlor. The floorboards creaked underfoot.
The window screamed on its ungreased tracks as Darius shoved it open and moonlight spilled inside, illuminating lazy dust motes spiraling through the air. Relief washed over me at the sight of the simple, single-paned window. I rushed to it and, inhaling, stuck my head into the cool night.
Fog encompassed the manor, creeping about the graveyard's edges in a thick blanket of obscurity. I could barely see twenty yards into the mire before the shapes of the crooked tombstones were consumed by the clawing mists. The hedge I had noted earlier served as a boundary between the rows of gray markers and the wild bogs of the moor. We were only four stories above ground level.
"I could have sworn we were higher," I mumbled as I ducked back inside. Darius said nothing. He dropped the bag by the table and sank into the armchair, disappearing into the oblique shadows thrown by its exaggerated edges.
I stood at the windowsill, my fingers curling over the pitted, ancient wood. The breeze was cold against the back of my damp shirt while the manor's heat continued to thrum against my pink face. "Why isn't there any fixtures in this room?" I asked, tilting my chin toward the wax candles. "I saw a television in Peroth's office, and I'm fairly certain the chandelier in the foyer was electric."
The Sin stretched himself, propping the heels of his muddy sneakers on the wide lip of the hearth. His arms fell over the chair's sides, long fingers almost grazing the dirty floor. The sound of his breathing grew deeper as the creature relaxed. "The manor doesn't update areas of disuse, though lighting may or may not appear in the next few days. The bedroom is through there." Darius tossed a hand toward the single door. "You may use it."
His apathetic manner caught my interest, and I realized I was in Darius's rooms. I gaped as the epiphany registered and I looked at the parlor with a more discerning eye. A thin film of dust covered every available surface, reiterating that the demon had not been in residence for quite some time. I ventured from the windowsill to the shelves on the inner wall, finding that very few of the titles were in English. The majority of the volumes were novels, or philosophical texts.
There was one painting, and judging by the style and the brushstrokes, it had been painted by the same person who had created the rest of the manor's sinister artwork. The canvas was covered with the image of a surreal desert where a bronze-skinned man in a jackal mask knelt upon an arid crag.
"There's no restroom," I commented as I pulled one of the books from its line. The pages were comprised of a coarse vellum, inscribed with handwritten lines of a strange, linear language. It was similar to a mix of Chinese and Arabic, made with a series of curved scripts and harsher, jagged slashes and marks.
Darius sighed. "There is now."
"What?" I turned my head in time to see Darius point at the opposing wall. Where there had once been a mottled stretch of blank paint was a second adjoining door. I gawked at it, forgetting the slender journal I was perusing. I pushed it back into place as I stared at the sudden, improbable doorway. "W-where—?!"
"It seems he's more concerned with your comfort than mine," Darius complained, not moving from his recumbent position. "I've been asking for a washroom for years."
Wide-eyed, I went to the door and eased it open. Inside was a restroom with updated plumbing, a claw foot tub, and a silver pendent light.
"What is wrong with this house?" I asked, half in wonder and half in terror. It was human nature to be afraid of things and ideas we don't understand. My tired mind couldn't comprehend the mystical metaphysics commanding the Sin's domain. Moving rooms. Repeating stairs. The more I tried to understand, the worse my headache became.
"It's not a...house. Not in the typical sense." Darius's voice rose from the darkness of his chair and seemed to originate from all corners of the parlor, surrounding me with the weary rasp of the demon's words. "This place was one of the last...houses to be smuggled out of the Dreaming Isle."
"You've mention that place before," I said as I placed a hand against the wall. It was hot, but thankfully didn't feel like skin as the wallpaper in the hallway had. I might have vomited if it did. "The Dreaming Isle—and how does one smuggle a house?"
"The Dreaming Isle was the Realm of Sin, before it...collapsed. Crow's End was about the size of a football at the time, so removing it from the Isle was an easy enough task for Sloth."
"A football." The incredulity was blatant in my tone. "You're joking. You do see where we're standing, don't you? What did Peroth do? Just add water?"
Darius made an aggravated sound, shifting in his seat. "Conceptualize it as tree, Sara. You nurture it, and it grows. Branches are added and pruned to suit the gardener's needs." He toed off his shoes and they landed on the hearth with solid thuds. "Though Crow's End is exactly the most...stable example."
"That's an understatement." The manor was the strangest thing I had ever seen. I had met mages and witches and brimstone-biting demons—but this house was far weirder than any of them.
Given that there wasn't another chair for me to use, I crossed the room to lean on the shelves as I watched the armchair. The window remained open, displacing the smell of disuse with the green, brackish scent of the mire. "So...the Dreaming Isle. That's where the Dreaming Children came from? The—." I traced the shell of my own ear. "The elves?"
Darius grunted. "Don't call them that."
"But—."
"Yes," he said, interrupting me. "It's where the Dreaming Children came from."
I paused as I bit the inside of my cheek. "Was that man downstairs an elf?"
"King's breath, Sara. Don't call them that!"
"Well?" I tapped my foot, willing Darius to answer. "Is he?"
The Sin scoffed and waved his hand. "No. Though I'm sure he would love to pontificate on exactly who his Dreaming ancestor was. When the Isle collapsed roughly twenty millennia ago, there were a fair number of Dreaming who escaped into the Vale. The elasticity of their genes was quite extreme, meaning they interbred with many different species there. As a result, the realms are littered with demi-Dreaming idiots like Anzel. Some of them cling to that lineage with disgusting tenacity."
I thought on that for a minute, listening to the faint thrum of the manor's energy. It pumped through the walls like blood in veins and created a palpable static charge in the air. It clung to my fingertips whenever I touched something in the manor, and slunk through my skin in an insidious, impersonal caress.
I shivered and rubbed my arms. "You never said how the Dreaming Isle disappeared. Or collapsed." Such gaps in information were common with the Sin of Pride. Darius was often reticent with sharing information. "I've always wanted to ask, but...."
Silence. The demon didn't say a word as the parlor's heat diminished. Tension ebbed from the dark armchair in rapid pulses, belying his quiet, unmoving body. The Sin did not want to discuss the Dreaming Isle's fall.
"You should go to bed, Sara," Darius said, ignoring my question. "We've both had a very long day."
My hands tightened into fists. I wanted to push the creature, to demand more information about this strange place he had taken me to—but Darius was right. We had both had a very long, and very stressful day. Exhaustion rode my shoulders, its weight inexorable. I would gain nothing from pestering the tired Sin.
Fingers loosening, I allowed my posture to deflate as I went to retrieve the duffel bag containing my mismatched clothing. I bent at the waist to grab the strap abandoned by Darius's legs—when the Sin's hand suddenly moved, shooting forward to loosely grasp my wrist.
"Crow's End is not Verweald, Sara," he told me, his voice firm, brooking no argument on my part. "It is not a place filled with sheep and the occasional wolf marauding in the herd. They are all wolves. You are the only sheep here. It is very dangerous. If we had another option, I wouldn't have brought you here—but there isn't another option. This is it. Do you understand?"
Irked, I nonetheless nodded. Darius's rough skin rubbed against my own as the Sin leaned out of the shadows, bringing his lithic face closer to mine. Thoughts wheeled behind his eyes, vying for the Sin's attention. "The people here...have their own agendas. Do not trust them. Sloth is my ally, but he is not my friend. I do not trust him. Nor should you."
Darius released my arm, his fingers trailing across the back of my hand as he settled into the chair's darkness once more. "Go."
"Darius...."
"Go."
I went, though not before kicking the bottom of his chair as hard as I could. The action did nothing but give me a sore foot. Wounded and aggravated, I limped into the dim bedroom and shut myself inside.
The echo of the door slamming was the only word exchanged between us.
She was asleep. Finally.
Darius eased himself from the familiar confines of his armchair to silently pace the stretch of floor separating the chair from the bedroom door. The Sin had listened to her slurred swears for almost an hour before Sara's voice had subsided into the slow, quiet breathing of slumber.
Her name-calling could be quite inventive when she was mad.
He opened the door and slipped inside, allowing the gold light from the candles to spill over the footboard. The Sin's eyes adjusted to the dark as he scanned the floor, searching for the duffel bag. He spotted it, thrown aside and crumpled like the disemboweled carcass of a beast's kill. Darius grimaced as he kicked the thing aside, looking elsewhere for his books.
She had stacked them on the nightstand, the spines perfectly aligned with one another, arranged in order of size. The Sin shook his head as he gathered the texts in one hand. She had already managed to scatter her laundry to every corner of the bedroom, but she treated books with a reverence worthy of fine china. He had always found that odd.
Darius's gaze wandered over the sleeping form of his host. He was surprised by how long it had taken for the woman to fall asleep, considering how exhausted he knew she was. Sara was unaware of the demon looming at her bedside, her eyes moving rapidly beneath lids bruised by fatigue. She was having a bad dream.
The Sin did nothing to stop it. He drew his hand across her brow and threaded his fingers through her bangs, still damp from the rain.
"Idiot," Darius murmured as he lowered his arm.
From the parlor's open window came the song of crickets playing in the underbrush. In the distance, Banswolf's pack continued to howl in intervals as they ran the ward's perimeter. The ravens called to one another, crooning messages that would eventually reach the Sin of Sloth's patient ears.
Darius hadn't told Sara about the Isle. He hadn't wanted to watch her eyes fill with anger and disgust as she realized he was culpable in the destruction of an entire world. They all were. If the Sins had only acted faster, if they had tried harder or sought help, had set aside their petty jealousy and ire—perhaps the Isle wouldn't have fallen.
But the Isle had fallen, and they would carry that burden with them always.
Darius frowned. The Sin took his books, leaving the room before Sara was any the wiser.