Once they left the basement entrance behind, the obsidian ring on Thalia’s finger quickly returned to normal.
The unmistakable heat gradually faded as they moved farther away.
By the time they reached the room on the west side of the manor again, the ring had gone completely still, even regaining the natural coolness of the stone.
Thalia glanced down at it but made no attempt to say Acheron’s name again.
Back at the basement entrance, she had heard something—an extremely faint voice from somewhere below.
At the time, she had not even been sure whether it was real, which was why she had said nothing to Ivan.
Now that they were away from the staircase, however, she decided it was better not to keep it from him.
“Ivan, I think I heard something when we were standing at the basement entrance.”
Ivan paused while arranging the contents of the wooden box and looked up at her.
“What did you hear?”
“I don’t know.”
Thalia shook her head.
“It was very faint.
It sounded like someone speaking somewhere below us, but I couldn’t make out the words.
That’s why I asked if you heard anything.”
Ivan frowned slightly.
“Did you hear it again after that?”
“I think I did when we were leaving, but it was still too faint.
I can’t be sure it wasn’t just the wind.”
Thalia glanced down at the ring again.
Since leaving the basement entrance, it had shown no further reaction.
Ivan did not rush to any conclusion.
After a moment of silence, he finished arranging the box.
“We should head back.
We’ve found about as much as we can here.
We can take the rest back to the museum and go through it properly.”
“All right.”
This time, Thalia did not object.
They carefully repacked everything from the wooden box but did not return it to the hidden compartment.
Since Mrs.
Bennett had already given them permission to investigate what Adrian had left behind, there was no reason to leave the letters and floor plans at the manor when they still needed to examine them.
The small object wrapped in faded dark red cloth remained unopened.
They placed it in a protective bag together with the four letters and the basement plan.
After making sure they had not overlooked anything else in the room, they finally left.
By the time they stepped outside, the afternoon had grown noticeably dimmer.
Sunlight slanted through the trees, casting broken patches of light and shadow across the weed-covered stone path.
Halfway across the grounds, Thalia looked back.
The gray-white three-story manor stood silently among the trees, its outer walls covered in climbing vines.
Several broken windows showed through the shifting branches.
From the outside, nothing had changed since they arrived.
After everything they had discovered inside, however, Thalia could no longer think of Eremon Manor as nothing more than an abandoned house.
Whatever lay beneath it was far more complicated than the building suggested.
They followed the stone path through the iron gates.
Ivan placed the protective bag containing the wooden box safely in the car, checked that everything was secure, and started the engine.
The drive back would take nearly two hours.
Once they left the wooded area, the road gradually widened, and scattered houses and farmland began to appear again.
Thalia sat in the passenger seat, unusually quiet.
She watched the scenery pass outside the window, but her thoughts remained with the four letters they had found.
The ring.
The pact.
The bride.
And Acheron.
Words that had seemed completely unrelated were slowly being drawn together through Eremon Manor, yet they still knew almost nothing about what any of them truly meant.
Acheron was the greatest mystery of all.
The letters claimed his name was older than Eremon Manor itself, but they gave no indication of when he had lived or who he had been.
If he were merely an obscure historical figure, there would have been little reason for the unknown writer to repeatedly warn Adrian against telling the ring’s new bearer about him.
More troubling was the ring’s reaction when Thalia had spoken his name for the first time.
Her gaze drifted down to her left hand again.
The obsidian ring rested quietly on her ring finger.
“Stop staring at it.”
Ivan’s voice came from beside her.
Thalia looked over.
“I was just trying to remember when it first appeared on my hand.”
“Any luck?”
“No.”
She shook her head.
That was what bothered her most.
She remembered when she had first noticed the ring, but she had no memory of how it had gotten onto her finger in the first place.
It was as though it had simply appeared one day without warning.
By the time she realized something was wrong, nothing she tried could remove it.
Before, she had only thought it strange.
Now she was beginning to suspect it had never been that simple.
“We’ll start with the records when we get back,” Ivan said, keeping his eyes on the road.
“If the letters are right and Acheron’s name predates the manor, then there should be something left behind somewhere—assuming he really existed.”
Thalia nodded and let the matter rest for the remainder of the drive.
By the time they returned to the city, evening was approaching.
The museum was nearly closed for the day, with only a few staff members still tidying the exhibition rooms.
Thalia and Ivan entered through the rear entrance without disturbing anyone and took everything from Eremon Manor directly to the archive room.
They placed the wooden box in the center of a long padded table.
The four letters and two floor plans were transferred into fresh protective sleeves.
Once everything had been properly arranged, Thalia’s attention returned to the dark red bundle they had deliberately left unopened.
“Can we finally see what’s inside?”
Ivan did not object this time.
“Document it first.”
“I know.”
Thalia took several photographs of the bundle from different angles and made a brief record of its size and condition.
Once that was done, she put her gloves back on and carefully unfolded the cloth.
The dark red fabric had faded badly over the years.
Along the old folds, the color had worn almost completely away.
As the final layer opened, the object hidden inside for decades was finally revealed.
It was metal.
More precisely, it was a small black metal plaque, no larger than half her palm.
The plaque was rectangular with slightly rounded corners.
There was no obvious rust on its surface.
At its center was an intricate engraved design.
Thalia placed it carefully on the protective pad and leaned closer.
The design was nothing like the winged bird they had seen on the silver pocket watch and the wooden box.
Instead, several curved lines overlapped to form a circular pattern.
A thin vertical line ran through the center, ending beneath a tiny diamond-shaped mark at the top.
Thalia studied it for a while.
Something about the design seemed familiar, but she could not immediately remember where she had seen it.
Then she happened to raise her left hand.
Her eyes fell on the obsidian ring.
“Ivan, look at the inside of the band.”
He moved closer and examined the spot she indicated.
The outside of the obsidian ring had always been simple.
Apart from the black stone set into it, there was almost no decoration.
The inner surface, however, was engraved with an extremely fine pattern.
Because the markings were difficult to see and the ring itself could never be removed, neither of them had ever compared them closely with anything else.
Thalia held her hand beside the metal plaque.
The designs were different in size, but side by side, the resemblance was unmistakable.
The central vertical line and the small diamond above it were nearly identical.
“So this is connected to the ring too,” Ivan said.
He picked up a magnifying glass and examined the engraving on the plaque while Thalia pulled up the photographs they had taken earlier.
The silver pocket watch and the wooden box bore the winged bird.
The ring and the black metal plaque carried a different circular symbol.
So far, they had found at least two distinct markings.
“Could they represent different people?
Or different families?”
“Either is possible.”
Ivan lowered the magnifying glass.
“We don’t have enough to know yet.”
Thalia nodded and turned the plaque over.
Compared with the elaborate symbol on the front, the back appeared almost plain.
Only when she angled it beneath the desk lamp did she notice a faint line of writing near the bottom.
She adjusted the light.
Several characters slowly emerged against the black surface.
Thalia studied them, her brow gradually furrowing.
“It’s not English.”
“Can you read it?”
“Not really.
Some of it looks a little like Latin, but it isn’t quite right.”
She took out a sheet of paper and copied the characters one by one, preserving their shapes as closely as possible.
After years of working with antiques, Thalia was familiar with a range of old European scripts, but the inscription did not match any standard form she recognized.
Several characters resembled Latin letters, while others were completely unfamiliar.
The final mark did not even look like a letter.
It seemed closer to a symbol.
After studying it for a while without getting anywhere, Thalia set the copy aside.
“Let’s start with Acheron.”
His name had appeared clearly in the letters from 1996.
That gave them something far more concrete to work with than an unidentified inscription.
Ivan opened the computer, and Thalia pulled a chair over beside him.
They began with the museum’s own database.
The first search returned nothing.
Thalia tried several possible spelling variations.
Still nothing.
They widened the search to digitized local histories, newspaper archives, and old private collection catalogues.
Nearly an hour passed without a single direct reference to Acheron.
It was as though the name had never existed.
Thalia leaned back in her chair and stared at the empty search results.
“That doesn’t make sense.
If the third letter was telling the truth, whoever wrote it had already found records about Acheron in 1996.”
“Then we may be looking in the wrong place.”
Instead of searching the name again, Ivan opened another database.
“Let’s search Eremon Manor itself.”
If Acheron could not be traced directly, perhaps they could work backward through the place connected to him.
Thalia sat up again, and together they began sorting through the history of the manor.
This time, they found plenty.
The earliest public construction records for Eremon Manor dated to the late nineteenth century.
It had originally belonged to the Eremon family, passed through several owners over the years, and gradually fallen out of regular use after the middle of the twentieth century.
Most of that matched what they had already learned.
Nothing stood out.
Not until Ivan found an older land record.
It was not part of the manor’s own archive but a scanned document from an early survey of the surrounding land.
The paper had yellowed badly with age, and much of the writing was difficult to read.
Thalia was skimming through it when she suddenly stopped.
“Wait.
Zoom in there.”
Ivan enlarged the page.
It was a simple hand-drawn map.
Eremon Manor had not yet been built when the map was made.
The area showed only stretches of woodland, property boundaries, and several old roads that no longer existed.
Near the site where the manor would later stand was a small black mark.
Beside it was a handwritten note.
Most of the sentence had faded beyond recognition, but the final words were still barely legible.
…construction prohibited over the old site.
Thalia stared at the line.
“Construction prohibited?”
And yet a little more than twenty years later, Eremon Manor had been built on that exact spot.
Ivan enlarged the scan further and noticed another, much fainter line beneath the first.
Its condition was so poor that the writing had nearly disappeared into the stains on the page.
They adjusted the image several times before managing to identify two words.
Underground ruins…
Everything after that was lost.
Thalia immediately remembered the fourth letter.
Its writer had told Adrian that whatever lay beneath Eremon Manor had not appeared because of the manor.
Instead, the manor itself might have been built there because something had already existed underground.
Apparently, that theory had not come from nowhere.
“What year is this record from?”
“1871.”
Ivan checked the archive information.
“More than twenty years before the earliest construction records we have for the manor.”
In other words, the land had already been singled out long before Eremon Manor existed, complete with an explicit warning against building there.
Thalia was about to continue through the related files when another archived document appeared beside the scan.
It was an old collection catalogue without a complete title.
According to the archive information, it had once belonged to a private museum that had closed many years ago.
Part of its collection records had later been digitized.
Thalia opened the catalogue.
After a few seconds, a yellowed handwritten inventory appeared on the screen.
It listed more than a dozen objects of uncertain origin: stone carvings, silverware, damaged manuscripts, and several religious artifacts whose dates could not be determined.
Thalia read down the list.
Then she reached the third entry from the bottom.
Her hand stopped.
The description was brief.
One black ring.
Origin: Eremon Old Site.
Thalia instinctively looked at her left hand.
Ivan had noticed the entry too.
He immediately enlarged the image.
After the words Eremon Old Site, there had originally been more writing.
Someone had covered it completely with black ink.
The scan was not clear enough to reveal what had been written beneath it.
Thalia stared at the blackened section for a moment before noticing several faint traces near the edge—letters that the ink had failed to cover entirely.
She enlarged the image again.
One letter.
Then another.
Most of the word was gone, but enough remained to reconstruct a name they had first encountered only a few hours earlier.
ACHERON.
Thalia stared at the screen without speaking.
Acheron.
The name did not exist only in the private letters from 1996.
It had appeared much earlier, in the same collection record as a black ring recovered from the old Eremon site.
And almost at the exact moment Thalia recognized the name, the obsidian ring—silent throughout the entire journey back from the manor—suddenly began to grow warm again.
Her fingers stilled.
They were nowhere near Eremon Manor now.
Yet the ring had reacted to Acheron’s name all the same.