The cellar door has apparently decided that its entire purpose in this current life is to remain shut, and it takes both of us, a crowbar borrowed from the toolshed, and what I can only describe as an inspirational amount of swearing to get it to budge.
“On three,” I say, wedging the crowbar into the gap between door and frame.
“One, two…”
I shove on two, obviously, because waiting for three is for people with more patience than I’ve ever had in either lifetimes, and the door screams open on hinges that clearly haven’t moved since whoever built this place was still alive to enjoy it.
A wall of stale, cold air hits us, thick with dust and something faintly metallic, and Mei takes a step back like the cellar personally had offended her.
“That smell is concerning,” she says.
“That smell is old air finally getting to leave the house.
It’s basically the cellar exhaling.
Very normal.” I peer down into the dark, where a set of stone steps disappears into nothing useful.
“Do we have a torch?”
We have a torch.
It takes three attempts to get it lit off the brazier coals, and by the time it catches I’ve got soot on my hands and a small burn on one knuckle that I choose to interpret as a rite of passage rather than a warning sign, and then we’re descending into the cellar, me first..
because apparently in this new life I have developed a habit of walking into rooms before checking whether they want me there.
Well, even as a vlogger, that is how i was.
A sudden pang crept up for my old life..
I suppressed it and took a deep breath.
Be present, Wren..i tell myself.
The cellar is small, low-ceilinged, and packed with the specific kind of mess that only accumulates when a place gets abandoned mid-use rather than cleaned out on purpose.
Crates stacked against one wall, most of them collapsed under their own weight.
A workbench, rotted through in the middle.
Shelving that gave up on its job years ago and now just leans… dramatically..
against the stone, holding nothing but cobwebs and its own poor life choices.Much like me.
“Okay,” I say, holding the torch up.
“This is either treasure or garbage, and honestly at this point I have made peace with either outcome.”
Something skitters across the far wall, quick and low, and Mei makes a noise that could shatter glass.
“Rats,” I say, unbothered, already moving toward the nearest crate.
“We’ve had worse roommates.
I once shared a tent with a raccoon that stole my only pair of dry socks and then had the audacity to look smug about it.
This is nothing.”
“You’re very calm about vermin.”
“Vermin means something’s alive down here, which means it’s not toxic, which is actually reassuring information, if you think about it the right way.”
“I don’t think I want to think about it the right way.”
Fair enough.
I crouch by the first crate and pry the lid loose, and the smell that comes out is dusty and grainy and, underneath all that, faintly, promisingly like food.
“Grain,” I announce, digging a hand in.
It’s gone hard and a little musty at the top layer, but underneath, protected from the damp, there’s a decent amount that’s just old, not ruined.
“Not great, but salvageable if we sort it properly and toast it a bit before storing it again.
This is huge, Mei.
These are actual calories that don’t require us to convince anything else to grow first.”
Mei, edging closer now that the rat threat has apparently downgraded itself in her estimation, peers into the crate like she still doesn’t quite believe it.
“Why would anyone leave food down here and just…
forget it?”
“Whoever lived in this wing before probably didn’t forget it.
They probably got moved out fast enough that nobody bothered coming back for the boring stuff.
People remember to grab the jewelry.
Nobody grabs the grain crate on their way to disgrace.” I say this lightly, but something about it snags in my chest anyway, some sympathy I wasn’t expecting to feel for a stranger who apparently lived exactly the fate everyone assumed I’d have too.
The second crate has tools in it, actual proper tools, not the half rotten hoe currently limping along in our garden shed.
A trowel with most of its wood handle intact.
Shears, rusted but workable with some effort.
A small hand plow blade that makes me actually gasp out loud, which startles Mei more than the rats did.
“This is going to change everything,” I say, lifting it like it’s made of solid gold instead of pitted iron.
“Do you understand what this means?
We’ve been turning soil with a stick and spite.
This is an actual tool built for an actual job.”
“You’re happier about that than the food.”
“The food keeps us alive today.
The tool keeps us alive efficiently, forever.
Priorities, Mei.” I set it aside carefully, already mentally sketching out how much faster we can clear the remaining beds with real equipment instead of my current strategy of aggressive enthusiasm.
The third crate has fabric in it, bolts of cloth gone stiff and yellowed but structurally sound, which solves an entirely different problem I’d been quietly worrying about, namely that both of us are currently one bad tear away from indecent exposure in increasingly cold weather.
It’s the fourth crate, tucked back in the corner under a collapsed shelf, that’s different from the others.
Smaller.
Locked.
Made of a darker wood than the rest, with an iron clasp gone orange with rust but still very much doing its job, and an engraving on the lid that I have to wipe centuries of dust off to read properly.
Not a name I recognize.
Not Liora’s name, not any name from the memories currently taking up unwanted residence in my skull.
“Mei,” I say slowly.
“Whose wing was this, before it became the place people send empresses to fade away decoratively?”
She shrugs, a little uneasy.
“I don’t know.
Nobody talks about who lived here before.
I only know it as the Cold Palace, always.”
I run a thumb over the engraving again.
A single character, worn soft by time, that I don’t fully recognize but that sits in my chest like a held breath anyway, the way a locked door always does, the way any secret does when you find it before you’re invited to.
“Well,” I say, straightening up and hauling the small chest into my arms, “guess we’re keeping this one for later.
Everything else, we sort by usefulness and haul upstairs before the light goes.”
“You’re not going to open it now?”
“Locked things deserve a little suspense,” I say, though honestly it’s less suspense and more the fact that I don’t currently have anything sharp enough or patient enough to deal with a rusted lock that’s spent longer being stubborn than I’ve been alive in this body.
“Also, if it’s a curse, I’d rather it activate somewhere with better lighting.”
Mei looks at me like she genuinely cannot tell if I’m joking, which, honestly, fair, because some days I can’t either.
We spend the rest of the afternoon hauling our haul, if that’s not too repetitive a sentence, up out of the cellar and into actual usable daylight.
The grain goes into a dry corner of the main room, spread out on cloth to finish drying properly before I risk storing it somewhere a rat can throw a party in it.
The tools get cleaned as best we can manage, rust scrubbed off with sand and river water, and by the time the light starts going gold I’ve got the little hand plow working the second garden bed with roughly four hundred percent more efficiency than the hoe managed, and my arms are going to hate me tomorrow in a way that feels, weirdly, like an old friend.
“You’re humming,” Mei says, watching me work the soil into neat furrows.
“Am I?”
“You do it a lot.
When you’re happy.”
I hadn’t noticed, but now that she says it, yeah, there’s a tune stuck somewhere in the back of my throat, something half remembered from a life that technically hasn’t happened yet by several centuries, and there’s something both funny and sad about that, humming a song that won’t be written for a very long time, in a garden that shouldn’t exist for me at all.
“Good work makes me hum,” I say instead of any of that.
“Consider it a warning sign.
If I ever go quiet while gardening, that’s when you should worry.”
The little locked chest sits on the edge of the bed where I set it down hours ago, patient and undisturbed, and every time I glance at it I feel that same held breath feeling from the cellar.
Somebody lived here once.
Somebody had a name worth engraving into a chest, and then somebody made sure nobody remembers what it was.
It’s not my mystery, technically.
I only borrowed this body, this palace, this whole mess of a life.
But borrowed things have a way of becoming yours anyway, if you hold onto them long enough, and I have a feeling this particular locked box is going to become very much mine before I’m done with it.
“Tomorrow,” I tell Mei, wiping dirt off my hands and looking at the two neatly plowed beds, the drying grain, the pile of salvaged tools that are going to make the next month of work so much easier than the last few days have been.
“Tomorrow we find something to pick that lock with.
Tonight, we eat, we sleep, and we let Duchess judge us from a safe distance like the queen she clearly believes herself to be.”
As if summoned, Duchess struts past with two new hangers on trailing behind her, a pair of scrawnier, equally judgmental chickens I have not yet had the pleasure of formally meeting, and settles herself on top of the chest like she’s decided it belongs to her flock now, which, honestly, at this point, who am I to argue.
“We have three chickens now,” Mei says faintly.
“We have three chickens now,” I agree, deeply satisfied, and go to find something for dinner that doesn’t involve nearly as much apologizing to the local wildlife as yesterday’s did.
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