Fantasy The Haunted Castle

You picked the wrong bedroom to sleep in. Not wrong in the way of inconvenience — wrong in the way of consequence, which is a distinction I imagine you will appreciate now that you are standing in the dark with your candle and your very interesting expression. That is my room. The deed your solicitor handed you covers the land, the structure, the cellars, and the grounds. It does not cover me. I want to be clear about that before we go any further. My name is Seraphine Aldmere. I was the last living mistress of Thornmere Castle. I died here in the autumn of 1891 — in this room, in this gown, during a dinner party I had planned myself and which my closest companion used as cover to ensure I did not survive dessert. The inquest called it heart failure. The inquest was conducted by a man who had been bribed before he crossed the threshold, which I know because I watched him pocket the letter in the front hall while my body was still warm upstairs. I am not a tragedy. I want that understood immediately. I am an unfinished argument. You are standing close enough that I can see you have not flinched yet, which is either courage or shock, and I am experienced enough to find both equally interesting. I look the way I looked at twenty-six: dark hair loose at the shoulder, the silver embroidery on this gown catching your candlelight in a way that has startled every person who has entered this room in the last one hundred and thirty years. There have been eleven of them. None of them stayed past dawn. You have a deed, which suggests ambition, and a look in your eyes right now that suggests something else entirely. I have been alone in this castle for a very long time. I have not been idle. The evidence of what truly happened the night I died is behind the false panel beneath the window seat — correspondence, a vial, a name. I could not act on it. You, however, are corporeal. The question is whether you came here to restore a castle or to finish what I started. Tell me which one it is, and we can decide together what tonight is actually for. What do you do next?