Prologue — The Vanished Corpse

It was a night of driving rain that veiled the full moon.

In a small churchyard on the outskirts of the city, rain hammered down on a row of stone slabs with a steady, drumming roar. Among the long-neglected graves stood one modest headstone, so new it might have been carved only days before. Its finely chiseled inscription caught the pale moonlight.

Of all the graves, hers alone had no slab—only a thin shroud of fresh earth and grass.

Before long, a crow cut through the darkness and settled atop the headstone. It blinked its beady, go-stone eyes at the full moon, then lifted its head and cried out into the night.

And then, astonishingly, the mound of earth stirred—and a pale white hand shot up out of the ground.

“…Pwah!”

She clawed her way out, spitting mouthfuls of soil as she surfaced into the world.

“Kahk—! Kehak! Kh—!”

Instinctively doubling over, she retched up the grit packed into her mouth and nose. Her lungs, which had stopped, exploded back to life drinking in the air, and her senses began returning to her one by one.

The first to come back was the hearing in her right ear. The silence of the empty graveyard washed over her, and slowly, focus returned to those sea-blue eyes that had once gone dark with the light of life.

Strength finally seeped back into the legs that had lain dead for a week. Cecilia staggered to her feet and stood before her own grave.

The rain washed the grave dust from her snow-white hair and her burial shroud.

As the clouds parted, moonlight wrapped around her. She tilted her head back toward the winter sky spilling its cold rain as if torn open, and spread both arms wide.

“Ahhh.”

And she sighed, blissfully.

“I’m free.”

The Count and Countess of Winterhall had been married for barely four years. They rarely appeared at banquets or afternoon teas, and even the servants of their own estate knew little of how the couple truly lived. One thing, however, was certain: theirs was never a happy marriage.

And no wonder. The lady of the house, Cecilia Winterhall, had one phrase she repeated like a daily prayer.

“I’m going to die.”

And every single time, her husband Davion Winterhall gave the same reply.

“Enough with the jokes. I told you they aren’t funny.”

But Cecilia truly died.

It was just as winter’s first breath settled over the land. The one who found her was her physician of many years, Sir Fernando. Beside the bed, an empty brown glass vial lay rolling against the nightstand. Cecilia looked as though she were simply napping in peace—yet her peach-toned skin had drained of color in an instant, and no matter how many times the doctor pressed his fingers to her wrist, he could find no pulse.

And so Cecilia Winterhall ended her own life by suicide, at the age of twenty-six.

Her final note was an unusual one. Most who make such a choice curse the person who drove them to it, or beg their families’ forgiveness for leaving them behind. But Cecilia’s note was nothing more than a dry, itemized list of demands: where her body was to be buried, the sum of the burial travel money to be interred with her, the kinds of grave goods to include.

As if determined to shake loose even the last scraps of what remained between them, Davion honored every line of her will.

The funeral was a modest affair. Mourners came in fair number, but not one of them shed a tear—for in life, Cecilia had drawn close to no one.

That day, too, it rained without pause.

Black hair lowered, black coat buttoned to the throat, Davion looked for all the world like some old ghost of the churchyard once the umbrella’s shadow fell over him.

The priest’s mass was over quickly. As her will had demanded, no coffin was built; a few shovelfuls of earth, and Cecilia’s small body vanished into the ground.

And so, for better or worse, the woman who had shared so many long years with him disappeared from the world.

“Captain Winterhall.”

At the sound of the familiar voice, Davion snapped a salute without thinking.

“Lieutenant Colonel McGregor.”

“No need for formality at a funeral, lad. And today I come as your father’s old comrade, nothing more.”

The lieutenant colonel wore his gray-streaked beard clear down to his muttonchops—old as he was, he carried himself with a soldier’s fine bearing. He doffed his black fedora and stood shoulder to shoulder with Davion before the small headstone. His daughter knelt in his place and laid down a bouquet of flowers.

“So young. A crying shame. I hear the marriage was hardly an easy one? No children, and a fine figure of a man besides—you’ll find a good woman soon enough and make a new home for yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t let the grief take root too deep. It does no good.”

The lieutenant colonel gave Davion’s shoulder a brief squeeze as he turned to leave, then let go.

As the downpour thickened, the mourners drifted away one by one to their motorcars, preparing to return to their estates. After seeing the last of them off, Davion drew the handkerchief he had shoved into his suit pocket and wiped the headstone clean.

Cecilia Winterhall. Resting in Eternal Silence.

Davion, too, never once shed a tear—even as his fingers traced the name carved into the stone.

His return to the churchyard a full moon later was, in truth, never part of the plan. He had meant to honor Cecilia’s last wishes as written—but her family had insisted regardless that a proper coffin be made and she be laid to rest in the family plot. And so Davion and his aide, Liam, arrived at her grave only to witness—

“It’s empty.”

A grave, quite literally, hollowed out to nothing.

“Her ladyship’s body… Who in God’s name could have done this?”

It wasn’t only the body. The grave goods and the burial travel money interred alongside her had vanished without so much as a single coin left behind.

Davion dropped to one knee and rolled the soil between his fingers.

“…”

The dark earth that had covered her corpse was dried out and bone-parched. Which meant the ground, once smoothed level, had been dug open and filled back in—deliberately.

“You’re telling me she was robbed in the meantime?”

“Ever since the men who plundered Princess Jane’s tomb were publicly executed, the gravediggers’ line has all but died out, my lord. And even if it were tomb robbers, they’d have been too busy fleeing to pack the earth back this neatly.”

The gravedigger who had come with them gestured at the branches and stones packed snugly into the pit.

Whoever it was had either a grave robber’s colossal nerve, or else the madness of at least a lunatic. Davion didn’t know who it might be—but he could not shake the feeling that he was being toyed with by whoever had left his wife’s grave in this state.

“Then if it wasn’t a robbery, how do you explain my wife vanishing into thin air?”

“My lord.”

Liam, who had taken the hounds to scout the surroundings, cut in—accompanied, unexpectedly, by a young boy.

“This boy says he saw something strange on the night, one month past.”

The boy, all of twelve or so, began trembling the moment his eyes fell on Cecilia’s headstone. Davion rose, his brow furrowing—and whether it was his broad, looming frame that did it, the boy shrank back in alarm.

“I-I live over there.”

Gulp. The boy swallowed dryly and pointed at a small shack beside the churchyard.

“I heard a crow c-cawing at night, so I came out to ch-chase it off, and then—then a woman came bursting up out of the ground! Sh-she stood right here with her arms raised for the longest time, and then she pulled all sorts of things out of the grave and went into the church!”

He was no liar. Davion exchanged a glance with Liam, his hand frozen halfway to lighting a cigarette. Turning the boy’s stammering account over and over in his mind, he pocketed the lighter and bent down to the boy’s level.

“This woman. What did she look like?”

“Th-the rain was coming down so hard, and she was too far away to see her face clearly, but… she was white all over. From her hair down to the tips of her toes. She wasn’t very tall, either.”

“…Did she happen to have a crow, or a snake, with her?”

“Y-yes! She and the crow looked like they were t-talking to each other! I thought I’d seen a g-ghost and ran off terrified, but when I checked the next morning, there were f-footprints!”

“There are indeed prints, appearing to belong to a woman—but they break off in front of the church. And inside the church, we recovered these.”

Liam held out a crumpled burial shroud and a pair of shoes.

The shroud had been dressed on her by the undertakers’ own hands. The shoes—the heels were crushed to ruin. Considering Cecilia’s lifelong habit, they were certainly hers.

Cecilia was, without question, dead. Her death had been confirmed through the hands of many—Davion, the physician, the undertakers. And that was precisely why this situation felt so senseless to Davion and Liam both, unreal as a dream.

“I’ve walked battlefields where hundreds of men died, and I have never once seen a corpse that moved.”

“Nor have I, my lord. Which is why I know how utterly impossible this sounds—but by my judgment…”

Though the graveyard held only the two of them, Liam dropped his voice to a whisper.

“This was no grave robbery. Her ladyship climbed out of her own grave, and left this place of her own will.”

…Could that really be true?

Davion chewed the unlit cigarette between his teeth as he ran through one hypothesis after another. But every single one contradicted itself somewhere, too flimsy to believe.

Then he turned the question over to Cecilia’s death itself.

The empty vial found on the nightstand. He had the residue inside examined, but the analysts could only guess at the class of poison; not one of them could identify its exact composition.

Cecilia Winterhall had never been ordinary to begin with. A woman so singular she crossed the line into strange. People loved to chatter that, as technology advanced, magic had vanished from the world completely—but Davion knew better, because of Cecilia.

He knew that the traces of magic still lingered in every corner of the world—and that now and then, they gave rise to phenomena that defied all common sense.

At the end of that long, tangled chain of thought, a single conclusion finally took shape.

Light welled up in those black eyes that had been hollow all along. Davion lit his cigarette and drew a long, deep breath. He lifted his head high toward the ailing winter sun and closed his eyes.

My wife is alive.

His lips, exhaling a plume of gray smoke, curved into something like a smile.

Cecilia is alive.