Lila came to with a gasp, her lungs filling with dust and the acrid sting of burnt wood. She lay sprawled in the ruins of Ashford Manor, her body a symphony of pain...each breath sending sharp tremors through her ribs. Above her, the sky yawned gray through the shattered remains of the ballroom ceiling, the clouds swollen with unshed rain.
She rolled onto her side, coughing, her fingers digging into the debris...splintered piano keys, torn sheet music, and something cold and metallic.
It shouldn't have survived. Not after the collapse. Not after she'd seen it shatter in her palm as the house came down around her. Yet here it was, whole and gleaming, its glass face uncracked.
Lila flipped it open.
The hands ticked louder than her heartbeat, the sound echoing unnaturally in the ruins. The date beneath...June 18, 1927...glowed faintly, the numbers pulsing like a living thing.
"Theo?" Her voice was raw, barely audible. "...Anyone?"
Silence.
Then....
A whisper, so close it brushed her ear:
"Tick-tock, Eleanor."
She jerked upright, scanning the wreckage. Nothing moved. No shadows shifted. No ghosts lingered.
But the pocket watch chimed, its tone too deep, too resonant for such a small object.
Midnight.
Except the sky was still dawn-gray.
The Price Revealed1. The Entity's Terms
The debris shifted.
A ripple passed through the rubble, the shattered wood and stone rearranging itself like a puzzle solving in reverse. From the wreckage of the grand piano, something unfolded...tall, shapeless, its form wavering between shadow and smoke.
Then it stepped forward, and Lila's breath seized in her throat.
The figure had no face. No eyes, no nose....just a mouth, wide and gaping, filled not with teeth but with tiny piano keys, each one yellowed with age.
"You're awake," it said, the keys clicking softly as it spoke. The voice was neither male nor female, but something older, something that vibrated in Lila's bones. "Good. We have much to discuss."
Lila scrambled back, her hands slicing on broken glass. "What are you?"
The entity tilted its head, the movement too fluid, too wrong. "A collector. A keeper of balances. The house was merely... a vessel."
It gestured, and the air shimmered, revealing ghostly images:
Theo, young and alive, signing a contract with notes instead of ink.
Vincent, his hand pressed to the same parchment, a lion's roar frozen in the blood he used.
Eleanor, her signature fading even as she wrote it.
"Theo traded a century of music for your rebirth," the entity said. "Vincent traded his soul to stop you. And now?" The keys of its mouth played a dissonant chord. "The ledger is unbalanced."
Holloway's Warning
A groan came from across the ruins.
Holloway lay half-buried beneath a fallen beam, his skin gray with dust, his chest rising in shallow, rattling breaths. Lila crawled to him, her knees grinding against shattered porcelain.
"Holloway! Can you hear me?"
The groundskeeper's eyes flew open....normal again, no trace of Vincent's emerald glare. But his hands...
His hands were stained black, the ink seeping into his skin like veins.
"Lass...?" he wheezed, his voice barely audible. "Y'need t'see this."
With trembling fingers, he pulled a scorched scrap of paper from his pocket. The edges were brittle, the words barely legible:
"The Debt Collector comes when the music stops. It takes what you love most."
Lila's blood ran cold. "Theo wrote this?"
Holloway nodded, his gaze drifting past her to the faceless entity. "Aye. An' it's here now 'cause y'finished his song."
The Countdown Begins
Lila helped Holloway sit up, her own hands now tinged with the same ink that stained his.
"We need to...."
She froze.
Her reflection in a nearby shard of mirror wasn't hers.
Oh, it wore her face, her clothes...but it moved independently, its fingers tracing the glass from the other side, its lips mouthing words Lila couldn't hear.
Then the pocket watch chimed again, and the reflection shattered, the glass dissolving into ink that slithered into the cracks of the ruins.
The watch's hands sped up, the ticks coming faster, louder....every hour marked in seconds now.
"No," Lila whispered.
The entity's keys clicked in amusement.."Time is the first debt paid, Eleanor. Best decide quickly what you'll trade for the rest...
The Collector's Demand
The entity raised its hands...if they could be called hands....more like smoke given temporary shape. Its key-teeth plinked out a discordant waltz, the sound vibrating through the ruins like a physical force.
Lila clapped her hands over her ears, but the music crawled inside her skull anyway, worming into her thoughts, her memories.
Around them, the air ripped open, revealing three ghostly musicians:
A violinist with no eyes, his bow drawn across strings made of braided hair.
A cellist whose fingers were skeletal, the instrument's body hollowed like a coffin.
A flautist with Vincent's emerald eyes, the flute fashioned from a human femur.
"Three debts unpaid," the Collector intoned, its voice harmonizing with its macabre orchestra.
The musicians played a single, jarring note, and the ground beneath Lila split open, vomiting up three objects:
A sheet of music, the notes written in Theo's blood.
A lion-head ring, its emerald eye cracked.
A pearl necklace, identical to the one in Theo's grave.
"Theo's music," the Collector said, pointing to the score. "Vincent's rage." The ring spun like a top. "Eleanor'ssilence." The pearls clicked together like teeth.
Lila's own voice failed her as she tried to speak, the words stolen by the flute's next piercing note.
The Collector leaned in, its key-teeth grazing her cheek. "You will settle them."
The pearl necklace burned against Lila's skin when she touched it, the heat spreading up her arm like fever.
A vision slammed into her:
Eleanor Hart, standing in the same ruins...only whole, untouched by time...her hands shaking as she signed a contract with a feathered quill. But as the ink dried, her name faded, as though being erased by an unseen hand.
Lila gasped back to the present, the necklace now searing hot.
"It didn't just take her life," she realized. "It took her next one too."
Holloway groaned, his ink-stained hands twitching toward the contract that now materialized between them....a scroll of human skin, its edges charred.
"Lass... don't..."
But Lila was already pressing the pearls to the parchment.
Eleanor's signature bloomed back into existence, the letters pulsing like a fresh wound.
The Final Bargain1. Theo's Last Message
A single piano key lay intact amid the wreckage...middle C, the heart of "Our Song."
Lila struck it.
The note hung in the air too long, vibrating until the ruins blurred, and Theo flickered before her, his form transparent as mist.
"Lila," he breathed, his voice threadbare. "The contract's a loop. It feeds on itself. Break the cycle.....play it backward."
His hand passed through hers, leaving frostbite trails on her skin.
"But..."
Theo's image shattered, the piano key splintering to dust.
Vincent's Return
Holloway convulsed, the ink on his hands boiling black.
Vincent's voice exploded from his throat, too deep, too resonant to be human:
"You think I killed him for jealousy? For love?" Holloway's body twisted, his spine arching as Vincent poured into him. "The Collector wanted his music silenced. I was just the hand that pulled the wire."
The lion ring rolled toward Lila, stopping at her feet.
"Take it," Vincent hissed. "See what it really is."
When she lifted it, the cracked emerald showed her a memory:
Vincent, weeping, the Collector's key-teeth pressed to his throat as it whispered:
"Kill the pianist, or I'll take your brother instead."
The contract unfurled itself, the terms now legible in glowing script:
Theo's Debt: "100 years of music, paid in silence."
Vincent's Debt: "A soul for a soul."
Eleanor's Debt: "All future lives, forfeit."
Lila's hands shook.
Option 1:
She could burn it. Watch the parchment blacken, Theo's ghost fade forever, but walk away free.
Option 2:
She could sign it anew. Bind herself to the Collector, resurrect Theo, but lose what remained of her soul.
The pocket watch chimed, its hands spinning wildly.
"Tick-tock," the Collector sang.
The Signature
Lila slammed the lion cufflink into her palm, blood welling thick and dark.
As she hovered the quill over the parchment, Theo's ghost materialized one last time, his fingers clamping around her wrist.
"Don't you see?" His voice was raw with grief. "It was never about us. The Collector just wanted......"
FADE TO BLACK.