Daily Writing Challenge (May 2025)
Day 6 / May 30
Negative / Relic
@daily-writing-challenge
The Silverlight estate had long fallen since the day the dead came and marched a blighted path through Eversong, a ruined eidolon of the rich walls and lives that once inhabited it. The once golden fountain that crowned its welcoming courtyard was all that really retained shape now, dilapidated walls sunk or crumbled in on themselves, leaving only foundational doorways.
Still, its last survivor came to visit each week, bound to guilt and the urge to reclaim what had been lost. Alinora craved an opportunity of worth that would give her name precedence to Silvermoon again, as well as her lost family. Something to lift her out of servitude to another House, and rebuild her into a seat of nobility she once belonged to.
For years, she had tried but could never cross the entry hall’s threshold into the estate proper. A heavy fear kept Alinora from passing too far into broken doorframes. She could hear voices, as if wailing from the depths of hell. The walls shuddered when she would walk too close, as if they sought to crumble around her and bury the last living Silverlight within.
She knew little about the supernatural beyond charms and incense, but Alinora could feel the evil of the place in her bones, and it would not be abated by her or any prayer of the Light. She was a woman of very little means now, unable to afford much in the way of help. Convincing her employers to intervene would surely tip them off into what she meant to do. With all her luck, anything found by seedier peoples she'd involved would rob her of what remained of the estate, if anything remained at all.
But there was one she had heard rumors of, a figure that regularly haunted Tirasfal, one that would charge her no coin for a successful exorcism. A personage of strange ways, as she heard it. The Forsaken were always of a…unique disposition and demeanor. And as her eyes caught sight of the one they named the “Gravekeeper” appearing in approach from around the dark lake she waited at, Alinora felt a dreadful regret build in her stomach to have called on the haunting personage in the first place.
Riding what seemed to be a formidable destrier animated only by the framing of its own bones, the Gravekeeper was an uncanny ghost of flesh that was guided by it in the clutch of a saddle. Garbed in grey-blue funerary lace that contrasted deeply with the near unearthly glow of pale skin, Alinora reflexively held in her breath as the Keeper’s sights took her in, swallowed by the lantern light of her gaze. She felt an entire cemetery had visited upon her within those eyes, and readied her a coffin.
“You are the Lady Silverlight?” The sepulchral voice asked, a formal echo that could almost be gentle. Shadowy hair drifted from the crown of dead flowers atop the Keeper’s head, defying gravity.
“Y-yes - I–” Alinora answered after a long bout of struggling silence, staring upward at her mounted “savior”. The blood elf curtsied awkwardly. “I am Mis–Lady Silverlight. Yes.” She could no longer be called by such titles, but it felt right coming from the dead woman’s vocals, strange as it all was.
The Gravekeeper slid away from the saddle fluidly, her black skirts billowing like a fog about her willowy form. A soft scrape of metal heralded the sight of a great relic of a spade, clutched at her side. Alinora felt the blessing of being able to breathe again as the spectral eyes moved past her to the hollowed out estate itself. The Keeper's head tilted slowly until it reached an odd, unnerving angle in the viewing, deeply interested.
“I see…” she replied, a murmur, a whisper. A whisper that seemed to be echoed in slight, mimicked intonations around her, though Alinora could see nothing of where they came from. For a moment, she thought she was to go mad again with nothing but a swell of whispers, but it was a sound that died quickly as the Keeper took her steps toward the estate.
“Well then. I do quite think you have some visitors,” the Lady Keeper spoke with perhaps more creeping humor than one should have in such a harrowing haunt. “Stay there, dear girl,” she instructed Alinora with a suddenly frigid demand that seemed to freeze her feet to the spot. And then, without much more of another word, the Gravekeeper invited herself into the barely held framing that was the entrance of the estate.
Minutes passed, and the estate seemed to build from its disturbingly negative whispers, to disjointed groans, to angered shrieks belting from its darkest spaces. Alinora cringed, gasped as she heard shatterings from within, watched topsoil tremble, watched eerie blue light swell within broken walls. Her entire body tightened as she witnessed the remains of the Silverlight estate seem to heave as if it housed ghostly lungs, and let out a dreaded rattle, as if its very innards were expelling its last, threatening promise of unholy retribution. Just as Alinora thought she might turn and run for the city, the estate went silent, dead silent. The Gravekeeper emerged from the great doorway she entered through, right before it collapsed behind her. She seemed...entirely unphased.
What was more, the Keeper had went in alone, but with her every step outward, things unspoken broke through the ruined soil of the estate, collections of bones reanimated to walk again, and collect around her. Some skulls twisted on their levitating spines as they clicked into place, terrifyingly turning empty sockets on Alinora herself. None said a word. In her soundless fear, Alinora could only formulate the basic assumption that they had no muscle, no vocal chords to grind words with.
“Your estate is now safe for your…hmm, digging,” the Keeper spoke, her eyes much more interested in her skeletal crowd than Alinora herself. “I would suggest bringing a rather strong shovel.” A hint of a smile drifted on the Keeper’s bruised, deadened lips.
“A shovel….?” Alinora echoed in barely heard refrain, the terror waning in the face of some sort of success, yet moving to the utter confusion on where to begin next. “But…I thought? What…what should I do then?” Her mind numbed over with what had just transpired and no real understanding of it. The fallen noble realized she had no idea what she was expecting.
The Gravekeeper seemed to tilt her head, as if listening to something on the silent air that she was deaf to. “Is it not obvious, my dear?” The lantern light eyes fell distinctly on Alinora now, and the voice that came from her seemed to echo with others. Familiar echoes that chased her own as her words drifted past the seat of her own lips. “Remember them. And do it better than you have. Or I'm afraid they'll just have to come back.”
With that, the Gravekeeper lead her new skeletal friends away to a promise of new purpose, new unlife, their last living relative none the wiser.