So originally I was going to use this as an excuse to continue the Vampire Conspiracy series but that one got away from me.
Then i was hoping to write a short piece that would allow me to jump right into a longer dark/libra vampire fic I was planning to write for ages, and working in the same universe as my Demon of my Nightmares story which was quite popular, but that totally got away from me and inspiration from my reviewers inspired me to expand this universe with an idea for a monster family I've been wanting to write for literally EVER but could never figure out a plot for but thanks to my readers and some helpful suggestions i came up with an idea that I think is both very original and will make a fantastic original Gothic horror/Humor/Supernatural story!
See end notes for more info!
Also title suggestions for this one and the series are appreciated.
So in case it's not obvious I have a huge thing for house and castles and manors and haunted structure that are alive and become their own character with their own personality in my fantasy and Gothic-setting plays such a critical role in gothic stories especially and in my wok i want it to be its own character.
this one i wanted the house in both its decrepit and repaired state to be as savage and wild and untamed and beautiful and majestic as the mysterious moors mires, ocean and swamps that surround it-which is exactly what his took so fing long to write! i fell into my trap where i pour over books and passages for description and then i end up with three pages worth of description and no story...so i scrapped my notes totally changed tune and once i switched it to the House' pov i finally got my story PHEW wish i figured that out six hours ago XD
Part 21 of my Halloween October prompt challenge here: post/165553173026/31-horrific-days-v2-october-writing-challenge
Prompt 8: Basement
The House That Breathes
The house roared to life in furious protest as the new couple stepped through the gaping maw where its double doors had rusted off its hinges and the broken panes of their windows shuttered and pointed like jagged teeth. Its floorboard rumbled and rocked as if shaken by some savage beast shaking against the constraints of its cage. Its walls and corridors groaned, grumbled, like the empty gut of some ravenous monster's belly. It's stairs and porch shingles rattled and raged with warning like the rattle of a cobra just before it was about to strike.
The whole of its fountain rumbled and shook and from the bowls of its monstrous heart its creaks and groans and growls and shudders formed a single monstrous roar of "GET OUT."
The force of its breath was so hot and horrifying it all but forced the two occupants to step back. It roared until it ran out of breath and finished its threat with a single sinister syllable.
It was surprised when the two did not run away screaming: most of the prospective buyers often did. Those that did not often strolled around complaining about the dust caking its windows and surfaces, the debris scattered across the ground and the ruined states of its windows. Discussed in giddy delight which walls they wanted to blow out, which of its antiquing trimmings and trappings they wanted to tear out and replace with some repulsive boorish and unimaginative modern invention that was more fashionable. Talked of tearing down its turrets and towers and replacing it with the flat roofs that were the more popular style, or worse leveling it all completely, filling in its massive mires and draining its beloved moors, stripping it of all its savagery and surrealism, transforming the spice of it danger and the excitement of its unexpected trapps and and troubles with something meticulous and manmade, manicured and maneuverable: something pretty and popular, something safe and social, instead of the silent seclusion it boasted proudly like a wanton willow, free and fearless of the laws and regulations of society.
She stood alone in the rough, wild terrain with only the grounds and graveyard for company. A once legend of grand Gothic Revival, the dilapidated ruin jutting from the smoky gray fog like the remains of a jagged broken tooth. A watchful overseer seated upon the rocks of the high flat plateau where the vast expanse of moorland unfolded all around Her like its own private kingdom hidden in the in between space of this world and the next. The desolate landscape was home to none save ghosts and gravestones who knew its secrets and did not care, a rare commodity in this valley where none but the vultures and black cormorants were brave enough to venture here. Black hag harbingers of ill fortune and death that they were, they were well at home among the spectors and spirits, both those of the graveyard and the ones the House kept close to Her heart. Even the trees grew in scattered groves clustered together in the sheltered or the tors, like cowering children, reluctant and terrified to grow on the grounds. Only a single, solitary willow was brave enough, a weeping wailing creature with slender hunched over the crumbling wall of an enclosed garden like a mourner and tangled wisps of its branches and leaves grew long and ragged like the hair of a drowned woman. It sagged lovingly against Her and the house welcomed her weight. A lady-in-waiting to a queen.
This was her home. This was her Kingdom. Her secret world hidden in the mists and fog beyond the break in the tunnel of trees that claws leafless from the ground like the death-black arms of half-buried corpses. This forlorn and forgotten in between world fantastically spiced with danger and excitement. This place where rolling treeless hillsides capped with bits of broken granite jutting like tombstones or broken teeth and grassy knolls matted with long coarse tangles like the hair of a witches broom surrendered to quaintly deceptive quagmires disguising waterlogged bogs lying in wait like gaping predatory maws ready to swallow the uncautious and unsuspecting. Where the bones of the foolish and the fallen sank deep down beneath the muddy murky, depths and high jagged tors encompassed the valley like the uneven spines of some massive slumbering dragon and scattered paths of uneven ground rolled downward to a rocky shore and met the rough, restless waters of the white-capped sea, as gray as dismal as the perpetually white sky overhead. Where the winds howled and hammered, carrying echoes of mournful, womanly wails like banshees singing their hymns to the dead. Mists fell heavy across the expanse, slithered between the stones and uneven pathways like the smoky, spectral tendrils of a maiden's wedding dress or a ghost bridge's tattered gown.
For she was the heart of this land, its Overseer and mistress of this lost, lonely landscape. A decrepit beauty roaring with an indominance that neither time nor misfortune could quiet, the Morganstern Manor was a monster in size and and appearance: stall, spindley, and thorny with warning, its angular face was stoic and wrinkled like those of a stern old man, thorny and shadows with age and suffering. Broad-shouldered and wide, the manor loomed three stories high, layers stacked upon each other where second and third floor rooms shrank and jutted out, their flat rooftops rimed with iron gates formed additional porches crowded on either side of a tall, central turret that jutted upward like its own tower. The double doors rusted off their hinges left only a japping mouth, the expansion of the front porch spread like wings on either side, wrapping around the whole front of the house like a demon's toothy smile. The pegs rotted and broken, stood, though shattered like jagged teeth in the maw of some humongous monster.
Her towers and turrets and tall chimneys rose to challenge the sky. The conical roofs had long since given way, and sat lopsided, perched like sorcerer's hats. A strip of wrought iron fence topped the whole thing like the imperial spikes of a particularly garish crown. A steep gable pinched two abbreviated attics, its shingles ruffled and rotted, and the broken panes of the attics' circular windows blinked like the half-closed eyes of a three-eyed cyclops. The multitude of stained glass windows, cracked and empty, their harlequin colors dulled and dirty with dust and debris, stared blindly over the land and sea like the multiple orbitals of a giant spider. And yet they stood alive and alert, alight with the eerie glow of faded sunlight and shadows. Banquet halls and a ballroom jutted outward, facing the ocean with its monstrous waves and foaming teeth as if in challenge, windows open to the brutal world. The conservatory of iron wrought glass was clouded with a dusty film and spiderwebbed with the wooden corpses of ivy.
Rot had long since consumed the woods, spiders and cobwebs crowded every corner. The shattered stone walls, and that of the outside garden had grown wild and clotted with ivy, the cold mist snaking through the rubble of stones. Weeds and wildflowers crowded the cobblestones. The plum red bricks weathered black interrupted by smooth gray stones, cracked and sagging under their own weight, shimmering black in the shadow of the setting sun, a black silhouette against the starkness of the landscape, not a building of stone and mortar but a place of pure shadow.
This was the sound of a heart that no longer beat, of a corpse still clinging desperately to the fringes of life.
Since the building of its birth, Morrgenstern had witnessed all matters of madness and messes: bemusing beginnings and hideous horrors. It knew the secrets of the uneven ground and dwindling desolate forests, its mysterious mist-filled hollows, and sloping avenues of ruined stones left like the graves of ancient people. Its multitude of eyes had witnessed battles and bloodshed, wedding and witchcraft rituals, romantic rendezvous and revenge plots ruined and all manner of otherworldly mischief. It's walls and corridors told more stories than a thousand tomes could hold, and many secrets had been buried or lost within its alcoves. Many times its ownership had changed hands but the house, herself, was the queen and protector of this land: the heart of the landscape and when it went silent there was nothing left for the land but to die, alone and forgotten.
Rebelliously, she refused to die. The iron gates warred in protest at her side, slamming shut and biting vigorously into bankers and real estate salesmen who came too close, eager to decimate it structure and scrap its foundations. Its rusted door knobs and metal mailboxes bit and chomped when people cringed and complained about its dust and rot, and the out of dateness of its facades and castements. The windows creaked and the hingeless doors chomped and roared with furry, baring the teeth of its porch and snapping like an angry monster until all its enemies were vanquished and scared away. Relaxing its walls and foundations only when it knew it was safe. Dreaming against hope that one day someone would find and wish, not to change it but restore it to its true beauty and majesty. See it not as a blank canvas to paint into a beautiful masterpiece, but a rough-hewn jewel indeed of polishing to reveal its true shine. The heart of a beautiful, brutal, savage, surreal, weird, wild, wonderful landscape that existed both separately and within the rest of the world itself.
Never would she cease her fight, even if these two new interlopers were particularly stubborn. Yet they did not look around it's dust littered floors and cobweb chocked corners and cringe. If anything they looked...pleased.
"It's hideous," the woman complimented, a pale, slender, almost gangly thing with blood red lips and rose red eyes and a shadowy mass of flaming dark hair that seemed to glow with an eerie sort of fire light. The tattered hems of her long black lace hobble dress curling about her feet like shadows so that she seemed to float as she drifted across the floorboards gazing scrutinously but not critically upon the crown mouldings and the expanse of the rooms. The softness of her tone betraying not a hint of disgust or derision as she whirled to her companion.
"It's horrible," he agreed, spinning and springing spryly about the nooks and crannies taking in the alcoves and the long wide curl of the stairs with such quickness the house could not glimpse the full visage of him. When he leapt off the balcony of the second floor and floated down before his companion and took her hands the house the spritiling sported the appearance of a boy, far younger in appearance and the roundness of his face than the sharp pertness of his nose, and the wicked little crook of his smile and the dangerous glint in his wild violet eyes would betray. The wild mass of his hair blazed like black and red flames making the paleness of his skin brighter, the rosey color of his cheeks more prominent, the mischievous glitter of his eyes that much sharper, the points of his long ears al the more elvin and impish. Peaking from between the folds of his flamboyant black and red coat, the House caught the glimpse of a long slender black tail tuffed with red and gold feathers like a ruffled flame.
Their eyes locked and their shared a mutual sigh of collective longing as the eased themselves into each other's arms. The smaller leaning back into the welcoming embrace of the women who rested her cheek in the soft tufts of the boy's flaming hair. Their fingers and hands laced together lovingly and their jeweled eyes glittering with a love and a pleasure the house had not seen wrought upon herself in so many years she had almost forgotten the emotion behind such an expression.
The bones of her foundation rattled, the floorboards trembled, the wall and corridors held its bated breath, the spires of the roof straightened with hopeful shock and its barrage of window eyes glittered with a dying flicker of hope that it's harlequin hues shimmered.
"It's home."
So overcome with the joy of such a statement the house sang: an orchestra of shrieks and shuttered, creaking floors and rattling window panes, and moaning walls and the whistle of wind through the vacant corridors that would once again be filled with furniture and family.
The two lovers giggled and chuckled at the reaction, exchanging loving looks.
"I think the House approves?" the boy grinned at his companion, the sparkle in his eye salacious and by no means innocent.
"I do believe you are right, m'amour. " The woman pulled away from her lover and fluttered across the floors, admiring every corner and carving within the stones and wood, ran her fingers along the banisters as she ascended the steps to the upper floors, looked out the windows and traced the broken images in the gothic arches of the windows. "You are so lovely," she whispered, her voice awed and august. "Like a star trapped in smoke."
The house purred under the compliment.
"Just wait until we're finished restoring her!" The boy leaped and pouches, landing with the grace of a cat on the rottened railings of the banister and walking up the walls to the vaulted ceilings of the upper floors. "She's going to be dazzling, Yami!" His exuberant voice echoed from the upper floors and roofs. "Just dazzling !"
Yami, the woman, chuckled at her husband's enthusiasm, and grinned in agreement, pressing her forehead to the glass. The house cooed under her touch. "She already is, Yugi. She already is."
For the first time in what could've been decades or centuries, for she no loner cared. Morrgenstern Manor, was pleased.
Anyway...I think I figure out how to continue this story AND make it original by adding a "normal" character I love but have yet to take full advantage of! Here's what I got so far!
Tea, short for Titania to her misery, is a down on her luck dancer with dreams and aspirations far beyond the drudgery life she's been dealt. She's escaped her cruel "family" and the torturous boarding school they shipped her off too but alone and penniless and her prospects bleak, she longs for something more—and when a mysterious person offers employment as a maid and entertainer for the prestigious Morrgenstern Manor boarding house, she thinks she's finally found her chance. The Manor's as beautiful and savage as the wild misty moors that surround it, and as charming and mysterious as the house's Owner: the feisty, fiery, flamboyant and fun-sized Yugi Sennen and his equally mysterious and alluring wife Yami. They and the rest of their strange family and household welcome Tea with open arms and even the house, according to them, seems to like her, but Tea cannot help but wonder what they and the house hide, what secrets are stirring in the shadows. For Morrgenstern Manor is a house alive with ghosts both real and imagined, and the Sennen Family are not what they seem and even the guests in this place are strange and seem otherworldly. Tea is determined to learn the truth of this strange house that seems to test and taunt its guests and whose walls seem to breath, but if she finds out will she flee as so many before her—or will she embrace the weird wild and wonderful madness of her new life?
So, the Sennens test all their staff with a challenge to "solve" the mystery of their journal and learn their secret, I have some details of this worked out, Tea will see through the glamour and learn they're all monsters from Other who live parallels to the mortal world (totally crossing over the Conjure Cousins here!)
So creatures from Other and the between places on our plane intersect through Morrgenstern Manor, a home in the Between aka the moors as several such places link the realms together—humans crowded themselves into cities as both a means of protection and independence from them but eventually became ignorant due to such crowded conditions and closed minds.
Their guests are all monsters who stay there. All the members of their crazy family are magical like Maliku has ram horns, Marik is married to Heba (cause I want to) mana is their niece and Tea is introduced to them all gradually and several of the help are both human like Ryou who is a medium and magical like Otogi/Duke who is a Spriggan.
Teas of course becomes fascinated with this new world and while she has a few dark issues of her own particularity her past and her desire to no longer be powerless which Yami sympathizes with and offers to teach her magic but makes it clear not all humans can do it—it takes both arousal and passion but they discover Tea's true power comes when she dances.
Her and Otogi work obviously become a thing as his talent is liquor and poker and other such games and he's has talent with luck both good and bad and in the end Tea finds the family she's always wanted for herself.
Other ideas I imagine are the truth if her friend Milo whom Tea left behind when she escaped their boarding school returns, she's eager to reconnect with and shares secrets about the house but Milo betrays her and Johnson (her husband (is revealed to be a devil similar to Yugi and milo wants revenge for Tea succeeding where she had to sell her soul to get somewhere which causes Tea to feel guilty thought she begged Milo to come with her but she was too scared. Yami makes it clear Tea survived by her own merit and earned both their love and her privileges where as Milo was too afraid to try. Despite this Tea is devastated by the loss of her friend whom she feels she could have helped. (might have Milo become a demon or something)
Another would be to be adopted into the family now officially she has to learn the family secret (yeah totally from Sabrina) and she must solve it and understand it's true meaning in order to join. Other stories would be different members and guests she meets and maybe her accompanying Yami to Other where we get a cameo from the Conjure Cousins, May have Yami be Bakura's Ex and vice versa.
Oh and because I absolutely LOVE the idea of Yugi being an imp with a demon tail and sharp claws Yugi will be a devil/demon prince whom abdicated in order to marry Yami and many of his "rivals" possibly Seto or Seth cause I like the idea of Seth and Kisara and Mokuba (their son cause Mana needs someone to cause chaos with) being part of the family and coming by for an extended stay.
So those are that I for so far and am I pumped! Any thoughts or suggestions throw them my way!