---

The road to Braeriach Hall was long and graveled with silence. Even the carriage wheels hesitated on the stones, as though the land itself wished to swallow the past and all who wandered into it.

The mist did not lift for miles.

It clung to the hills like memory, low, cold, and relentless. Heather grew thick along the roadside, the purple heads bowed with dew and decay. You had read somewhere that heather meant protection, but here it looked more like mourning.

You arrived with a letter. Folded in black wax, marked with a military crest you recognized too well.

Your brother’s name had been on it. Corporal Elias [insert surname], deceased—1879.

Second Anglo-Afghan War. His body returned, but not whole. And not all of him had made it back. Strangely enough, his lungs were filled with blooms of sweet violets that seemingly grew inside his lungs. The roots thrived in the tissues of his bronchus. From there it stemmed all the way up and housed the flowers to his oral and nasal cavity. You saw it yourself.

The military offered no explanation beyond “honorable death.” No apology. No real answers.

Only this: A place where the broken were sent. A place where something had gone wrong.

Braeriach Hall.

Braeriach Hall did not rise. It hovered, watching. Stone-dark and shrouded by moss and memory, it loomed through the trees like a secret remembered too late. The light never quite touched its corners; instead, it clung to the heavy eaves and watchful windows as if afraid to trespass.

The Hall had the shape of a fortress, but none of the warmth of safety. It was a place built to endure. Not to welcome. Ivy curled against the walls like veins beneath tired skin. The upper windows were narrow and silent, as though the building itself held its breath.

You could look upon it for hours and still not be certain if it had ever been truly alive.

They needed staff. But you weren't just here to serve tea or fluff pillows.

You came with questions buried beneath your skirts and grief sewn into every hem.

---

The Hall rose from the moor like a wound stitched into the hills, gray stone darkened by rain, slate roof veined with moss. Windows like watchful eyes. No warmth. No music. Just wind, and rot, and secrets.

They said it was a sanatorium now. A convalescent home for veterans.

But whispers lingered. Strange tales muttered behind locked doors. Of men whose lungs failed in bloom. Of fevered nights and breath laced with petals. Not wounds of flesh, they said, but something far crueler. Quiet. Hidden. And growing.

You didn’t believe it. Not at first.

---

They told you his name before you saw him: Sergeant John MacTavish. Twenty-six. Highland-born. Decorated. Damned.

He’d been in the same battalion as your brother. Fought in the same frostbitten hell.

The letter didn’t say that, but you found his name scribbled beside Elias’s in a report stamped “Confidential” and left unsupervised.

That’s how you knew. And that’s why you asked to care for him.

---

You found him in the west wing.

Alone.

His hands were wrapped in linen, knuckles bruised from old fights or new nightmares. His hair was dark and unkempt, and he sat too still for someone awake. The window cast his face in silver and shadow, cheekbones drawn sharp, eyes heavy with storms you dared not name.

He didn’t look at you.

Didn’t need to.

Pain hung around him like incense.

---

You sat across from him. Not close. Not distant. He did not speak.

Neither did you.

But in the silence, you thought of Elias. Of the way he’d whispered in his sleep before they took him. Of the petals you found on his pillow before he was sent for war. Lavender. Violet. Rose.

After his death, the doctors said it was infection. That war does strange things to a man’s lungs.

But you had watched him bleed color. And you knew better.

You were not here to save Sergeant MacTavish. You were here to watch. To gather whatever the doctors missed or refused to name. You didn’t know what ailed him, not yet. He was silent, whole, and breathing. But so was Elias once. And if something unspeakable had begun to bloom in his lungs too, you would be there when the first petal fell.

And maybe. Maybe, he wouldn't suffer the same fate as Elias.

---

He exhaled. A ragged, too-human sound. And though he didn’t look at you, you felt something shift.

Recognition. Resentment. Or ruin—you couldn’t say.

But you stayed.

Not because you were brave. Not because you were kind.