The Hollow Crown
When Eleanor Vance arrives at Ashworth Manor, the moors are already weeping rain against black stone. She has come to bury her uncle Callum and claim what remains of her family's crumbling estate, but the villagers won't meet her eyes, and the house itself seems to breathe. Her uncle's solicitor, Tobias Marsh, hands her a key to the ruined west wing and refuses to say what lies inside. Only Father Brennan, the old priest whose faith has been worn thin by decades of confession, hints at the truth: the Vances have carried a secret for generations, and every heir who learned it died badly. Deep in the manor's foundations, Eleanor finds the first Morcant's journal, pages written in a hand that trembles, describing a hollow crown forged from something that should never have been named. Mathilde Vance, the last to wear it, wrote only one line before she vanished: the crown does not rest with the dead. As the storms close in and the manor begins to shift around her, Eleanor must choose whether to continue her bloodline's bargain, or become the next name the Morcant claims.