THE ASHMOOR LEGACY

​The summons didn't arrive with a black wax seal or heavy, cream-colored stationery. It landed in Liam’s inbox like a digital shard of ice: a terse, legal email from a firm in Zurich.

​The name "Ashmoor Hall" hit him like a physical blow. It was a ghost, a dark fairy tale from his mother’s fractured past—a place she had fled, a history she had buried so deep that speaking its name was forbidden. Before her untimely death, the only thing she’d ever said about her family was that they were "hollow." Now, Liam was beginning to understand.

​His grandfather, the formidable and reclusive industrialist Alistair Blackwood, was dead.

​The terms of the email were as cold and absolute as the man Liam had never met: all potential heirs must gather at the ancestral estate for the reading of the will. It wasn't an invitation; it was a command.

​The drive into the remote Scottish Highlands was a descent. The vibrant greens and purple heather-clad hills of the lowlands slowly surrendered, replaced by a landscape that felt hostile and ancient. Gnarled, skeletal pines clawed at the sky, and the granite peaks were jagged, like broken teeth. A perpetual, bone-chilling mist clung to everything, reducing the world to shades of grey and shadow.

​When the silhouette of Ashmoor Hall finally pierced the gloom, Liam’s stomach didn't just drop; it felt like it had been surgically removed.

​It was a brutalist monolith of dark, weeping stone. It wasn't a home. It was a scar, an angular, arrogant wound inflicted upon the wild landscape. Its massive windows, slick with rain, reflected the gloomy sky like polished slate, seeing everything and revealing nothing. Liam parked the car, the crunch of gravel sounding obscenely loud, and felt a primal, gut-twisting dread. He wanted to put the car in reverse. He should have.

​He wasn't the only soul damned by this inheritance. They gathered in the main hall, a vast, minimalist space that was cold on a cellular level. His sister, Elara, stood with her arms crossed, her sharp-tongued cynicism a familiar armor. She looked at the stark, modern art on the walls with a practiced sneer. And then there was the other one: Professor Valerius, a quietly intense man with eyes that didn't seem to blink. An anthropologist, apparently, but his knowledge of the Blackwood family history, which he’d briefly shared, seemed far too intimate for comfort. He wasn't just observing; he was cataloging them.

​The executor, a man named Mr. Sterling who had the stiff demeanor of a Victorian funeral director, laid out the rules. He spoke under the cold, abstract gaze of a massive portrait of Alistair Blackwood.

​The rules were a study in psychological cruelty.

​The entire fortune—the shares, the global holdings, the art, Ashmoor Hall itself—would not be split. It would be bestowed upon a single heir.

​The one who could endure seven consecutive nights within the soundproofed, isolated walls of Ashmoor Hall.

​To step off the property was to forfeit everything. The first to break, to flee, would lose all. Sterling’s gaze swept over them, and Liam thought he saw a flicker of amusement in those dead eyes. "The game," Sterling called it, "begins at nightfall."

​The silence of the hall was the first weapon. It was an oppressive, heavy quiet that swallowed sound, pressing in on Liam’s eardrums as he lay in his sleek, sterile, modern bed. He strained against the void, his own heartbeat thudding painfully in his chest.

​Then came the sounds the silence couldn't hide.

​Not whispers. Nothing so cliché. It was a precise, mechanical ticking from deep within the walls, like a dozen antique clocks falling in and out of sync. A dry, metallic heartbeat.

​From the floor above—a room he knew was empty—came three slow, deliberate knocks.

Knock. Pause. Knock. Pause. Knock.

​He tried to rationalize it. It’s the pipes. It's the wind battering this stark structure. This old house is settling.

​But then, through the floor-to-ceiling window of his room, he saw it.

​A figure, tall and impossibly attenuated, stood perfectly still between the mist-wreathed pines. It was man-shaped, but wrong. Its limbs were too long, its posture a study in broken geometry, its form seeming to blend and ripple with the shadows. It was there, watching the house—watching him.

​Liam blinked, a cold sweat breaking out on his neck.

​And it was gone. It didn't walk away. It didn't run. It simply ceased to be.

​He realized his mistake. He had chalked the sounds up to an "old house," but Ashmoor Hall wasn't old. It was a modern, concrete fortress. The sounds weren't the pipes. The figure wasn't the wind.

​This was not a house with a ghost. It was a living, breathing entity of malice, a trap built by his grandfather. And as the ticking in the walls grew louder, seeming to sync with his own terrified pulse, Liam understood.

​Alistair Blackwood wasn't just testing them. He was feeding something.

​The first night had only just begun.