Chapter 4: The Mark of the Inheritor

Chapter 4: The Mark of the Inheritor

The world dissolved into a cacophony of terror. A collective scream tore through the hall as Hermann Blatzer lunged. Maxwell was a statue of ice, his mind screaming a command to move that his body refused to obey. The icy fingers, impossibly strong, slammed into his chest. It wasn't a push; it was a brand. The absolute cold from the corpse’s forehead was now a focused, searing point of agony that seemed to burn straight through his ribs and into his soul.

Then, chaos erupted. The ring of silent villagers broke. People scrambled backwards, knocking over benches and snuffing out candles, plunging the hall into a maelstrom of shadow and shrieking panic. Through the pandemonium, Maxwell heard a splintering crash—the great oak table overturning.

Before he could fall, a grip of iron clamped onto his arm. It was the burly man who had escorted him from his room. His face was grim, his jaw set, but his eyes held no panic. There was only a grim, practiced efficiency. He yanked Maxwell backward, dragging him away from the flailing corpse as another man, his brother perhaps, moved in with a heavy wooden pew, using it like a shield.

“Get him out!” Elsbeth’s voice cut through the noise, sharp and commanding. She was not screaming. She was directing, managing the crisis with a chilling authority.

Maxwell’s legs were useless, stumbling over the uneven floorboards. He was a dead weight, his mind reeling from the supernatural assault. The last thing he saw before being hauled through the doorway was the spectral, milky-grey glow of Hermann Blatzer’s eyes, fixed on him even as two men wrestled with the reanimated body. Then the heavy doors slammed shut, muffling the sounds of the struggle, and the world went black.

He awoke with a gasp, his body jerking upright. He was in his room at the inn, lying on top of the covers of the lumpy bed. The silence was absolute, a stark contrast to the memory of screams and crashing wood. For a delirious moment, he prayed it was a nightmare, a stress-induced hallucination brought on by the creepy village and its morbid folklore.

But the feeling in his chest was undeniable.

He scrambled to pull up his sweater and the thermal shirt beneath. His skin was pale and unmarked, but a patch of flesh directly over his heart radiated a deep, piercing cold that felt, paradoxically, like a burn. It was a psychic wound, an invisible brand left by the dead man’s touch. When he pressed his own warm fingers to the spot, they recoiled as if from a block of dry ice. It was real. The cold was inside him now.

Panic, cold and sharp, clawed at his throat. He had to get out. Not later, not in the morning. Now. He didn't care about the five thousand euros, he didn't care about the translation. He cared only about putting as much distance as possible between himself and the frozen, hateful village of Steinwald.

As he fumbled for his boots, his gaze fell on the nightstand. The mimeographed instruction sheet lay where he had left it. But something was different. A faint, sickly violet shimmer clung to the paper, a barely-there aura that pulsed with a slow, rhythmic light, like a dying heartbeat. Maxwell squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head, convinced his mind was playing tricks on him. He looked again.

The glow was still there.

He looked around the room, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against the icy patch on his chest. The brass handle on his door had the same faint, spectral sheen. So did the spine of the old guest ledger sitting on the small desk in the corner. It wasn't random. It was specific. These were all objects connected to the Blatzers, to the inn, to the nightmare he had just endured.

The dead man’s touch hadn’t just left a mark on his skin; it had altered his perception. It had tuned his senses to some horrifying, unseen frequency. He could see the ghost’s lingering influence, a stain left on the physical world. This wasn't a gift. It was a curse. A symptom of the infection he had received.

The thought galvanized him. He shoved his feet into his boots, not bothering with the laces. He threw his few belongings into his duffel bag, his hands shaking so violently he could barely grasp his toothbrush. The instructions, the awakened corpse, the unnatural sight—it was a cascade of insanity, and escape was the only rational response.

He slung the bag over his shoulder and wrenched his door open. The hallway was dark and silent. He crept down the creaking stairs, every step an agony of suspense, expecting Elsbeth or one of her monstrous kin to appear at any moment. The main room was empty, the fire in the hearth burned down to glowing orange embers. The heavy oak door to the outside was right there. Freedom.

He reached it, his hand closing around the cold iron latch. He didn't pause. He pulled the door inward and was met not with the cold, quiet night, but with a solid wall of roaring, blinding white.

A violent blizzard had descended upon Steinwald. The wind howled like a banshee, a physical force that slammed into him, driving needle-sharp ice crystals into his face. He couldn't see more than two feet in front of him. The world beyond the inn's doorstep had been erased, replaced by a churning, white vortex. The snow wasn't just falling; it was attacking. He took one stumbling step out and was nearly knocked off his feet, the drifts already halfway up his shins.

It was impossible. He couldn’t walk ten feet in this, let alone find the road out of the valley. The mountains that had seemed merely judgmental on his arrival had now become his prison walls. The blizzard was the bars on his cell.

“I wouldn’t go out there, Herr Thorne.”

The voice was soft, melodic, and utterly terrifying. Maxwell spun around, his heart seizing. Elsbeth Blatzer stood at the bottom of the stairs, holding a kerosene lantern. The warm light cast her face in flickering shadows, making her motherly smile look like a predatory grimace. She wasn't surprised to see him. She had been waiting.

“You’ll catch your death,” she said, her tone dripping with false concern.

“What was that?” Maxwell’s voice was a ragged whisper. “What in God’s name was that thing in the hall?”

Elsbeth’s smile didn’t waver. “That was my father. Expressing his final wishes.” She took a step closer, the lantern light glinting off her cold, green eyes. “The blizzard is a blessing. The mountains are protecting us. Keeping us safe until Father’s business is concluded.”

Her words from his arrival echoed in his memory: They keep the world out. And they keep us… in.

He was trapped. Trapped in a village of necromancers, marked by a vengeful ghost, afflicted with a horrifying new sight, and imprisoned by a storm that felt as unnatural as the ritual itself. He looked from Elsbeth’s knowing face to the roaring white abyss outside, and understood. The nightmare wasn’t over. It had just begun.