4345.97 · April 7, 2025 AD
The Night The Estate Burned
Nathan steps from the portal onto Campbell ground with thirty minutes to change everything. The White Rose Society is coming. In the greenhouse, Daniel packs generations of secrets into crates. In the house, three sisters choose what pieces of their lives can fit in a backpack. Then the headlights appear at the gates. Then the flames. Then the explosions. By the time they find the hidden tunnel beneath the garden, home has become ash and memory.
The portal deposits Nathan onto dew-damp grass with a countdown already running.
Daniel doesn't ask how Nathan knows. He starts packing—seeds, soil samples, notebooks containing generations of cultivation secrets. The questions can wait. The White Rose Society cannot.
In the house, three sisters learn what it means to reduce a life to essentials. Isla fills a duffel with practical necessities. Maeve grabs her portfolio—the pieces that might be all that remains of rooms she's sketched a hundred times. Rowan takes her hard drives, her phone charger, and Mr Whiskers, because some comforts matter more than logic.
They cross the grounds as headlights flicker through the trees. The greenhouse glows ahead. Behind them, their childhood home waits unknowing.
Then the first explosion tears through the east wing.
Fire crowns the roof. Windows shatter outward. The kitchen where they ate breakfast that morning becomes kindling. The dining room table where Rowan built her first circuit board feeds flames that turn memory to carbon.
Nathan leads them to a weathered stone slab covered in ivy. Beneath it, stairs descend into darkness.
Behind them, everything burns.
Before them, the earth opens.
