The Mask of Three
A Story from The Chronicles of Blackwood Hollow
A new darkness unfolds today. Inspired by
’s haunting Mask Image Prompt #3, I’ve conjured The Mask of Three, a story that delves into twisted ambition and the relentless grip of ancient power.If you’ve read my previous story, Blackwood Hollow - Children of The Blood Moon, you might just recognize this world and some familiar faces... or rather, memories. If you haven’t, and you’re curious about the origins of the Old One and the Rememberer, you can catch up here.
Prepare yourself. The threads of fate are more tangled than you know.
The dust motes danced in the sparse sunlight that pierced the grimy panes of the Coven House, illuminating the decay. Not a decay of rot, but of spirit, a gnawing emptiness that mirrored my own. I stood by the mantelpiece, my fingers tracing the cold, polished wood, my gaze fixed on the mask that hung there. It was gold, forged not of metal, but of power, shimmering with a composite of white and black, crowned with six curled horns. A single black tear, perpetually fresh, tracked down its unsettling jester smile. It was the combined mask of our lineage. My mask. My broken promise.
It had been years since I’d last seen the two masks hanging there, empty and inert, a testament to their folly. Now, opposite the hearth, they hung in a painting, eternally trapped: the white, the black, a lingering remnant of the power they once possessed. There was a fleeting moment, a ghost of a memory, when a third had existed, bright and vibrant—though now, of course, there was but one. The memory was fresh, as vivid as the scars I now bore.
Anya and Blythe, the two sisters who then walked the dying earth of our withered village, were the architects of this desolation. Their Coven House, once a beacon of ancient magic, felt like a tomb. Outside, the fields stretched sickly brown, the crops refusing to ripen. The livestock coughed a wet, hacking sound. My small, isolated community, once sustained by the whispered charms of the ancestors, withered. Their magic, too, was a pale imitation of its former glory, a faint spark where once a roaring fire had been. It had been like this, the blight spreading, since Celeste vanished. Even the regular sacrifices, once enough to placate the Old One and ensure our prosperity, no longer seemed to suffice. The entity’s hum grew restless, its demands insatiable, and the villagers knew, though they dared not speak it, that their offerings were now barely a tremor against its cosmic hunger. This growing desperation was what finally forced the sisters to look beyond their traditional charms and consider the true, terrible power of their masks.
Celeste. Her name was a sharp ache in my chest, a memory that, like the others I clung to, refused to be silenced. They spoke of her as “lost to the veil,” “claimed by the older spirits.” This was a version of truth that eased the hollow parts of Anya and Blythe’s own minds, as they tried to forget their true sin. To the Coven, she simply ceased to be, like the fading memory of a dream. But I remembered. I remembered everything.
My father, desperate to find a cure for my “madness”—the villagers’ term for my unwavering memory of those the Old One had consumed, those everyone else had forgotten—had sought out the Coven, risking the strictures against witchcraft that bound Blackwood Hollow. That’s how I met her. Celeste.
She was different from her sisters. While Anya was all sharp angles and colder ambition, and Blythe, a quiet, simmering resentment, Celeste was wildfire and rich earth. Her touch could coax life from barren soil, her voice charming secrets from the wind. She saw my truth, recognized the untainted clarity of my memory, not as a curse, but as something precious, something powerful. She understood my torment, she believed my stories of the vanished. In her eyes, I wasn’t “mad.” I was simply… seeing.
We fell in love with a ferocity that defied their bleak world, a love at first sight that burned away the years of my quiet torment. She made me feel whole, understood. We were two halves of a truth no one else comprehended. She wanted to spend every waking moment with me, to learn, to simply be. And that, I would later understand, was her sin in her sisters’ eyes.
It bred resentment, a cold, venomous envy in Anya and Blythe. Celeste, the heart of their magic, the vessel closest to the ancient Root that fed their power, was choosing me over them, over the Coven’s demands. I understand now that they must have seen her as a limit, a bottleneck to their ambition, a soul too connected to humanity for their dark designs. They, driven by a hunger that twisted even the old texts, must have believed in a solitary power, a lineage made stronger by singular will. What foolish whispers from a world that craved control, not balance.
So, they plotted. I can see it clearly now, piecing together the fragments from my cell, the glimmers I’d caught during their fleeting visits as three, and the horrific logic of their desperation. It was years ago, under a cold, indifferent moon, not unlike this one. Anya and Blythe, impatient, hungry for more, decided to rid themselves of their ties to her. They must have believed that if they could absorb Celeste’s essence, merge her unbridled power with their own, they would become truly unstoppable.
The ritual was brutal, a perversion of ancient binding spells. They had worn the masks, their faces contorted into mocking grins by the horned wood, as they forced the essence from their sister. I know Celeste had screamed, because even now, in the Coven House’s silence, the sound rang in my ears, a phantom echo to the screams of those vanished in my own Hollow. Her body had dissolved, not into mist, but into a shimmering, vibrant energy that they tried to pull into themselves.
But the moment Celeste’s last spark flickered, their own magic had buckled. The surge of power they craved had become a violent implosion. The very masks, meant to channel and amplify, had gone cold, inert, and Celeste’s mask, the third of the trinity, crumbled to dust in Anya’s trembling hands. The other two remained, but their power was broken. They had not absorbed Celeste; they had merely destroyed the vital third pillar of their trinity. Without the three, their magic was nothing. A hollow echo. The blight spread, deeper and faster than before, as the Old One grew ever more restless. Even the regular sacrifices, once enough to placate it, now seemed only to enrage it further.
Their desperation grew, their strength failed. They would have tried everything. Gruesome rituals, I am sure of it now. Sacrifices of their remaining farm animals, their own blood drawn until their veins felt empty. They chanted forbidden words, their voices surely growing hoarse, their eyes sunken from each failing attempt. They tried, I know, to reanimate Celeste, to bind her essence into a new vessel, a new mask. But it was useless. The magic, without the living balance of three, was a dead thing, demanding all and offering no reciprocation. Each failed attempt must have left them weaker, more gaunt, their own human features subtly sharpening, drawing closer to the unsettling, unyielding contours of the masks they wore, the masks I later saw distorting their own reflections into something harder, colder, stranger.
They came to understand the bitter truth: the Old One’s power, the very Root of their magic, demanded a trinity. Elder Lyra, their grandmother, had always preached of the sacred, unbreakable weave—Maiden, Mother, Crone. Or perhaps, the mind, the spirit, the body. By severing one, they had unraveled themselves. The dying community was merely a reflection of their own internal decay. They must have then searched the oldest texts, those dusty, skin-bound tomes, for a solution, for any way to reclaim their lost power. It was there they would have found it, the rare anomaly: a Rememberer. A mind that, through some twist of fate or cruel immunity, defied the Old One’s insidious erasure. A living node of untainted reality, a key to unlock what had been irrevocably taken. Their desperation would have driven them to seek this knowledge previously ignored.
It was then they came for me. I was that Rememberer, the one who held a strange resistance to the Old One’s quiet consume. They knew of my madness, my fervent, unwavering belief in a mother no one else recalled—a madness Celeste had not only believed but loved. They also knew of my undying love for their sister. I was the vital, unwilling component for their final, terrible ritual.
They knew exactly where to find me. They had visited often with Celeste in the days before her… vanishing. They arrived just as the last vestige of the Harvest Moon began its wane, finding me isolated in my crude stone cell, carving desperate truths into the walls. My eyes held the wild, piercing clarity of one who saw too much, and my skin bore no visible mark—only the invisible, deeper mark of the Rememberer.
It had been unnervingly easy to take me; the villagers, in their Old One-sanctioned blindness, saw nothing amiss, their minds smoothly re-writing my absence just as they had my mother’s. They brought me back to the Coven House, not as a prisoner, but as a sacred, albeit unwilling, tool. I had fought, screaming for Celeste to somehow return and help me, but my strength, already frayed by my unique sanity, was no match for their masked determination.
They addressed me cautiously, their voices laced with a false deference, their eyes still holding the cold fire of their ambition. They promised Celeste’s return, whispered of the love we shared, of my chance to reunite with the one soul who had truly seen me. I knew they were lying; I saw the cold calculation in their eyes, the way their lips twisted beneath the masks as they spoke of love. But the desperation to see her, even for a moment, to validate that my memories were not just carvings on a cell wall, was a blinding light. I would help them. And then… I would have my revenge.
“The Blood Moon rises tonight,” Anya had said, her voice hollow, eyes fixed on the deepening twilight. The celestial conjunction, the same one that had mocked their ambition years ago, now offered a final, desperate chance. It was the night for their final, terrible ritual. It involved the remnants of Celeste, gathered over years from the blighted soil where her essence had dispersed. And a willing sacrifice of a part of themselves that still clung to humanity.
They moved to the ancient standing stones at the edge of the dying fields, the very ground where Celeste had breathed her last. The air thrummed with a heavy, expectant energy. The blood-red light of the moon bathed the land in an ominous glow. They wore their masks, their faces hidden, their identities already blurring into the ancient wood.
As the chant began, slow and guttural, Anya took a deep breath. She reached for Blythe’s hand, a silent, grim pact passing between them. This was it. The last chance to complete the trinity. To reclaim their power. To become whole again.
And then, as the energy surged, as the third mask began to slowly, horrifyingly, knit itself together from the soil and the fragments of Celeste’s long-scattered being, I felt a terrible vulnerability in the sisters’ focus, a momentary crack in their desperate will. A voice, ancient and vast, echoed in my mind, a sound both internal and all-encompassing, as if the darkness itself spoke, “It is yours. Take the power that is your birthright,” it breathed.
In that instant, my love for Celeste, a blinding desperation moments before, twisted into something else—a sharp, cold blade of purpose. I redirected the raw surge of energy, bending their ritual to my will. My mind, a Rememberer’s untainted wellspring of truth, was a far more potent anchor than their fractured ambition. The coalescing mask, meant for Celeste, began to shift, to flow not from her remnants, but towards me, pulling with it the essences of Anya and Blythe, who screamed, their masked faces contorting in horror. Their forms dissolved, not into shimmering mist, but into dark, swirling motes that streamed towards me, drawn into the golden mask I now clutched. The six horns, two from each original mask, sprouted from its brow, and the single, black tear on its cheek deepened, reflecting not Celeste’s sorrow, but my own cold, triumphant purpose.
The magic roared to life, potent and terrifying, sweeping over the blighted fields, bringing a surge of unnatural green. As I looked at the now-empty spaces where Anya and Blythe had stood, I knew. They were gone. Consumed. The Coven of The Three was complete. And the final torment was theirs.
They had not brought Celeste back, but had merely given the spirit of the three masks a singular vessel. I was that vessel, master of their magic, a worthy embodiment of the Old One’s power over truth and memory. My love for Celeste, a phantom ache, was the price. But the power… the power was absolute. I would be the ultimate Rememberer, and I would make this world remember. Or forget. All at my command. The villagers, the Old One itself, would finally face…
Their true purpose.
This is a story of deep magic, and I love stories about deep magic. The enchantments, the ceremonies, the things hung about the house all add immeasurably to an atmosphere of unescapable horror. Good work, L.G.
I will never look at a Venetian mask like same way again..shudder…