The Emberfauld House Notes and the Abandoned Mycologist’s Table

A faint scent of dried earth, old paper, and mineral dust lingers. Emberfauld House feels balanced on the unfinished edge of an ordinary day.

The Quiet, Inquisitive Life of Dr.

Thalen Mire Emberfauld
Dr. Thalen Mire Emberfauld, a Victorian mycologist who specialized in cataloging woodland fungi, lived here with his cousin, Seraphine, and her son, Orric. Thalen was a man of whispered curiosity, often returning home with mud-caked boots and notebooks full of sketches—gilled caps, cup-shaped fungi, and delicate shelf growths annotated with delightfully meticulous notes.

In the Mycology Study, field journals lie stacked in ordered towers; specimen jars sit grouped by growth habitat; and delicate dried samples cling to brittle parchment sheets pinned along the far wall. Seraphine’s domestic steadiness softened the home—linens folded in tidy thirds, herbal tonics arranged with care, and mending sorted by season. Orric’s young presence lingers through scattered objects: a wooden puzzle piece carved in the shape of a mushroom, chalk-dusted arithmetic cards, and a folded drawing of Thalen holding a magnifier twice his size.

As Thalen’s cataloging grew more ambitious, his handwriting tightened. Margins crowded with rushed illustrations. Spore prints overlapped across pages. Corrections slashed through observations. When Seraphine fell ill, the house’s remaining structure faltered. After her passing, Orric was taken in by distant family. Thalen’s final notes show tremors—half-drawn diagrams, sentences ending in mid-curve. One day, he left the house for a field outing and never resumed his work. Emberfauld House has remained untouched since.

A Corridor Bent Beneath Years of Quiet Retreat

Upstairs, the corridor reveals the home’s slow retreat from routine. The runner rug droops into soft folds, its once-rich pattern scarcely visible. A hall table holds a cracked spectacles lens, a dried spore slide, and a letter whose final sentence ends abruptly. Pale spaces on the wallpaper mark where botanical diagrams once hung before being removed in a moment of quiet surrender.

A Sewing Room Held in Final Pause

In the Sewing Room, Seraphine’s gentle order remains frozen. A child’s smock lies pinned beneath the treadle machine’s presser foot. Thread spools toppled from alignment have faded into chalk-soft hues. Pincushions stiffened over decades bristle with rusted needles. Folded muslin stiffened at the edges sits exactly where she last placed it.

Behind the lowest crate lies a slip in Thalen’s fading script: “Record spore profiles — tomorrow.” Tomorrow never returned to Emberfauld House.