Myrethorn Elgvarin House and the Parlour That Kept Its Last Cooling Teacup

The parlour of Myrethorn Elgvarin House holds the softened residue of a day that never properly concluded—teacups cooling, fabrics left mid-task, arithmetic pages resting beneath untouched dust.

The Gentle, Earnest Pattern of Lurana Elgvarin

Lurana Elgvarin, tutor of domestic sums and letter-shaping, shared the house with her nephew Rhalden, a clasp-inscriber whose contracts dwindled until his tools lay quiet. Lurana lived by careful habit: morning slips arranged in graded stacks, midday hemming by the window alcove, evening tea warming beside her lesson notes.

She favored predictable sequences—quills trimmed evenly, blotters rotated to clean edges, linens folded with deliberate patience. But as Rhalden’s earnings shrank and her joints stiffened in harsher winters, her once-steady rhythm lost definition. Slates went unreviewed, hems waited in silent piles, thread baskets tangled into muted disorder. Their debts grew unmanageable, and the departure that followed left the house to settle into an unbroken hush.

The Passage Where Her Certainty First Faltered

Down the inner south corridor, Lurana’s boots lean stiffly against the wainscot, leather hardened by disuse. Rhalden’s unfinished clasp-inscribing blanks scatter near the floor seam, their etched marks ghostlike beneath a film of dust. A dropped dust cloth rests where her hand numbed and never returned to finish the corridor.

The Scullery Settling Into Its Shape of Silence

Inside the scullery, mismatched cups hold pale rings of dried tea. A chalk-lined kettle rests beside the river stone she once used to soothe her palms. Her linen apron hangs slack on its peg, folds surrendered into shapeless drape.

At the far end rests Lurana’s final corrected slip—ink faint, line wavering—beneath the shawl she meant to reclaim. Rhalden’s unfinished clasp blank lies beside it. Myrethorn Elgvarin House remains dim, still, and abandoned.