1069: Story 1069: The Bleeding Portrait 1069: Story 1069: The Bleeding Portrait They say the portrait weeps.
High on the cliffs of Dagger’s Point stands the Marrowick Estate, abandoned since the Great Purge.
The house itself is little more than a skeleton of splintered timbers and ash-streaked stone, but inside its grand, rotting parlor still hangs one immaculate thing—a portrait of Lady Selene Marrowick, untouched by flame, framed in obsidian, and forever crying blood.
In life, Selene was an occult painter—renowned, reclusive, and possibly mad.
Her final piece was said to be her own soul rendered on canvas.
As the story goes, she locked herself in the studio with her paints, her blood, and something else—something that spoke to her from the walls, begging to be remembered.
She emerged days later, pale and shriveled, dragging a canvas covered in silk.
She died before it was unveiled.
Her husband opened it at the funeral.
He screamed.
His eyes burst in his skull.
He clawed out his own heart.
And the blood—so much blood—ran from the frame and never stopped.
Fast-forward to now: Dr.
Mina Thorne, folklore archivist and collector of “haunted truths,” arrives at Marrowick under blood moonlight.
She’s heard the stories.
She’s written about them.
But now she wants proof—proof of a curse so potent, it survives death and fire and time.
She enters the parlor at midnight.
The portrait waits.
Selene’s eyes shimmer as if wet with fresh tears.
The red seeps from beneath the frame, staining the floor like it always has, though no one can say why.
Mina watches.
Measures.
Photographs.
Until the crying stops.
Then Selene’s lips… twitch.
A whisper hisses through the room:
“Let me out.”
The paint begins to peel, slowly at first, then rapidly—as if the canvas is molting skin.
A strange wind fills the room though every door remains shut.
Mina stares, paralyzed, as the portrait reshapes.
Selene’s face changes, becoming more real… more alive.
And the blood begins to rise.
Not from the frame this time—from Mina’s nose.
The walls pulse like organs.
The chandelier melts into strands of hair.
The floor beneath her turns warm and wet.
Mina screams, but her voice doesn’t echo—it gets swallowed.
From the canvas, a pale hand pushes through.
Selene isn’t in the portrait anymore.
She’s in the room.
By morning, the estate is quiet once more.
Mina is never found.
But a new painting hangs beside the original now—its colors still fresh, the brushstrokes erratic and wild.
It shows a woman screaming in a house of bleeding walls, her eyes glassy, her soul stolen mid-breath.
And yes… it cries too.
Not tears this time.
Ink.
Black.
Endless.
Whispering.