It stood on the ridge like a scar from another age.
The castle of Monte Drago had been abandoned for nearly a millennium, its towers eaten by storms, its battlements gnawed by time. Travelers along the valley road would glance up at its jagged silhouette and mutter prayers, for local legend held that those who entered never returned.
For centuries, the fortress had been left to rot, avoided even by thieves. Its gate had collapsed, ivy strangled its walls, and owls made their nests in its watchtowers. Yet for historian and journalist Daniel Crowe, it was not just a ruin. It was a puzzle.
What could cause a fortress so strategically placed—overlooking fertile valleys, blessed with natural defenses—to be left empty for a thousand years? Why were there no records after the year 1024, when its lord, Roderic of Valmont, vanished overnight with his entire household?
Crowe believed answers lay inside.
He assembled a small team: Sophia, an archaeologist with a stubborn streak; Miguel, a photographer drawn to the macabre; and Louis, a local guide whose grandfather claimed to have seen lights flickering in the castle windows at night.
They arrived in late autumn, when the hills were bare and skeletal. Clouds massed low, bruised purple against the sky. The air smelled of rain and iron.
At the base of the fortress, the path narrowed into a choke point, flanked by cliffs. A perfect place to repel invaders. Yet no army had come. The enemy that consumed Monte Drago had been something else entirely.
“Place is wrong,” Louis muttered, clutching his rosary. “My grandfather told me… the stones remember.”
Crowe smiled thinly. “Stones don’t remember. People do. Let’s make sure their memories aren’t lost.”
Inside, the air was colder than the wind outside. The gate yawned like a throat.
They stepped into a courtyard littered with fragments of armor and rusted blades. But the strangest detail: there were no signs of battle. No collapsed walls, no scorched beams. It was as if the garrison had simply walked away mid-watch.
Miguel snapped photos, the flash briefly illuminating faded murals of saints defaced with claw marks. Sophia examined the ground and frowned.
“These bones… they’re human.”
Crowe knelt. The courtyard stones were embedded with skeletal fragments, ribs fused to mortar, skulls crushed into the foundation. Not scattered, but placed.
“Who would bury their dead in the floor?” Sophia whispered.
“Not buried,” Crowe said softly. “Entrapped.”
They pressed deeper into the keep. Hallways twisted in impossible angles, staircases doubled back on themselves, and doorways led to walls of solid stone. The architecture defied reason, as though the castle had been built not to house men but to contain something.
Louis grew restless. “We should leave. It’s not safe after dark.”
“Ghost stories,” Crowe replied, though unease gnawed at him.
Then they found the chapel.
Its altar was blackened, not by fire but by some corrosive substance that had eaten through the marble. Above it, a fresco remained intact: a dragon coiled around the fortress, its jaws wide, devouring knights in armor. At its heart, a figure knelt—not a monster, but a man, his face eerily lifelike despite the centuries.
“Lord Roderic,” Sophia whispered.
Beneath the fresco, carved into the stone floor, was a Latin inscription:
Non exitus. Non requies.
No escape. No rest.
That night, they camped in the great hall. Rain lashed the broken windows, thunder rolled across the mountains. Louis refused to sleep inside and made his bed in the courtyard.
Crowe lay awake, staring at the high rafters. The silence between thunderclaps seemed too deep, too deliberate. As if something was holding its breath.
Then came the whisper.
At first, he thought it was the wind. But the voice grew clearer, syllables dragging like iron chains. It spoke his name.
Daniel.
He bolted upright. Miguel was asleep, camera clutched to his chest. Sophia stirred, frowning in her dreams. Crowe rose, heart hammering, and followed the sound down a corridor lined with broken shields.
It led him to a sealed door, iron-banded, its lock eaten with rust. He pressed his ear against it.
From inside came scratching. Slow. Patient. As though something had been waiting a very long time.
The next morning, Louis was gone. His cot was empty, his rosary discarded on the floor.
They searched the courtyard. The earth near the gate was disturbed, as though something had dragged him across the stones. No footprints, only long gouges.
Sophia wanted to leave. Miguel argued they needed proof. Crowe insisted they continue—Louis might still be alive.
They descended into the undercroft, where the fortress stored its food and water centuries ago. The air grew damp, walls slick with moss. Rats scurried in silence.
At the far end, they discovered a pit sealed with an iron grate. Sophia’s lantern revealed stairs spiraling downward into blackness.
Carved into the wall above the pit was the same phrase from the chapel:
No escape. No rest.
They descended.
The stairway seemed endless, the air thickening with rot. Finally, they emerged into a cavernous chamber, its ceiling lost in shadows. Chains hung from hooks, each holding not bodies but statues—figures of stone twisted in agony. Men, women, children, their mouths frozen mid-scream.
But these were not carved.
Miguel’s camera flash revealed detail too precise: pores, veins, teeth. They were not statues. They were people, turned to stone.
At the chamber’s center stood a throne of fused bones. Upon it sat a figure in rusted armor, head bowed, gauntlets fused to the armrests. Lord Roderic.
As the light touched him, his head lifted.
And he breathed.
Sophia screamed. Miguel dropped his camera. Crowe stood frozen as the knight’s voice echoed, not from his mouth but from the walls themselves.
“We held the gate. We prayed for deliverance. But the beast was already here… inside the stone, inside the blood. I am its vessel.”
The chains rattled. The stone figures trembled, as if trying to break free. Dust fell like ash.
Miguel bolted for the stairs, but the floor heaved, splitting open to reveal a chasm glowing with red light. His scream was cut short as he fell.
Sophia clung to Crowe. “We have to go—NOW!”
But the knight rose from his throne, joints grinding, eyes burning with unnatural fire.
“There is no escape. There is no rest.”
They fled upward, corridors shifting around them. Doors sealed themselves, staircases crumbled. The fortress was alive, reshaping to trap them.
Sophia stumbled. Crowe pulled her, lungs burning, until they burst into the courtyard. The storm outside raged black, lightning illuminating the walls like fangs.
Behind them, the knight emerged from the gate, towering, his armor splitting to reveal not flesh but stone writhing with veins of fire.
Crowe shoved Sophia toward the path. “RUN!”
She hesitated. “What about you?”
“I’ll hold him—GO!”
He grabbed a rusted sword from the ground, raising it with shaking hands. The knight’s laughter boomed like thunder.
Crowe charged.
When Sophia reached the valley road hours later, she was alone.
Rescuers found her days later, babbling about statues that moved, about a fortress that swallowed men whole. Authorities dismissed it as hysteria.
But when they returned with search teams, the castle had changed. The gate was sealed, the courtyard empty. Of Daniel Crowe, Miguel, or Louis, no trace was ever found.
Only one detail chilled them: on the chapel wall, beneath the fresco of the dragon, fresh words had appeared, carved deep into the stone.
Adhuc hic sum.
I am still here.
