The Morrowinds

Prologue

The Blackwood Gazette

October 12, 1999

TRAGEDY ON HAWTHORNE STREET: FAMILY OF FIVE FOUND DEAD UNDER MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES

"They were a good family."

The house on Hawthorne Street seemed peaceful that morning. Dead flowers, covered in the first frost of autumn, still lined the front yard, their withered petals swaying gently in the cool breeze. The once neatly trimmed lawn had started to disappear under a blanket of red leaves, dropped by the wind and the indifference of time. To any passerby, it would have looked like just another sign of the season's change. A postcard from the end of summer.

But inside those walls, something far colder had settled in.

For days, the curtains at the Morrowind house remained drawn. It wasn't typical. Mr. and Mrs. Morrowind were known for their active social life, especially since they had adopted the five children who, in the town's eyes, had brought joy back into the couple's lives. But for the last week, there had been only silence. The lawn, once meticulously maintained, had grown wild. Mail piled up in the mailbox. No bikes or children's toys in sight. Neighbors began to notice. Whispers floated around the neighborhood, over coffee and grocery store chats, but no one dared knock on the door.

Until the police were called.

When the officers finally entered, what they found wasn't silence — it was death. Five bodies. Four children. One survivor. The sole survivor was found upstairs, sitting in the room he shared with his siblings. The clothes were still neatly folded on the shelves, toys untouched. It was as if time had frozen, trapped between a moment of innocence and the horror that followed. He seemed distant, detached from the reality around him, as if the last hours had been nothing but a dream. But the dried blood on the stairs, the acrid scent of something burnt lingering in the walls... that was all too real. Terribly real.

The tragedy was incomprehensible. There were no signs of struggle, no obvious clues of a break-in or anything that could explain the massacre. The bodies, arranged in an eerie, almost ceremonial way, hinted at something far darker. A crime that made no sense to the officers combing every inch of the house.

But the real questions began when the survivor was taken to the station.He was calm. Disconcertingly calm. His eyes, large and hollow, reflected a stillness that felt wrong for such a situation. An unfathomable void of despair mixed with apathy. Sitting in a cold room, he stared at his hands. Detectives around him tried to pull something, anything, from him that might explain what had happened. Where were his parents? What did he remember from the night before? Who could have done such a thing?

He answered in the same way, almost every time, his voice low, emotionless.

— "I don't know. I think... I think it all happened so fast. They were a good family, for a while."The response hung in the air, cold and lifeless, like an echo of something that was no longer there.

The Morrowinds were a good family. That's what everyone in town said. The couple had moved to Blackwood Hollow after a personal tragedy. Their only daughter, Anna, had died in an accident. The kind of accident people preferred not to talk about. Anna had been only thirteen when she passed, and grief turned the couple into shadows of their former selves. Blackwood Hollow, a small and quiet town, watched from the sidelines as the two slowly unraveled. To those who passed them by, it was hard to see anything more than hollow bodies, trying to carry on.

Blackwood Hollow had always been like that. Quiet. Too small for big tragedies. People rarely locked their doors at night because nothing truly dangerous ever happened. Crime was almost nonexistent, and misfortunes, when they came, always seemed to belong to another world. But the Morrowinds, somehow, changed that. After months of seclusion, they began attending community events again. Smiles returned to their weary faces, and soon, the whole town knew they were adopting children.

Five of them.

Lucas, Ethan, Lyra, Ivy, and Vincent. Each with medical peculiarities that made them different. Physical frailties that raised questions, but never serious concerns. Who cared? The Morrowind family finally seemed to have rebuilt their lives. They now had what many called a perfect home: a house full of life, laughter, and children running down the halls.

To the neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Morrowind had done the impossible — they had turned pain into something new, a chance to start again.

But horror always finds a way to creep through the cracks.Around the neighborhood, everyone noticed the change, but few spoke of it. The silence that had settled over the house was unsettling. No more laughter, no more shouts. Just the wind, blowing dead leaves across the sidewalk.

Inside the interrogation room, the survivor remained still. The detectives, frustrated, glanced at the mirror. On the other side, the darkness seemed to reflect something no one could see. The lead detective, exhausted, leaned forward in his chair and asked the question everyone wanted to ask.

— "What really happened that night?"

The child slowly lifted his eyes, his eyelids heavy with the weight of a story no one wanted to hear.

— "They were a good family, for a while," he murmured.

And then, in a voice even quieter, almost inaudible, he added:

— "Until I killed them."