The Four Ancient Intelligences Epi 01 - The Writer With Nobody

My name is Arin, and I was a writer, though not the kind whose name anyone knew. I had no big office, no famous publisher, no wall of awards, just a small rented room above an old tea shop, and most days I wasn't even sure I could call myself a real writer at all. I was an orphan. I never knew my parents, and I grew up drifting between hostels and borrowed homes until I was old enough to fend for myself. Eventually I started writing small pieces for a local newspaper, comic strips, mystery columns, the occasional little horror story and sometimes they even published them. My dream was simple, to become the best horror writer in the world. But lately there had been one problem standing in my way. I had stopped getting ideas.

Every night I sat in front of my old computer and stared at a blank page, whispering, "Come on, Arin. Just one good idea." Nothing came. I deleted half-written stories, threw away notebooks, and spent hours online searching for haunted houses, abandoned hospitals, strange forests, ghost stories, missing persons cases, anything that might spark something. One night I found an old article, years old, about an abandoned house outside a village where a family of four had died. The report said all four had apparently taken their own lives, but the strange part was how they were found, hanging together from a massive tree behind the house. The cop had never explained it, and the house had sat empty ever since.

I stared at the photograph for a long time. Broken windows, blackened walls, that huge tree looming behind it, darkness pooling in every window. Something clicked in my mind, what if I stayed there? I laughed at the thought, then stopped laughing, because it suddenly didn't feel ridiculous at all. A scary place, a real mystery, a lonely house, and a writer desperate for a story, it was exactly what I needed. I packed my bag the next morning, with no idea that I wasn't going there to find a horror story. I was going there to become part of one.