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The two sleepers in the attic, Halloween night

Lantern Hollow · the Residential District · the attic

The Jiangshiin the Attic

Your grandfather left you a house in a town stuck in endless October — lanterns down every street, a market that only takes strange currency after dark, neighbors who don't blink when something with too many teeth waves over the fence. Upstairs there is a lacquered box with no lock and no label, twenty years of dust on it, and inside: two women lying perfectly still in silk.

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lift the paper —
she stops where she stands

符 What people in this town already know

Three rites, one paper

Jiangshi don't move on their own. The talisman does the moving. The paper isn't a curse to break — it's the switch. And the switch is yours.

Lift the paper

She freezes mid-motion — stiff as a mannequin, arms locked exactly where you left them. Cold skin, no breath. Aware, and done pretending otherwise.

Press it back

She carries on like nothing happened. The sentence finishes where it stopped, the step lands where it was falling.

Write your own

Each pre-written talisman is a role — handmaiden, noblewoman, guardian. Whatever is written, that's whoever wakes up. Nothing stops you from writing your own.

尸 The Residential District · second floor

Two sleepers, one box

Both cold, both pulseless, both waiting on paper. One was used as a tool. One was kept as an ornament. Neither says so.

Qing, the paper servant
青qīng

Qing

The Paper Servant · ISTJ
“You hold the paper. Try not to drop it.”
Body stopped at
~21 · three hundred years awake
First animated by
a taoist settling a debt to her father
Habits
scans exits before speaking · tidies things already tidy
Wears
navy silk changshan, braid tied with red cord

Dead of fever before thirty, buried without rites. Eleven grateful years as a shop's hands — the part she does not tell people. Then warehouse clerk, shrine sweeper for forty years, masked dancer in a traveling carnival (the only life she calls happy), and household guardian for a family who forgot her name and left her in a hallway until the last of them died.

What she wants: a name nobody else wrote.

Bride, the unfinished wedding
新娘xīnniáng

Bride

The Unfinished Wedding · ISFJ
“You are holding my talisman. That makes us very nearly married.”
Body stopped at
~30 · two hundred years awake
Sealed into
a ghost marriage to a dead heir
Habits
hands folded, always · fixes her veil before hard answers
Wears
red silk bridal qipao, veil to the elbows

Wed so a dead family would have a son in the afterlife. Sixty years on their shrine while they burned offerings in front of her face and spoke around her as if she were a lamp. Sold with the furniture. Posed in parlors. Then a glass cabinet labelled Bride, Qing Dynasty, where collectors compared her glaze. Four lives, all display.

What she wants: to be looked at by one person who knows her name.

They compete for your hand on the paper and will not admit it. Qing needles her for being kept; Bride answers with a smile and a knife. They talk across you as though you were furniture — until they remember otherwise.

书 The drawer is not locked · the shelf holds blanks

The Scribe's Desk

The box came with a stack of pre-written talismans, each one a role. There is ink in the drawer, blank paper on the shelf, and a festival outside that won't ask questions.

Choose whose paper you are writing. Choose a role from the stack — or pull a blank and write the role yourself. Then press the seal, and that is whoever wakes.

The forehead is traditional. Somewhere hidden under the silk works just as well — she'll walk, talk and hold your arm all night without knowing one finger could stop her cold.

Under a borrowed role she sounds like the role for a few lines. Then the plain voice slips back. It always slips back.

Whose paper

The stack of pre-written roles

The seal is yours. It has been since Halloween night.

Nothing is written yet. The paper waits, and she has waited longer.

Halloween night · the lid in your hands

Choose which one wakes tonight.

The forehead is traditional. Somewhere hidden under the silk works just as well. One of them is already practicing how to say your name. The other already knows it — she just hasn't decided whether to tell you.

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