I Trapped Us In The Wine Cellar Together – Long Pham

Shadows stretched and recoiled with each flicker of the single, sputtering bulb overhead. Mara stood in the center of the room, her hands still trembling from the chill that rose from the barrel’s broken seal. Lena leaned against the damp brick, her arms crossed, eyes narrowed as she tried to make sense of the ghostly tableau before them.

“Did you feel that?” Mara whispered, voice quivering with both awe and fear. “Like the air itself is… breathing.” Lena raised an eyebrow, a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth despite the sweat gathering at her temples. “The cellar’s been breathing for a hundred years, Mardi. We’re not the first to feel it. Remember when your grandfather used to say the vines listen to us? Maybe the vines finally decided to answer back.”

Mara’s eyebrows knitted together. “You think this is… some kind of metaphor?” Lena pushed herself away from the wall and took a step toward the broken barrel. “I think it’s more literal than that. Look at the journal.” She pointed to a weather-worn leather book that lay open on a stone table, its pages yellowed and brittle.

The ink, though faded, still glimmered with the faint copper sheen of fresh blood. Mara knelt and traced a finger over the cramped script, the letters sweeping across her palm like vines creeping over old stone. The journal had been hidden in a false bottom of an old wine crate, discovered after the mist had forced the cellar’s hidden door to close.

Its author, a handwritten name now indecipherable, wrote in a mixture of confident hand and frantic scrawl. “The cellar was built to protect the heart of the vineyard,” Mara read aloud, her voice steadying as she found a rhythm in the words. “In the age of the first harvest, when the vines first wound themselves around the hills of Valcora, our ancestors forged a sanctuary beneath the earth.

Within its stone belly they sealed the Wine of Binding, a potion said to hold the souls of those who drink it, forever entwined with the land.” Lena squatted down, peering at the margin where the ink bled into the paper. “‘Wine of Binding’? You sound like you’re reading a fairy-tale, not a logbook.”

“The wine isn’t a fairy-tale,” Mara replied, eyes narrowing. “It’s the curse you felt earlier. The hallucinations, the violet fog… it’s the binding effect. Whoever drank this wine became part of the vineyard, never to leave. The journal mentions that the wine can also break the binding, if…

The smell of earth and ferment clung to the stone walls like a memory that refused to fade. Mara pulled the slick wooden half-door shut behind her and felt the cool draft of the cellar rush over her skin, carrying with it the faint perfume of grapes that had never quite been turned into wine. The dim light from the single dangling bulb flickered and hummed, casting jealous shadows on rows of aging barrels that seemed to line up like patient sentinels, each one holding a secret the other could not imagine.

Mara leaned against the rough stone, feeling the vibrations of the old house settle into her bones. The house had been her sanctuary since the funeral, a place where the world outside could be ignored, if only for a few stolen hours. The vineyards stretched beyond the horizon, their vines heavy with grapes that promised a future, but the present was a hollow echo of what had once been—an empty chair at the kitchen table, a quiet that grew louder with each passing day.

She slipped on an old pair of leather gloves, their once-soft interior roughened by years of handling corks and bottles, and set a small lantern onto a shelf. Its amber glow illuminated a thin patch of dust that seemed out of place on the cornerstone slab that formed the cellar floor. The slab was older than the rest, a slightly different shade of gray, its edges worn smooth by countless footsteps. It gave off a faint metallic scent, as if the stone itself remembered the weight of something precious.

Mara crouched, the lantern casting a halo around her chin. The air smelled of fermented grapes and, beneath that, a more subtle scent— something like old cedar and the faint sting of iron. She brushed away the dust with her gloved hand, uncovering a square of moss-green iron that ran like a seam across the stone. The seam was faint, but it was there, a hint that something lay beneath. Her heart thumped a slow rhythm as she ran her fingertips over the metal.

A cold shiver ran up her arm.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: e14f8a67432bc5c0
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 564,660 bytes (0.539 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 124
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 150.44 minutes
• Total Words: 30,088
• Total Characters: 173,084
• Average Words per Page: 242.65
• Average Characters per Page: 1395.84

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