Do Not Enter

Ken Kaito did not believe in haunted castles.

He believed in wind shear, battery voltage, and the fact that his DJI Mavic 3 cost $2,049 and was currently committing suicide.

“Come on, come on - no, no, no!”

The drone had been perfectly stable over the olive grove. Then it hit an invisible patch of air over the ruins and just... glitched. The controller screen flashed red. SIGNAL INTERFERENCE. COMPASS ERROR.

On the hill above was Kastro Aima.

Everyone in the village said the same thing about it. Don't go near it. The castle is closed. The castle doesn't like visitors.

Ken had assumed that was Greek superstition for “the structure is unstable and we don't have liability insurance.”

Now his $2,049 drone was drifting, dead-sticked, straight over its wall and dropping like a stone.

Thump.

The video feed died to black.

Ken stared at the black screen for five full seconds.

“Okay.”

He lowered the controller. He looked at the castle. The castle looked back.

Kastro Aima was not a ruin. From far away it looked like one - grey stone, overgrown. Up close, it was impossibly intact. No collapsed roof. No graffiti. Just... enormous. Too enormous. The sort of castle that made you feel like you'd walked up to the wrong scale in a video game.

And around the entire perimeter, hammered into the old stone, were warnings.

Not one. Dozens. In Greek, in English, in languages Ken didn't recognize.

ΑΠΑΓΟΡΕΥΕΤΑΙ Η ΕΙΣΟΔΟΣ
DO NOT ENTER
TURN BACK
THE CASTLE IS NOT EMPTY

The last one was new. Fresh red paint.

Ken did a very rational risk assessment.

Option A: Leave the drone, go home, explain to his uncle that he lost two grand because a castle in the middle of nowhere has bad Wi-Fi.

Option B: Hop the low part of the outer wall, grab the drone, get out in two minutes. No supernatural consequences because supernatural consequences aren't real.

Ken chose Option B. As any 19-year-old with an expensive hobby and zero respect for folklore would.

The front gate wasn't even locked. It was just... ajar. A massive, black iron gate, twelve feet tall, open exactly wide enough for one idiot to slip through.

He slipped through.

The air changed instantly.

Outside, it was August. Cicadas, hot wind, 32 degrees.

Inside the walls, it was cold. Silent. The cicadas just stopped. The light was wrong too - softer, like the sun was coming from a different angle than it should be.

“Okay, creepy architecture,” Ken muttered to himself. "Great acoustics for horror."

He spotted it a moment later.

His drone had landed, or rather, crashed onto a balcony several floors up.

He stared at it. Then at the castle. Then back at the drone.

“You've gotta be kidding me.”

Unfortunately, there was no convenient way to reach the balcony from outside.

Which meant that, regrettably, Ken would have to trespass into the actual building to retrieve his two-thousand-and-forty-nine-dollar drone.

After a while, he reached the main entrance, the massive door leading into the castle. 

The compound had been, as Ken would say, “a complete architectural nightmare.”

Overgrown paths, broken statues, dead vines crawling up the walls... And somehow despite all of that the castle itself looked almost perfectly intact.

Ken stood before the enormous wooden doors and sighed. 

Beside them stood two stone statues that he couldn't quite figure out. 

They were small, barely three or four feet tall, with broad, compact bodies and long, pointed ears. Their mouths were slightly open, revealing rows of sharp teeth. 

He stared at the large, bat-like wings carved into their backs. 

Then at their long fingers, each ending in a claw. 

Then at their ridiculously large eyes. 

He frowned. 

“What the hell are these supposed to be?”

He then reached for the handle.

“Two thousand dollars,” he muttered.

Slowly, he pulled it open.

“Worth it.”