The manor at Blackwood stood on a jagged cliff overlooking a sea of grey fog, a place where the wind sounded like a choir of the damned and the rain never truly stopped. It was a house of velvet curtains, dying embers, and a silence so heavy it felt like it was trying to drown the inhabitants. The air tasted of dust, old secrets, and the faint, metallic scent of blood.

Clara arrived at Blackwood in the dead of winter, hired as a companion to the elderly Lady Eleanor. Eleanor was a woman of ethereal, haunting beauty, though she had not left her bedroom in thirty years. She lived in a room filled with dried flowers and antique mirrors, her skin as pale as parchment and her eyes like two frozen lakes. She claimed to be a "Time Weaver," a rare being capable of pulling memories from the future to sustain her present.

At first, Clara was enchanted. Eleanor would take her hand and share "visions"—vivid, breathtaking glimpses of a future where Clara was a famous artist, a beloved wife, a woman of power and grace. These visions were more real than the grey walls of Blackwood. They were filled with the scent of jasmine, the sound of laughter, and the feeling of absolute belonging.

But as the months passed, Clara noticed a terrifying change. She began to forget her own life. She forgot the smell of her mother's perfume, the sound of her father's voice, the name of the street where she had grown up. These memories weren't just fading; they were being replaced. In their place came the borrowed memories of Eleanor's imagined futures.

Clara realized the truth: Eleanor was not weaving time; she was consuming it. She was a temporal parasite. By sharing the visions, Eleanor was creating a psychic link that allowed her to drain the vitality and identity from Clara's soul. The "future" Eleanor showed her was not a prediction, but a lure—a beautiful, shimmering bait used to distract the prey while the parasite fed.

The more Clara loved the visions, the faster she faded. She became a translucent shadow, a ghost in her own body. She would look in the mirror and see her own features blurring, becoming a generic, featureless mask. Meanwhile, Eleanor grew younger. Her skin regained its glow, her voice became strong, and her eyes sparked with a predatory hunger.

In the final hour, Clara tried to run, but her legs were no longer solid. She was a whisper of a person, a fragment of a memory. She reached out to touch Eleanor's hand, but her fingers passed through the skin like smoke.

Eleanor looked at her with a smile of pure, cold satisfaction. "Thank you, my dear," she whispered, her voice now that of a woman in her twenties. "Your life was so vivid, so full of potential. It has tasted wonderful."

Clara didn't scream. She didn't have the strength. She simply watched as the last of her identity was absorbed into the radiant woman before her. She was no longer a person; she was a memory, a footnote in the long, parasitic life of Lady Eleanor, disappearing into the grey fog of Blackwood.

*** Objective Tensor Code: [OTMES_v2: M7=8.0, M4=8.0, N2=0.9, K1=0.7, theta=90°, TI=69.1, Level=T2]