Across decades of expansion, reconstruction, hidden excavation, imported architecture, and continuous refinement, Las Dueñas slowly transformed into something far beyond its original colonial foundation. By the beginning of the Last Century, the estate no longer resembled a mansion that had simply grown larger over time.

It felt composed.

Entire wings appeared older than the city surrounding them despite having no clear construction records. Corridors subtly shifted depending on emotional atmosphere within the house. Gardens expanded according to symbolic logic rather than ordinary landscaping. Hidden chambers beneath the estate reached far deeper than engineering surveys should have allowed safely.

The architecture no longer behaved entirely like architecture.

As the twentieth century accelerated and Crestfall modernized rapidly, Dalethia withdrew increasingly from visible society. Public patronage diminished. Direct political influence faded. Appearances outside carefully controlled social circles became exceptionally rare. To most of the city, Las Dueñas transformed gradually from legendary estate into almost mythic local presence: beautiful, distant, private, and quietly unsettling.

Dalethia preferred it that way.

This retreat was not surrender. It was concentration. Dalethia increasingly understood that the Wound beneath Crestfall was changing again under modern pressure. Massive urban density, industrialization, emotional overload, media systems, electrical infrastructure, war-era anxiety, and the accelerating complexity of modern civilization all interacted with the buried fracture in ways no earlier age had encountered.

Las Dueñas became her observatory.

Over time, an unintended consequence emerged. The immense concentration of symbolic, emotional, architectural, historical, and occult pressure within Las Dueñas began partially redirecting and consuming energies that otherwise would have accumulated more directly within the Wound itself. Dalethia originally intended the estate as stabilization structure and controlled domain.

It became something closer to a pressure sink.

The entities beyond the fracture increasingly found portions of their available leverage diverted, trapped, absorbed, or refracted through the layered systems of the estate instead. Las Dueñas did not seal the Wound completely.

But it complicated access.

Dalethia's withdrawal gradually reshaped the rest of her surviving inner circle as well. Elizabeth abandoned most direct interaction with broader society almost entirely, becoming increasingly associated with the estate itself: silent halls, guarded grounds, unseen corridors, and the invisible perimeter surrounding Las Dueñas. Rumors about her became less human over time.

Sun-Hee descended beneath the city.

As Crestfall expanded, Sun-Hee increasingly focused on the hidden systems beneath it: tunnels, infrastructure, containment architecture, biological study, environmental modeling, and the growing complexity of the Wound itself. Her work became less visible with each passing decade until many hidden actors within Crestfall began treating her less like individual and more like a presence somewhere beneath the city.

Aniyya alone remained socially active consistently.

To ordinary residents, Las Dueñas slowly transformed into local folklore. The estate appeared in photographs inconsistently. Invitations became status symbols. Entire generations grew up hearing stories about impossible parties, silent galleries, rooms larger inside than outside, and beautiful hosts who never seemed to age correctly.

Most dismissed these stories as urban myth.

And beneath the oldest house in Crestfall, the Wound continued breathing slowly while the estate above it listened, redirected, and held the pressure just long enough for the modern city to keep pretending it stood on ordinary ground.