The House with No Windows

When I first crossed that weathered threshold, young and bright with borrowed spring, I thought that shadows that draped in corners were but harmless, slumbering things.

The house stood tall beneath a moon that watched through clouds of silver lace; its halls were lined with gilded mirrors, yet none would ever show my face.

At first he spoke in honeyed murmurs, soft as rain on chapel stone, and I, a foolish songbird, never saw the waiting bones.

One by one the windows vanished...

Not shattered... Covered. Board by board.

The world became a rumor, a distant and forgotten shore.

Letters withered in the darkness. Voices faded down the years. Every path that led toward home was swallowed by the house's ears.

And in those rooms the clocks grew strange...

Days were long... The nights were longer.

Something hungry stalked the corridors, feeding on whatever made me stronger.

The walls learned all my secret names. The floors memorized my silent cries. The house became a living creature, breathing through a thousand lies.

Sometimes the wind would shake the rafters.

Sometimes thunder split the sky.

Sometimes storms were born indoors without a single reason why.

The moon alone bore witness. The moon and all the watching crows.

Neither spoke. They merely gathered, as if they somehow already knew.

Then came a night of crimson weather.

A night the darkness lost control...

A night when every shadow rose to collect a heavy toll.

The house groaned low... The candles trembled.

The heavens hid their silver eye.

And something precious, scarcely formed, was carried upward from my life.

No lullaby was sung... No cradle softly swayed.

Only silence draped in morning black where fragile hope had once been laid.

For many nights I wandered haunted, a ghost among familiar halls.

Listening for a vanished heartbeat within the breathing of the walls.

Then one dawn, cold and colorless, I opened a forgotten door.

The house protested. The hinges screamed!

The shadows clung about the floor.

Yet beyond the threshold waited air untouched by grief or fear.

A sky so vast it startled me...

A world I had not seen in years.

Behind me, the house remained.

Its towers bent with age and sin.

Its windows dark. Its chambers hollow.

A tomb for all that lived within.

Some nights I still dream of corridors and locked rooms and ravens overhead. Of a house that fed upon the living while pretending love instead.

But morning always finds me waking.

And with the dawn comes one sure truth:

The house was never built to keep me; I was merely trapped inside it.

Though it stole much from my life...

My innocence... My voice... My child...

It could not claim the final thing.

The small, stubborn flame it sought for years to extinguish.

For even now, beyond those ruins, I remain.

And the house, at last...

Stands empty.