Simon walked with heavy steps, each one pressing deeper into his shoulders. His face was drawn brow furrowed, lips pressed into a bloodless line. His eyes did not wander but fixed on some phantom point ahead, unblinking. Every so often, his right hand twitched toward the hilt of his long coat, as if trying to recall why he wore such a cumbersome garment.
The floor let out a soft groan beneath him, as though pained by his passage, and the echo of his footsteps rippled down the long, damp corridor. A swaying chandelier overhead cast flickering ghosts of light on the stone walls. Simon lifted his gaze briefly catching a glimpse of a narrow window framing an ice-clad mountainside before succumbing once more to the silence of the ground.
A hand darted to his taut coat, a reflexive motion snuffed out as quickly as it flared. His shoulders hunched forward, bent by some invisible weight lodged in his chest. A fine dust stirred in his wake, clinging to the edges of his black shoes before scattering behind him like ash.
At the fork in the corridor, he paused not searching for an exit, but for balance. He glanced at his hand, brushing the silent chime of the metal ring on his right finger, then turned his body slowly toward the new wing. His brow did not lift, yet he exhaled soundlessly, like a man passing judgment on himself: "I won't find what I'm looking for here." Then he walked on, like a fool who no longer remembers how to choose a direction.
Simon drifted through the palace directionless, planless walking as his sole proof of existence.
He crossed a narrow passage with a ceiling so low he nearly had to stoop, only to emerge into a vaulted hall, its smooth walls pierced by invisible seams that bled a sourceless, pallid light.
He climbed a railless spiral staircase, then descended through a sudden fissure in the floor one he couldn't recall appearing.
His hands were buried in his pockets, shoulders slightly slumped, head tilted leftward, his gaze utterly vacant, as if his eyes had forgotten how to feign interest.
But none of it mattered. He wasn't truly here.
The palace was Simon's safest mental refuge
The one thing no one had taken from him when he left the family.
The only gift never revoked.
The sole place he could inhabit without being asked:
"Why?"
Or "How long?"
His father had built it decades ago with a strange obsession, with illogical details then, on a whim, decided to gift it to Simon for his birthday, as one hands a child a trivial toy to keep him occupied. No one cared about the palace. No one ever demanded it back.
It was more like a living creature without fixed dimensions, without defined space.
The palace could exist in multiple places at once.
It replicated itself in different forms: a seaside villa, a hilltop fortress, even a forgotten apartment in a noisy city.
All were facades. All were masks. But the interior remained the same.
The structure was constant; the essence never changed.
All its palaces were, in truth, a single one.
The walls shifted.
The corridors redrew themselves.
Doors appeared and vanished.
Sometimes, you could walk in a straight line only to find yourself back where you started without ever having turned.
And because no one could fully comprehend it, the palace was never classified as a royal estate nor a true historical site.
It was simply left to its own strangeness.
The kind of place bureaucracy instinctively avoided.
The rooms the palace conjured were endless, yet mostly useless.
Empty. Silent. Not even dust settled there.
But sometimes—just sometimes—it would create something:
A clock that moved backward.
A machine that played a melody never repeated.
A book written in a language no one knew only to vanish suddenly, or melt into the walls as if it had never existed.
The palace could stretch into your dreams if you slept within it.
Its rooms seeped into sleep like smoke, appearing in dreams as places you'd passed through though you could never remember when or how.
And because it was utterly without purpose, Simon kept it.
No one reclaimed it.
No one tried to understand it.
So it remained his the only thing that acknowledged his existence without conditions.
And now…
Here he was, wandering from room to room,
having long lost track of time since this aimless drift began.
Not that it mattered.
It was his.
And he could stay as long as he wished.
Simon drew breath slowly, his lungs filling with damp air that wept from cracks in the stone walls. He raised a hand to wipe a droplet clinging to his unkempt beard, then felt a biting cold sear his fingertips. His feet moved across the red carpet stretching before him like a river of dried blood its fibers shattered, choked with dust, its hue so faded it nearly vanished in the guttering lamplight, their oils almost spent.
With every step, the frayed fibers rasped beneath his soles, their sound echoing through the hall's cavernous silence. The right wall, clad in slate panels, bore intricate carvings like the roots of a dead tree—colorless, lifeless—while moisture seeped between the cracks, exhaling a nostril-stinging reek of ancient mildew and faint smoke.
Simon couldn't tell if he'd been stubbornly marching down this corridor or if time had plucked him from some earlier moment and placed him here. A fog of hours stretched ahead, obscuring shattered columns to his right and, to his left, windows boarded with rusted iron plates. Thin slivers of pallid light pierced through, meeting airborne dust that hummed like distant whispers.
Then he halted abruptly, his foot recoiling from something solid. He turned and spotted a small gift wrapped in yellowed paper—the hue of tarnished gold—bound with a red ribbon coiled too meticulously. Beneath the knot, a frayed note peeked out, its edges jagged, the ink smudged as if by grief.
Simon bent forward slightly not out of conscious thought, but from the slow, accumulated weariness in his back and legs. His fingers, dusted with a thin film of grime and old oil, plucked the letter from beneath the gift's ribbon. His expression did not change. He simply fixed his gaze on the folded paper and opened it with a precise motion between thumb and forefinger—no haste, no hesitation, no visible care.
In the hall, everything remained suspended: the faded carpet, the stone walls, the dim light, the shallow, hesitant breath. Everything waited for words to be spoken.
The letter was written in rich, dark ink on paper that spoke of care and taste—but the script, though elegant, seemed suffused with sorrow.
Each character was crafted with painstaking precision, as if the writer had been resisting collapse with every stroke.
The letters all leaned left, their lines stretching with fractures, as though the hand that penned them had trembled.
There were exaggerated curves, random splatters of ink, and every tail was drawn out too long.
It was not just beautiful calligraphy it was beautiful in the way a corpse adorned with roses is beautiful.
To the Esteemed Lord, Sir... My Dear Simon,
I pray these lines find you in the fullest health and prosperity.
How fares your household these days?
I have yet to receive your reply, but no matter—
my heart is eased merely by imagining you well.
As for me, by the grace of the gods, I remain in stable health and spirits,
though such matters may no longer concern you.
It is enough that my name should appear between these lines.
I have enclosed a humble gift,
hoping it might meet your approval
should fate grant you even a moment to spare it praise.
I cannot delve into details or bare my secrets,
for these words must pass under watchful eyes before they depart.
Yet I wished your day might carry some trace of me, however fleeting.
I am still here. I still remember you. Until death deems it time for my soul.
Do not trouble yourself with a reply.
Expect nothing from me but these unguarded words.
Forgive their flaws
they come from a spirit that refuses silence,
even as the night of separation grows long.
You may never read this. You may discard it.
But still, I will write.
So that one day, you might find something in this small, fading soul.
— Rosemary
When the words ended, Simon did not move.
He did not fold the letter.
He did not crumple it, drop it, clutch it, or speak.
He stood motionless, the page still in his hands,
while the only sounds in the hall were those issuing from the heart of the palace itself:
The slow drip of water from the ceiling,
The faint shudder of the carpet's worn fibers,
A distant hum, like wind slipping through an unseen crack,
And Simon's own heavy breath
exhaling softly,
returning with weight.
His weary eyes dragged a slow gaze toward his left shoulder. He did not turn his head all at once. The movement was deliberate, as if his body could no longer trust whether what he saw was real or merely a phantom of his mind.
A faint haze veiled his vision not physical, but that transparent film that forms when one goes too long without blinking. He focused slowly, pressing a tired finger to his lower lid, then steadied his gaze on the stone wall ahead.
There, on the weathered rock, hung the portrait.
Not large. Not small.
Just the right size to assert its presence without demanding attention without hiding.
A massive man. Broad-shouldered, his features still. His gaze did not meet the viewer's but passed straight through, as though he were seeing beyond the moment itself. His mouth was closed, jaw taut, the wrinkles on his forehead fixed and deep like grooves carved in stone, not skin.
Simon needed no nameplate. No inscription, no caption, no direct memory.
He had seen this face more often than his own reflection.
This… was the Grandfather.
It would be untrue to say they looked alike. But in the sharpness of the nose, the slight tilt of the head to the right, the way the eyes pierced without permission there was something of him there.
Yet the mystery of the portrait and its elegy remained unsolved:
How?
From where had it come?
Beneath the portrait, a stone carving. Square, its edges faded, etched with ancient precision.
There lay the elegy.
Untitled. Unsigned. Undated.
It simply… existed.
He had read it a thousand times already:
In brassy nights with no moon's face,
The First Grandfather lost his place.
Within his palm—a pearl of smoke,
That drifted through both time and folk.
It spun, it sang in absent tune,
And screamed when light would near too soon.
It floated time, it drowned the dawn,
And made from moments wave and yawn.
He met a friend, a stranger weird,
Who drank warm honey none had stirred.
He stirred his tea with fingertip—
A star—and laughed with no known script.
But as the tale was passed along,
The Grandfather fell out the song.
He slipped where silence starts to swell,
Beyond the edge where fables dwell.
And there, beneath the void's dark seam,
A shadow met him, shaped like dream.
It said: "I am the king of dusk,
Give me your laugh—and gain the husk."
Simon did not stir.
He did not speak.
He did not smile.
He did not question the meaning of what he had read.
The wall before him.
The portrait above.
The epitaph below.
And the air around him still heavy, still cold, still stagnant.
His eyes remained fixed on the portrait, tracing its details without seeking answers. Silence clung thick to the hall, and time had long since lost its meaning, the way it does when the senses stop reacting to the outside world and turn inward to watch.
Then...
From the edges of the portrait, from its lower corners, something began to seep.
Mist.
Black. Thick as living ink.
It spilled slowly, as though the painting were bleeding.
It crept along the wall like old oil sliding across stone, then pooled onto the floor, slithering over the carpet
utterly soundless.
It had no sound. No scent. Yet the air changed
grown heavier, as if something in the lungs had slowed, deepened.
The black mist moved.
It slid past the columns, climbed the corners, then drifted toward the center of the hall where Simon stood, motionless.
It reached him.
And slowly, it began to coil around his body.
Like a living shroud of silk, it spilled from his neck to his feet, layer upon layer, seeping into the crevices of his hands, between his fingers, winding around his throat, his chest, his legs.
He did not resist.
He did not try to flee.
He did not so much as lift a finger or even an eyebrow.
His mouth parted against his will, as though the muscles of his face had surrendered to some alien force within the mist.
The first tendril slithered toward his face.
It did not touch his skin it pierced it, seeking points of weakness:
His nose.
His mouth.
His eyes.
His ears.
His nasal cavities quivered, their inner walls contracting as if to expel the intrusion
but the mist did not relent.
It advanced with a weight disproportionate to its form, like a wave of hunger that refused to be sated.
It seeped into his nostrils, deliberate, patient
then, suddenly, as though something had snapped,
the smoke flooded him like scorched oil poured into an open wound.
It filled his sinuses, slid over his tongue, buried itself in his throat, and clung to his windpipe like a poison that refused to be swallowed.
And then
he felt his hollows being colonized.
As if something were crawling up from within him not descending from the air.
He wasn't breathing it in… the mist was breathing him.
It sucked him dry, devoured him from the inside out,
and left his eyes wide open to watch himself suffocate slowly no hand to hold him, no voice to scream for help.
But the mist found another entrance.
Through the narrow slits between eyelid and skin, it forced its way in,
tilting his eyes back into his skull, coating them in a dark sheen like polished obsidian
reflecting nothing.
The darkness worked deeper, seeping into his ears.
Then, in a single moment—without sound, without warning—
it swallowed him whole.
Darker.
Denser.
Gone.