Aug 12, 2024 7:55 am
The woods are quiet this night, and the air grows chill. For whatever reason—you can't remember how—you've become lost, unhooked from the world you once knew. Or maybe you do remember. Maybe you are cursing your foolishness—maybe someone else's. The sky doesn't look good, dark clouds looming high above you like giant birds of prey. The sun gutters dimly like a dying flame, pale and warmless. Lightning flashes through the trees, lighting clawlike branches, and you know you must find shelter soon.
You are mulling over your strange and dismal fate when the giant, black trees part to reveal a road the color of old blood. Black pools of water stand like dark mirrors in and around the muddy roadway. As you squelch down the road, the sky breaks with rain. It comes down in trickles, then drops, then furious sheets that drive mist high into the air. Soon enough, you are soaked to the bone and have lost all sense of direction.
It is then that you see the House. Its peaked roofs loom out of the mist like the bones of a giant, and the tattered pennants at its peak whip like mad in the growing storm. Warm yellow lights pierce the mist at the entrance of the house as if to beckon you. Before you know it, the mist clears and you find yourself on the lawn of the House. A narrow, gray building of peeling plaster and fieldstone, its three floors of dark windows glare down at you like apathetic eyes. The warm lights come from oil lamps hanging inside an entrance portico at one corner of the house, which is shut with a rust iron gate.
Looking around, you see that the mist is still thick behind you; in fact, it seems to form a wall around the perimeter of the lawn and the House. You also see that other weary figures have found their way here as well. Hopefully, this place offers you a more hospitable welcome than the land around it.
You are mulling over your strange and dismal fate when the giant, black trees part to reveal a road the color of old blood. Black pools of water stand like dark mirrors in and around the muddy roadway. As you squelch down the road, the sky breaks with rain. It comes down in trickles, then drops, then furious sheets that drive mist high into the air. Soon enough, you are soaked to the bone and have lost all sense of direction.
It is then that you see the House. Its peaked roofs loom out of the mist like the bones of a giant, and the tattered pennants at its peak whip like mad in the growing storm. Warm yellow lights pierce the mist at the entrance of the house as if to beckon you. Before you know it, the mist clears and you find yourself on the lawn of the House. A narrow, gray building of peeling plaster and fieldstone, its three floors of dark windows glare down at you like apathetic eyes. The warm lights come from oil lamps hanging inside an entrance portico at one corner of the house, which is shut with a rust iron gate.
Looking around, you see that the mist is still thick behind you; in fact, it seems to form a wall around the perimeter of the lawn and the House. You also see that other weary figures have found their way here as well. Hopefully, this place offers you a more hospitable welcome than the land around it.
