In the candlelit parlor, where whispers twined like fog around spectral chandeliers, a voice murmured, now steady, now faltering among shades of lilac and dust. "It was here," it confessed, as if trying to unlock a stranded memory, a dream heard from the hollow walls of the manor.
"Do you recall the nightingale?" she said, "singing lonely beneath the moon's indifferent jade glow?" It was not the question but the way each word trailed like smoke from extinguished candles, longing to hold the migration of mystery across time's elongating corridors.
The old oak door creaked in concurrence with the resonance of a forgotten Clock Tower. "Five strokes had come," he said, "but not all were ours," brandishing an unknown chronicle, for they were sand on a beach swirled incessantly until identities were stark pointed shadows on the boundary of being.