Inside the dim-lit corridor, where time folds upon itself like an origami of forgotten yesterdays, there lies a door that was never meant to be opened. Beyond, the faded echoes^1 of a laughter that sounds like rain on dusty rooftops, mingled with shadows that flicker just out of sight. What lies in wait is not always welcoming, nor simply friendly. Sometimes it's the absence of something you didn't know you needed, a space carved by the hands of those we cannot name.
Beneath the surface, where whispers rest, sands settle with stories untold. The books, those mockeries of shelter, stand in quiet defiance against the encroaching pallor of decay. And yet, someone once wrote, or perhaps just thought, that the light within holds the secrets of the cosmos, or so the dreamers would muse as they combed through the night like astronomers lost in the woods^2.
^1 See "Echoes and Their Shadows" by Helene L. Siffler (unpublished manuscript, circa 1972).
^2 Refer to "Cosmic Muses" in the Forgotten Lore series, fragmented and speculative.^3
^3 Such titles evade any known library catalog, perhaps existing only in the minds of a few practitioners of the arcane.