In a small village never marked on any map, stood an old house built of grey stone.
Its paint peeled, its windows veiled with black curtains, and its door... never made a sound.
The villagers called it the cold nest.
Not because of temperature,
but because no one who ever entered felt warmth again—even in the height of summer.
And inside that house lived a man named Ashir Valem.
He never bought anything from the market.
Never spoke, except to reply with words that never invited conversation.
He wasn't poor. Nor was he rich.
He simply... didn't live like a human.
In his living room, there were no family photos, no wall clocks, no paintings.
Only an old wooden table, a chair, and a worn-out book filled with blank pages.
But every night, while the village slept, those blank pages would begin to change color—
as though faint blood seeped in from words that were never written.
---
🖤
> I don't write with ink,
but with their final breath.
Those who could not die...
now know what it means to lose life.
– The Unseen Note, Night 11
🖤
Beneath the house, it wasn't just a basement.
There was a long hallway that defied normal architecture.
Its walls were etched with ancient symbols—not Latin, not Hebrew, not Arabic,
not any language humanity had ever studied.
Some called it the tongue of the first fracture—
a language used only when the world still had no shape.
Within that corridor hung a creature whose form changed each night.
Today it resembled a woman without eyes.
Tomorrow, a child with three heads.
The day after… a bird, whose voice recited prayers in a language
that shattered the teeth of anyone who heard it.
Ashir never spoke to them.
He only sat in his chair, observing, documenting… and sometimes asking, softly:
> "What do you hold sacred… when all your bones break in rhythm?"
They never answered.
They couldn't.
Because Ashir did not permit their voices to exist.
---
🖤
> You said you were an angel.
But when I broke your wings—
why did you pray to Me, not to Him?
– Ashir Valem, Night 33
🖤
Night after night passed, but the house never changed.
It never aged.
It never decayed.
Because time itself dared not enter.
And Ashir Valem?
He lit his candle, sat in the same chair, and opened the same empty book each night—
awaiting the next entity foolish enough to enter this world…
...so he could prove one thing:
> Those who believe they are eternal—have simply never met me.