The Weight of Unread Pages

The moon leans thin against the oak, spilling silver across the spines of sleeping giants. Here, the air tastes of ancient cedar and forgotten rain, held in the lungs of paper that has not breathed in decades.

Silence is not the absence of sound, but a choir of whispers trapped in tight-bound glue. Each vowel is a seed waiting for a glance to water it, huddled beneath the gold-leafed skin of a leather-bound dawn.

The clock on the wall has lost its teeth, chewing on seconds that no longer matter to the stars. Dust motes dance in the path of a moth's ghost, tracing the outlines of stories that never quite began.

We are the architects of these paper cities, building towers of syntax to reach the roof of the dark. And when the sun finally cracks the glass, the words will settle back into the quiet, heavy and deep.