The morning stretched soft and grey, shrouded in a mist that hid all the far edges of the valley. Across the moorlands, the colours of the world ebbed into murmurs - the purples of the heather bruised and muted, the green of the grass a memory beneath a pallid sheen of dew. The trees were spectral things, their branches dissolving into the cloud like half-formed thoughts. They seemed to lie in delicate layers, each fainter than the last, paper-thin silhouettes gently laid one upon another, in a procession of whispers dissolving into the pale horizon, as if the landscape itself were forgetting them.

The air was heavy with the scent of wet bracken and rich, damp earth, carrying with it a faint sweetness of decay. Somewhere distant, the mournful cry of a curlew echoed, its sound swallowed almost instantly by the hush. The land rolled away in gentle swells, soft and endless, its beauty washed with an aching desolation, as though it remembered a time when it had been brighter, sharper, and more alive.

Set back from a narrow road, the cottage emerged from the mist like an afterthought. Its walls, weathered smooth in places by the relentless winds sweeping across the Devonshire moorlands, seemed silent and subdued. Patches of deep yellow lichen clung to the stonework, their uneven circles, markers of nature's slow encroachment. Ivy crept its way up the corners, tendrils gripping with a possessive hold, as if determined to guard a secret.

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Inside, the air was heavy with stillness, carrying the faint odour of neglect, the muted scent of a place left unused. Dust lingered in the wan beams of light filtering through the windows, each mote hanging as if time itself had paused, uncertain how to proceed.

A single chair stood crooked in the corner, its legs dug into the floor with a sense of purpose, as if it had been left hastily. The table in the centre of the room bore the marks of anxious movements - loose scrawls that looped and crossed, tangled in patterns that made no sense. They seemed to spiral inward, as if someone had been trying to pin down something that refused to be caught.

The walls, too, bore marks - chalk scribbles covering the plaster, their lines deliberate but frantic, layered over one another like a language half-formed, half-remembered. Here and there, curves emerged, suggestive of apertures or arches, shapes lingering just on the edge of recognition. They beckoned in places to be seen as something more, only to dissolve back into ambiguity.

Outside, as the fog tightened its grip, a single bird took flight, its wings briefly cutting sharp and dark against the haze, its cry faded before it could truly be heard. A thing of air, barely a murmur, as if the world were dissolving into itself, becoming unrecognisable, fragments of a memory.

The boundaries of the place bled away, forms thinning into vapours, shapes ever more indistinct, reverberations of voices no longer there. The distance between things lost meaning, as though the landscape were slipping away, piece by piece, losing its form. Sound, sense, unravelled, dissolving, until only the quiet, endless expanse of nothingness remained, like a memory half-formed, drifting just beyond reach.