Writetober 2025, Coven of the Quill, Day 31: END.

Behold now, this bewildering expanse, this vestibule of all my vanished years,

 Not a simple corridor, mind you, nor a winding path through memory's fields, 

But an echoing chamber, where every moment I ever breathed, every choice I ever bent to,

 Has congealed into an unyielding portal. A fragment of self. 

Oh, to think I once charted my existence as a grand river, a continuous stream of becoming! 

What an exquisite delusion that was, a comforting falsehood spun from the silken threads of youth's naive loom.

No, my friend, gaze upon this, this architectural testament to my utter cessation of purpose. 

This is the Foyer, they whisper, the final ingress.

The polished floor, cold as a tombstone freshly quarried, reflects the impossible height of the ceiling. 

A dome of silence that presses down, yet never quite touches, always hovering, always threatening. 

It is a liminal vastness, this space.

The very air, thick with the unuttered, the un-risked, and the un-become, a palpable shroud of what-might-have-been.

And these doors! These magnificent, dreadful doors, each a heavy sentinel to my soul. 

There, the gleam of The Chamber of Undone Affections. 

And next to it, the forbidding iron of The Vault of Deferred Ambitions, bolted tight against any belated yearning. 

Further on, the translucent glass of The Conservatory of Forgotten Dreams, where spectral light filters through,

 Illuminating only the dust motes dancing in the void. 

They stand not as entrances to revisit; no, perish the thought of such a cruel, reiterative torment.

 But as monuments, each an epitaph to an epoch irrevocably sealed, thoroughly consumed.

And there it stands, at the Foyer's furthest reach, drawing all light, all shadow, and all breath into its void. 

The Door. 

A monolith utterly devoid of ornament or warmth.

Its surface, vast and smooth, absorbs all light, allowing no ingress, permitting no escape. A

And inscribed upon its face, not carved, but seeming to simply be, a stark articulation:

END.

Oh, the simplicity! The brutal, unadorned frankness of it! No flourish, no ominous warning, no poetic flourish, Just the ultimate designation, the final, irrefutable declaration of the House's terrible purpose. It does not beckon with the allure of a new vista, nor does it threaten with the terrors of a hellish pit.

No, it merely stands as the unavoidable conclusion, the single, definitive punctuation mark

 To the sprawling, convoluted sentence that was my life.

And the realization dawns, vast and cold as the moon on a winter's eve, that this horror

 Is not the presence of the End, but the chilling certainty that I have been here all along.

 A silent, unwitting participant in the slow, meticulous construction of this very Foyer,

 And this door, this ultimate barrier, was always the only possibility, the only outcome. 

A whisper, perhaps from the wind, confirms the truth:

 "The ultimate trick of the House, dear soul, was convincing you there were any other rooms left to build."

written by Zoe