ineffable

prologue: four walls

The room has recently been cleaned. A grey painted wardrobe, a low single bed. A small window frame opposite the even smaller bookshelf that holds several volumes in its wooden arms. Between the clean pages of books on topics ranging from mathematics to chemistry to world history is not a speck of dust, but everywhere there is grey.

The room is four walls, and the room is also a life. One that is slowly bleeding away, out through the open door. As though the space is a wound that has been cleaned but is yet to be treated, even though it was once living.

The Barrows is a village built on tradition, logic, and the colour grey. If you were to enter another of the cement-block-shaped houses across the street, you wouldn't feel as though you'd moved at all after stepping into a room identical to the aforementioned. A space to be alone, but not a space to truly call one's own.

In the years they spend here, the people do not know a shade brighter than the pale yellow of flowers sprouting from a nearby forest floor. Or of the eye colour their family might share, binding them to each other.

They think perhaps there are more colours to search for in Ineffable.

Imagine a world made up of thousands of these towns and villages, each barely different from the next. In one town there might be a larger library, or a glimpse of the colour purple. There might be a different language in one; different clothing made in another. One place might be rooted in tones of brown rather than grey. All unique, but almost nothing worth exploring. Imagine a country built on its predictability.

It goes by the name of Triffid Valley.

The only intrigue (that cannot be summed up in a paragraph) is the city of Ineffable, the pulsing heart of a cold-bodied world, from which nobody ever seems to emerge.

It cannot be summed up in a paragraph, so it will have to do as a story.

This story starts with a choice. The choice to leave behind a life of grey and search for fireworks instead. The choice to emerge from the dark and find the star studded plain called the night. A turn to discovery. If only for the chance to read some new stories. The choice to live a life worth telling.

For some, this place may be a singular stretch of beach in which soft waves glisten in the light of the full moon. Or a church built from crumbling stone and just barely standing upright. A cloud pulsing out rain and thunder onto a mass of colourful umbrella tops. Numerous skyscraper-sized buildings stretching up towards a melting sun. Forests, doorways. Stories.

For most it is simply a new chapter. And this is the single chance.