The Room

I do not fear the sun.

Let us start from there.

It is a myth, one of many. The sun does not burn me to ash, nor do I collapse in a pile of dust when a sliver of dawn creeps through the curtains. No. The truth is duller and stranger—I simply wilt. I slow, I fade. My blood grows thick and sluggish. My thoughts blur. The world becomes a pale imitation of itself.

By day, I am a ghost of what I was. But when the sun sets…when the sky bruises and the stars open their mouths—then I awaken. Not just to hunger, though yes, that is always there, but to something far more urgent. To inspiration.

You think this strange? You think immortality dulls the mind? Perhaps it does for some. That, I have witnessed indeed. But I am no count rotting in a castle, no monster hiding in a closet. I am, at heart, still an artist. Still a creature of thought. And the night has always been the only time I can create.

By daylight I cannot think. I cannot write. My mind, so ancient and filled with centuries of memory, becomes mute. The stories I long to shape remain locked beneath a thousand layers of lethargy. But when darkness falls—when the night bleeds in—I feel alive once more! And that is when the door appears.

It is not a real door. Not in the way you know them. No hinges. No knob. Just a presence—familiar and expecting. I have followed it for hundreds of years, across continents, through wars and winters, through names I no longer use. It waits for me always, at the same hour.

1:17 a.m.

Why that time? I do not know. But it never fails.

I do not own a mirror. I have not seen my own face in four hundred years. But I know the look I wear when the hour strikes: starved and electric. I know the sharp hunger in my eyes, not for blood, but for the room. For the words. For the place where I can finally think again. It begins with a sensation behind the eyes. A pressure, not painful, but intimate. Like something tapping against the bone, reminding me: It’s time. And then the door peels open in my mind.

It is always the same, yet always different. A corridor of deep violet shadows, lit only by moonlight that filters through tall, narrow windows. Sometimes the windows show forests. Sometimes deserts. Once, a sea that whispered my name. Always, it is beautiful. Always, it is quiet.

There is a desk. On it, blank parchment. And when I sit, the words come. And how satisfying it is.

You cannot understand, unless you’ve lived long enough to forget entire centuries. The pleasure of new thought. Of stories that have never been told. The room feeds me what the world cannot: invention. Not echoes, not memories, but true creation. I do not know what power governs this place—only that it gives, and I receive. And so I write.

I write poems that bloom and rot in a single stanza. I write histories of cities that have never existed. I write letters to lovers who may one day live, in languages that haven’t yet been invented.

I do not question it. I only write faster.

There is a price. Of course there is. There is always a price for art, for beauty, for hunger. And that price is solitude. I cannot share the room. I have tried. Once, a lover lay beside me as the hour approached, curious of what I had told him. I felt the door open, and I stepped through. When I returned, he was dead. Mouth open. Eyes hollow. As if something had reached into him and unraveled his heart. I never spoke of it to another.

Recently, it welcomed me as it always had: familiar, strange, mine. But something shifted. The room has begun to change.

It started with the light. The moonlight dimmed and the windows fogged, as if breath had stained them.

Then, the desk changed. Where once there had been ink and pages, there was only a mirror. Oval, black-rimmed. Cold. I looked. And I saw myself. Not as I am—was—but as I might become. Thin. Ragged. Eyes wild with obsession.

My reflection leaned forward and spoke: “You cannot keep taking without giving.”

The mirror cracked. And I woke, breathless.

Since then, the door appears less often.

The room flickers. Some nights I enter, and the corridor collapses behind me. Some nights, I find the desk empty. Or worse: filled with pages I don’t remember writing, in a language I cannot translate. I think the room is…tired. Or perhaps angry?

I try to give back. I write stories in blood. I leave pages beneath moonlight. I carve poems into the skin of beasts before I drain them. But I don’t know if it’s enough.

The stories are still beautiful. But they are beginning to ache.

I met another of my kind, last winter, in a chapel turned art gallery. She painted visions of the cities she dreamed of during her long sleeps. Skyscrapers made of bone. I asked her if she knew of the room.

She looked at me for a long time and said, “Yes. But I don’t go there anymore.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it asked for my name.”

I did not understand then. I do now. Because last night, the room asked me the same.

The door opened, and there was no desk. No ink. No mirror. Just a single phrase written on the wall: What are you, without us?

I had no answer.

Tonight, the air is thick. The sky splits open like a wound, and the rain hisses against the windows of my tower. I have fed well—an archivist who offered his veins in exchange for a story only I could tell. He sleeps now, in a velvet chair, heartbeat slow but steady. He dreams of ruins made of glass. I gave him that.

1:17 a.m.

The door opens. The room is there. I step through.

The corridor is narrow, the windows show stars collapsing. The moons are gone but the desk is waiting. There is no paper. Only a pen and my name. Not the one I use now. The real one. The one I buried centuries ago, under layers of false passports and lies. The pen trembles in my hand.

I understand. The room wants truth now. Not invention. Not fiction. It wants me.

I do not know what will happen when I write it. Perhaps the room will close forever. Perhaps it will open wider than ever before. But I am tired of being only a collector of other people’s dreams. I want to leave something behind that is real. I lowered the pen and I began to write.

"I was born in winter, under a full moon…"

Whether I emerge from the room tomorrow or not, I do not know. But tonight, I will give it everything.