In a quaint village nestled between rolling hills and winding rivers, there lived a man who spent his days perched upon a weathered wooden chair on the front porch of his modest cottage. His eyes, a mirror to the vast expanse of his thoughts, gazed blankly into the distance as if searching for something just beyond the edge of his consciousness.

The man's mind was a void, a vast emptiness that seemed to swallow up any stray thought or fleeting emotion that dared to cross its threshold. He sat there, unmoving, a solitary figure against the backdrop of the bustling village around him.

Neighbors passing by would stop and exchange fleeting greetings with the man, but he hardly registered their presence. His mind was elsewhere, lost in the labyrinth of his own thoughts and memories.

Some said he was a dreamer, a man who had wandered too far into the recesses of his own mind and had lost his way back to reality. Others whispered that he was haunted by ghosts from his past, memories that clung to him like shadows in the fading light of day.

But the man paid them no mind. He remained on his chair, a silent sentinel guarding the threshold between the known and the unknown, his gaze fixed on a horizon only he could see. And there he sat, lost in the vast emptiness of his mind, a solitary figure in a world that seemed to have forgotten him.

It was the beauty of living in such a quaint town. Or perhaps it was the taunt of a cyclical existence.

Either way, she went on a walk. A mindless, acceptable smile keeping her lips closed as one step followed another.

In the autumn, leaves would crunch under her shoes. Spring and summer were quiet. In the winter, snow was a muffled punch against buried asphalt.

Today, it was a crunch. Early fallers from the trees that nearly hid him on the porch.

She waved. She always waved. He barely inclined his head, eyes not seeing her as he looked. They were foggy or pale. No, he had his sight. He just didn't seem to want to see.

The old man was happy without remembering any of the passerbys that waved or called their hellos. He was happier wherever that silent mind was. Wherever it had been since she'd moved to the town two years ago.

That was two years of walks, not a single day missed. And for two years, she'd waved and carried on.

Today, the gate latch replaced the crunch of her steps.

He still didn't see.

The town of Amberbrook had, to put it lightly, always been a bit lifeless. This predicament, however, was not the product of a centuries long curse, as some may blame it, but rather the silent rotting resentment that comes in a town whose residents simply stagnate. A couple who lived and died in the same house, abandoning their lover, childless: this was the man, Arnold Snoot's case. A family who settled with children who never had the means to leave: this was the girl, Astrid Hayward's case. Both individuals were clouded, in body and mind, by the smog of hopelessness.

The town was not unprosperous, by any means. They had the essentials: a baker, a tailor, church, tavern, inn. Arnold and his wife had ran the blacksmith's, long ago, before the role of the forge was relegated to the stables after Ferne passed and Arnold found himself uunable to lift his hammer again. Astrid's family: mother, father, brother, all together ran the cobbler's, a fate that Astrid was expect to fall into, and much maligned. It was on the day that her father had told her that she was to give up her schooling at age 16, in order to join the family bussiness, that she had gone off on her long, ambling walk.

Her expertly crafted leather brogues crunched neatly over un-raked leaves out the front of Arnold's porch. She continued onwards, onwards, until suddenly, a bird landed on the porch beside Arnold. It cawed once, casuing Astrid to turn her face to the man, and that caused the man, in all his years of silence, to let out a soft noise. Surprise.

"Hello? Sir?" Astrid called.

The man eye's only fluttered when he set them upon her, then, upon hearing his voice, lit up.

"Astrid Hayward?" He called.

Astrid paused, taken aback by both hearing old Arnold's voice after only hearing childish stories about his supossed mutism and grief-strucken possession. "Old Man Arnold?"

The man rose to his feet, unsteady with hour of disuse. "Please, do come in."

Astrid began to walk towards him, before stopping again. "How do you know my name?"

"Well, my late wife delivered you, of course!"