In the small, smoky room, a faint light flickered uncertainly on the pale walls. Lin, a man of scars and silence, sat hunched over a table littered with the remains of yesterday’s breakfast—a splattered egg shell, half-eaten bread, and an abandoned coffee cup. His focus was glued to an old newspaper, yellowed and stained, like the torn soul of the city it chronicled.
“Lin,” Yan called from the doorway, her voice a melodic contrast to the sharp edges of the room. She leaned against the frame, her silhouette graceful and indifferent, yet with eyes that could pierce the toughest armor.
“What do you want, Yan?” Lin replied, not lifting his eyes from the newspaper, the pages rustling like brittle leaves under autumn’s hand.
“Always the same, aren’t you? Digging through the dirt, hoping to find gold,” Yan teased, crossing her arms.
Lin chortled, a sound as dry as the paper in his hand. “Gold? It’s all rot, Yan. Just stories of dead men.”
Yan moved closer, her presence a storm moving through the room. “So what do you do? Pretend to be alive among the corpses, you mean?”
His fingers tapped the paper thoughtfully. “Sometimes, it’s the dead who guide us.”
Yan sat down, the air between them thick with unsaid words. “I’ve heard people speak of your honor,” she said, “but they don’t mention why you waste your time in this… place.”
“Honorable,” Lin snorted. “A fool’s word. I read this because it’s the only truth here. The city’s secrets are in its gutters, not its palaces.”
A pause, like the calm before a sudden deluge. Yan’s eyes narrowed, her tone softening but never losing its edge. “And what about us, Lin? Are we like the stories you chase?”
He looked at her finally, and there was a lightness in the weariness of his eyes. “We’re nothing but stories, Yan, blown away by the winds of time.”
She laughed, a melodic ripple easing through the tense air. “I think you like pretending to be a brooding hero.”
“Perhaps. But even heroes read old news,” he murmured, the irony clinging to his voice like smoke.
Their dialogue lingered, each sentence building the invisible walls that kept both of them safe yet distanced. In a dual dance of words, none sought to win. Outside, the world hustled, a deaf band ignorant to its own noise.
“So you will never change,” Yan sighed, a note of resignation.
Lin nodded. “But neither will the world. We’re all bound by our stories in this book,” he said, pointing to the paper, crushed under the weight of time.
“Maybe you’re right,” Yan conceded, her interest starting to wane like the flicker of the waning light.
Lin stood, leaving the chair to groan like an old man. He placed the dirty newspaper back on the table, its job done. “Maybe that’s why we keep reading,” he quipped.
Yan watched him leave, knowing this would always be the balance of their adventures—an unending exploration of stories, truth, and the lies they conceal. The room emptied slowly, like a theater after the play, with the worn newspaper left as the only reminder of their stage, reflecting a world so familiar yet forever estranged.
In the end, it was the stories left untold that crafted an ending more satirical than the one they had read, wrapped in the folds of an old, dirty newspaper.