Home For Wayward Travellers Here

“No one is,” the Keeper replied. “That’s the first sign that you do.”

Up the creaking stairs, past doors with no numbers, only whispers. Room 7 was small, warm, unbearably kind. The window showed not a view, but a memory: a fork in a forest path, one side overgrown with brambles, the other still wet from recent rain. The Elena in the memory stood at the crossroads for a long, long time.

She had chosen the rain. She had run. And now, somehow, she had arrived here. home for wayward travellers

The common room was a museum of lost things. A grandfather clock with no hands. A globe spinning backward. On the hearth, a pair of boots caked with seven different colors of mud. And people—or the shells of them—huddled in mismatched chairs. A woman with a compass tattooed on her wrist, always pointing south. A man who counted his fingers obsessively: ten, nine, ten, nine. An old fellow who said nothing but hummed the same lullaby, over and over, as if trying to remember whose cradle he’d once bent over.

Elena hesitated. “I’m not sure I belong here.” “No one is,” the Keeper replied

Below, the man with the compass stopped checking his wrist. The finger-counter held still. The old man hummed a new note—the first change in decades.

That night, she slept without dreaming for the first time in years. When she woke, the Keeper was at her door with a tray: tea that tasted like forgiveness, bread that broke without crumbs. The window showed not a view, but a

And the sign outside continued to swing. Home for Wayward Travellers.