The eaves are green bricks and flowing tiles, curving gently like the stroke of a calligrapher’s brush, balanced perfectly against the vast canvas of sky. In the stillness of an early morning, when the mist is thick and the world seems softer, the roof seems to breathe—alive with history, whispering stories etched into its bones by centuries of sun, rain, and wind.
This house, tucked away in the folds of a forgotten mountain village, stands quiet but watchful. Moss grows thick along the lower edges of the eaves, the tiles glazed by time and seasons. Each brick was once clay, each tile once earth, shaped by human hands and fire until they became more than materials. Now they’re memory. Now they’re myth.
The green isn’t uniform. Some bricks are darker, weathered to deep jade. Others shimmer with a near-emerald sheen when the sun hits them just right. The flowing tiles carry patterns—some accidental, created by lichen, cracks, and stains; others deliberate, curved like waves or painted with symbols whose meanings have been forgotten but still radiate a sense of sacredness.
Beneath these eaves lives a silence not born from absence, but from reverence. The silence of generations who once laughed here, fought here, planted rice in the fields just beyond the gate, and watched the stars from these very corners. The silence of ancestors whose incense smoke still curls upward, trying to reach the heavens.
There is a courtyard, square and stone-paved, its center worn smooth by the feet of those who once danced or prayed there. Ivy climbs the walls slowly, persistently, finding its own way up toward the eaves, embracing the green bricks as if remembering them. A rusted bell hangs beneath one corner of the roof, swaying in wind that tells no direction.
Inside, the air smells of aged wood and distant jasmine. Furniture sits in still dignity—hardwood chairs with carved backs, a table worn smooth by countless meals. A single scroll still hangs in the hall, its ink faded but its presence heavy: a poem, perhaps, or a proverb, or the name of a family long departed. No one can say anymore. But still it hangs, as if waiting.
A child once grew up here, barefoot and curious. She’d lie beneath the eaves during summer storms, watching the rain stream off the curved tiles in rhythmic waves. She gave names to the cracks in the bricks, stories to the birds who nested in the corners of the roof. The house was her fortress, her theater, her map of the world.
She left, of course. The way most children do when the world calls louder than home. She packed her stories in her bones and went off into cities filled with glass and steel and streets that forgot how to curve. Years later, something pulled her back. A funeral. A memory. A whisper. She doesn’t even remember which.
And now, she stands again beneath those green eaves and flowing tiles. Her hair has silvered like moonlight. Her fingers trace the lines of bricks that never moved, never followed, but also never forgot. And the house seems to breathe her in.
She remembers the old tales—the dragon beneath the river rock, the fox spirit in the woods, the hidden doorway behind the screen. None of them seem so far-fetched now. This place holds magic, yes, but not of spells and sorcery. It’s the magic of memory. Of roots. Of walls that watched you grow and didn’t stop loving you when you left.
She runs her hand along a tile, feeling the warmth left behind by the sun. And maybe it’s her imagination, or maybe it’s something more, but for a moment she thinks she hears a soft voice—her grandmother’s, perhaps—humming a song half-lost to time.
The eaves are green bricks and flowing tiles. They don’t speak loudly. They don’t shine in bright lights or demand attention. But they endure. And sometimes, when the world spins too fast, it’s the enduring things that matter most.
