Had the Walls Not Fallen
Amid the ashes, Maria weighs all she has lost
The second night was not so , and the fire came when the wind was high.
Had the walls not fallen, the House of Salt might have survived to see another dawn.
But the flames climbed the old timbers, and by morning only blackened stone remained.
Maria escaped with little more than the clothes she wore and a single ledger of accounts.
Had the crowd shown mercy, the servants might have saved some treasure from the .
Instead they scattered into the countryside, and the great household was broken forever.
Maria wished that her father were alive to guide her through the he had feared.
"I wish I had listened," she murmured, standing among the ashes of her childhood home.
Had she sold the salt in time, some fortune might have been carried safely away.
But the harbour had closed, and no buyer had come, and now nothing at all was left.
She wished the walls still stood, that the candles still burned, that the past could return.
Had her marriage been true, perhaps Lucien would have stayed to share the .
Yet he had fled, and she found she did not miss the man she had never loved.
The town, too, lay wounded, its finest houses reduced to smoking shells along the shore.
Maria walked the ruined streets, wishing she could , yet finding her eyes strangely dry.
Had history been kinder, the House of Salt might have endured another hundred years.
But history, she now understood, spared neither the honest nor the proud.
Among the she found the stone lintel carved with her family's ancient name.
Had it not been for that single stone, no of the Voss line would have remained.
She knelt and touched the letters, wishing the dead could see how much had been lost.
An old servant found her there, one of the few who had not abandoned the family.
"Had we more time," he said gently, "we might have saved the house you loved."
Maria shook her head, for she knew that time itself had turned against them all.
She wished she could hate someone, yet the fault belonged to no single hand.
Standing in the ashes, she made a quiet that surprised even herself.
If nothing of the old world remained, then she would build something wholly new.