The hollow seals behind me, solemn and soundless, like the mouth of something that only swallows whole.
The dark is immediate.
Not the dark of night, not even shadow, but something thicker. Heavier. It clings to me like damp wool, crawling along my arms and shoulders, seeping down the curve of my throat.
It presses into my mouth, sour and stale, so that every breath I drag in feels thin, already spent, and each exhale is stolen back before I can feel it leave.
The longer I notice it, the tighter it coils around me. My lungs scrape against my knotting chest. I try to draw more air. My throat pinches. Panic thrashes against my sternum like wings in a cage.
I reach for another breath, deeper, but it snags halfway and burns in my throat. The silence grows heavy around me, enough to bend my shoulders, a weight that listens without sound.
And then—
Light.
Small. Golden.
The compass.
It glows faint in my hand, a seam of gold stitched against the black, small and fragile, no more than a thread. And yet it endures. Not fierce, not wild, but patient. Steady. A heartbeat that refuses to falter in the suffocating dark, warm, and alive as though it cannot be unmade.
The warmth hums through the thin metal, seeping into my skin with a rhythm — not my own, but present, certain, alive. The longer I grip it, the less it feels like something I hold and more like something that clasps me back.
A hand in mine. Firm. Patient. Gentle.
Here, where everything else unravels — sound, breath, even the edges of my body.
The compass does not. It is the one thing that holds. My guiding light. My proof I have not yet dissolved into this dark.
It tugs forward. Small, sure.
So, I walk.
Step. Step. Step.
That rhythm steadies me at first. But between the falls of my feet, the quiet thickens, spreading into the gaps my feet leave. It creeps closer, brushing against me as though it means to walk in my place.
I begin to count my steps to stave off the quiet surrounding me.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—
She was going to trade you.
Those words strike through my rhythm, hollowing the next number before I can form it. My chest snaps tight. The air seizes sharply in my throat.
The compass warms, suddenly and firm, until my lungs remember how to move again. The air shudders out of me and back in, ragged, thin, but enough.
I walk faster.
Step. Step. Step.
The silence shifts with me, pressing closer, moving in step.
She tried to escape it.
That whisper cuts clean beneath my ribs. My throat cinches. My mother's face stirs in memory, pale and worn, her eyes fixed always on the cabin door in those last weeks as if something waited behind it. She never told me why. She gave me stories instead, spun from scraps, and they all ended just before their ending.
I cling to the compass' light, thin as it is, as though it alone can keep the dark from shaping itself around me.
The compass hums hotter, holding me steady.
Step. Step. Step.
You were never chosen.
Those words slam through me. I stumble.
For a heartbeat, I swear I saw in the darkness a glimpse of another shape, thin as smoke. Was that a woman?
There and gone.
The hollow inside me widens.
The compass pulses harder, its warmth soothing. Its glow stretching wider as though to hold me upright, refusing to let me fold. The whispers fray, slipping back into the black, circling. Waiting.
Step. Step. Step.
Time feels like it's unraveling. Step after step all the same. A thought coils in: there is no end. Only this. Forever.
Then—light.
Thin. Pale. Ahead.
I stumble toward it, starving lungs gulping air that doesn't exist, and reach it gasping like the drowning finally meeting the surface.
I step to a ring carved into the ground. Spirals etched deep, glowing faintly, while a humming reverberated in my bones.
I cross the line.
The moment I step across, the weight peels from my chest. I breathe to the bottom of my lungs, filling them whole. Sweet, aching relief pours through me, enough to bring tears behind my eyes. I hadn't known how starved I was until this moment.
At the circle's center burns a flame — white, wavering, without smoke, without heat and yet the dark recoils from it, as if scorched.
I close my eyes. The hum of the carvings runs through me steadily, like a lullaby I never learned but somehow remember. My limbs loosen. The panic slips out of my ribs like smoke through cracks.
For one fragile moment, I am safe.
My shoulders sink. The compass for the first time, lies quiet in my hand, spinning slowly as if it too is content here. No longer having to strain against the black.
I lean myself into it, the stillness, the light, the fragile sense of being sheltered.
A thought slips through my mind: maybe I could just stay here. I could stop walking.
Then—movement scrapes the edge of my vision.
A ripple in the dark, sharp and sudden.
This darkness, the inky blackness I've been walking through. Is not empty.
A figure drifts around the outer rim. A woman.
She circles the flame with the movement of someone pacing in thought, but her rhythm is broken. A step held too long, then a turn too sharp, a sway that bends too far before snapping upright again. At times she lingers, leaning close to the light, then recoils as though struck, clutching her arms tight against her chest. Her body keeps time to a song I can't hear, but every note must be wrong.
Her eyes, hollow and restless, stare at me , her gazing lingering long on the compass in my hand.
"You found it," she breathes, brittle, voice like paper cracking. "You...you found it. I thought I was the last who remembered the way."
I grip the compass tighter. Its hums steady in my palm, pulsing heat through my fingers.
Her lips twitch, split by a smile that never settles.
"You have it," she says. "The compass. Then you know."
"I don't." My words feel thin in the air. "I don't know anything."
Her head tilts. Her expression flickers— hunger, grief, confusion, each gone before it can settle.
"How did you come here blind?" she whispers. "They filled us with vows, prayers, promises until there was nothing left of our own voices. I carried a hundred prayers into the dark. I thought it would be enough."
She laughs; a sound cracked in half. "It wasn't."
She lunges toward the circle, hands reaching, then jerks back with a shudder as her shadow nears the flames edge. Her fingers writhe in the air, trembling for what they cannot touch.
"I walked into the dark, and the dark walked into me," she says. "The voices came quick. They told me I was weak, that I would falter, that I was unworthy. I argued. I listened. I argued again. That was all it took."
Her pacing falters. She stares at the compass, eyes wide and wild.
"I never finished," she whispers. "My trial...I was close, I was close... But I lost it. The compass. It was mine, and I lost it."
"It left you," I murmur, though the words rise unbidden.
Her mouth twitches, tightens. "No. No, it doesn't leave. I dropped it. Misplaced it. I just...I just need to hold it again. Then I can go on. I can finish. I can pass through the gates."
Her voice fractures, pleading, demanding, weeping all at once. "Let me see it. Just a little closer. Give it back. It'smine. I was chosen."
The compass flares hot in my hands and she recoils with a shriek, staggering back into her restless orbit.
Her voice pitches higher, slipping into a chorus of whispers that seem to pour through her lips.
"She was going to trade you."
"She sent you here to die."
"You were never chosen."
Her head jerks violently. "Don't listen to them," she gasps. "Listen to me. You can't trust the light. You can't trust the flame. They left me here. They'll leave you too. Step out. The dark will show you the truth. He will speak, and you will see."
The compass burns in my palm, it's pulse hammering. She shrieks and clutches her head, muttering, pacing, faster and faster, the sound of her broken hum filling every space the whispers don't.
Then, as suddenly as she appeared, she staggers away as if yanked by something unseen. Her form unraveling into the dark until I can no longer tell if she was ever there at all.
I kneel at the flame.
Its pale light steadies me, but the steadiness feels brittle, fragile, like glass cupped in shaking hands. I hold my palms out towards it though it gives no heat and still I feel something soak into me, as if the flame knows how to fill the hollow I didn't realize I was growing.
For a few moments, I only breathe, letting the glow settle in my bones. Reminding myself that I am still here. That the dark has not yet unmade me.
It would be so easy to stay.
The circle hums low, like the earth itself breathing. The flame wavers with a grace that feels alive, almost watching me. My body loosens. The compass lies calm in my hand, quiet, no straining, no tugging, like its content resting in this safety with me.
I close my eyes. For a moment, I could almost believe this place is meant to be a haven.
But silence doesn't stay still.
It shifts.
Not a sound, not a word, but a pressure. Stretching thin across the circle's edge. The realization sets in slowly.
The circle is a shelter, but not a wall. It can't keep them out forever. I hear something strain like fabric pulled too tight, waiting to tear.
And then the first whisper seeps through.
She would have fed you to the dark.
The words crawl under my skin. My chest tightens.
Another seam strains.
She turned her back on the chain that holds him.
The air thins. The flame flickers but hold. The circle hums louder, resisting.
Then the third.
You are nothing but a mistake waiting to break.
The circle markings flare, white-hot. I clutch the compass until my knuckles ache, its warmth trembling, as though holding me together tight against something vast pressing on.
And in the pause between one whisper and the next, I see her.
Not the madwoman.
Her.
My mother.
She steps from the dark as though she has always been there. The scarf at their throat. The slope of her shoulders. The crooked hang of her left hand. She does not look at me. She only walks, steady, certain, every movement so familiar it hurts.
I rise without meaning to.
She drifts towards a seam in the black a doorway cut too straight, to clean.
A gate.
She passes through.
The compass jerks in my hand. Its face spinning wildly, the needle trembling, then lurching towards another seam — smaller, tucked at the edge of sight. The hum of it reminds me of the carvings, of the flame, of something older and patient.
The compass pulses with a desperate force, warmth rising in my palm until it hurts.
But she is ahead.
And the whispers lean closer, heavier, deeper, like a voice speaking through the stone.
Her blood was meant for the flame, but it failed.
Her fear is your inheritance.
You were never chosen — only left behind.
The words dig into me like hooks. My throat closes. But my feet move anyway.
"Wait," I call out, though I know she will not turn.
The compass tugs against me, almost frantic but wordless.
No.
I step across the circle's boundary. The dark slams in, wrapping cold fingers around my ankles tugging. The flame shrinks behind me, its glow small and distant, until it winks out of sight.
I reached the gate she crossed. The air here is colder, sharp with the taste of iron, bitter as old blood. Beyond her figure moves deeper. She does not stop. She does not turn.
The other gate lingers faint in the corner of my vision. Narrow, patient, humming softly like the flame's protection.
The compass pulses again, desperate, tugging so hard my arm arches.
But I do not choose it.
I follow her.
I step through the gate. The compass burns in my palm, tugging back, desperate to make me stop.
But I see her open a door and silently close it behind her.
So, I follow. Down this pathway. Even the desperate pull of the compass fades and it begins to spin slowly as I place my hand on the knob.
And turn.