The hollow seals behind me, solemn and soundless, as if a mouth closes around me and vows never to open again. Darkness takes me instantly. It is not the familiar dark of night, nor the soft edge of shadow, but something thicker, heavier, with weight enough to cling. It presses around me like damp wool, crawling along my arms and shoulders, seeping down my throat until I feel smothered in it. Every breath I try to take comes sour and stale, as though the air has already been used, and each exhale is stolen back before it can leave my lips.
The longer I notice it, the tighter it coils. My lungs scrape against my chest. My throat pinches shut. Panic thrashes in my ribs like wings caught in a cage. I fight for a deeper breath, and it snags halfway, burning. The silence presses down until my shoulders bow beneath it. A silence that listens. A silence that waits.
Then, in the suffocating black, a thread of gold appears.
The compass glows in my hand, its seam of light a fragile stitch against the void. It does not blaze, does not fight, but it endures—patient, steady, like a heartbeat refusing to falter. Warmth hums through the thin metal, seeping into my skin with a rhythm not my own. The longer I grip it, the less it feels like I am holding the compass and the more it feels like it is holding me—firm, patient, gentle, as though a hand clasps mine.
Here, where sound unravels and the edges of my body threaten to dissolve, the compass does not. It anchors me. It proves I am still here. When it tugs forward, small but sure, I let it guide me.
I walk. Step after step, my boots find unseen ground. The rhythm steadies me at first, but between each fall of my feet, the silence seeps back in, creeping closer, brushing against me as though it means to walk in my place. To fight it, I begin to count aloud, my voice thin against the dark. One, two, three, four, five, six—
She was going to trade you.
Those words strike through my rhythm like a knife. My chest meizes. The next number dies on my tongue.
The compass warms, sudden and firm, until my lungs remember to move again. The air comes ragged, thin, but enough. I walk faster, pressing the steps down as though I can grind the whispers beneath them.
The silence shifts with me, pressing closer, moving in step.
She tried to escape it.
The whisper cuts beneath my ribs. My throat cinches. I see my mother's face—pale, worn, her eyes fixed on the cabin door in those last weeks as if something waited beyond it. She never told me why. She gave me stories instead, and they all ended just before the ending
The compass glows hotter, steady in my grip.
Step. Step. Step.
You were never chosen.
Those words slam through me. My foot falters. For a heartbeat, the darkness twists into the shape of a woman, thin as smoke. A figure there, and gone.
The hollow inside me yawns wider. The compass pulses, stretching its light as though to hold me upright, refusing to let me collapse. The whispers peel away, circling, and waiting..
Time unravels. Steps blur. The thought coils: there is no end here. Only this. Forever.
And then—light.
Thin. Pale. Ahead.
I stumble toward it, gasping like a drowning thing breaking the surface. The glow opens into a ring carved into the ground, spirals etched deep and faintly luminous. They hum through my bones.
The moment I cross the line, the weight peels from my chest. My lungs fill whole for the first time in forever. Relief floods me, so sharp it hurts, and tears burn behind my eyes.
At the circle's center burns a flame. White, wavering, without smoke or heat, yet the dark recoils from it, scorched. I close my eyes. The hum of the carvings runs steady through me, a lullaby I never learned but somehow remember. My limbs loosen. Panic drains from my ribs like smoke escaping cracks.
For one fragile moment, I am safe. My shoulders sink. The compass lies quiet in my palm, the needle spinning lazily, no longer straining. Content.
I lean into it—the stillness, the light, the illusion of safety. A thought whispers: I could stay. I could stop walking.
Then—movement breaks the edge of my vision. A ripple in the dark, sharp and sudden.
A figure drifts around the outer rim – a woman.She circles the flame as if pacing in thought, but her rhythm is wrong. A step held too long, a sway bending too far, a turn too sharp. At times she leans close to the light, then recoils as though burned, clutching her arms to her chest. Her movements keep time with a song I cannot hear, and every note must be wrong.
Her eyes, hollow and restless, fix on me , her gaze lingering long on the compass in my hand.
"You found it," she breathes, brittle, voice cracking like paper. "You...you found it. I thought I was the last who remembered."
I clutch the compass. Its hum steadies, pulsing heat through my fingers.
Her lips twitch, a smile that never settles. "You have it. Then you know."
"I don't." My words sound 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 we had no voice of our own. I carried a hundred prayers into the dark. I thought it would be enough." She laughs, broken. "It wasn't."
She lunges toward the circle, hands outstretched, then jerks back with a shudder as her shadow nears the flame. Her fingers writhe, desperate 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 fail, that I was unworthy. I argued. I listened. I argued again. That was all it took."
Her pacing stutters. Her eyes widen, wild on the compass.
"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. The words come without thought.
Her mouth twist. "No. No, it doesn't leave. I dropped it. I misplaced it. I just...I just need to hold it again. Then I can finish. I can pass through the gates."
Her voice fractures—pleading, demanding, weeping. "Let me see it. Give it back. It'smine. I was chosen."
The compass burns in my palm. She shrieks and recoils, staggering into her orbit again. Her whispers splinter. She was going to trade you.She sent you to die.You were never chosen.
Her voice splits raw. "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 flares hot, steadying me. 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 trembling hands. I hold my palms out towards; though it gives no heat, something sinks into me, as if ; the flame knows how to fill the hollow I didn't realize I was growing..
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, just 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 shifts at the circle's edge, straining like fabric pulled too tight. Cracks form. The circle is a shelter, but not a wall. It can't keep them out forever.
The first whisper seeps through: She would have fed you to the dark.
The second followsShe turned her back on the chain that holds him.
The flame wavers, but endures..
The third strikes: 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 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 emerges from the dark as though she has always been there—the scarf at her throat, the slope of her shoulders, the crooked hang of her left hand. She does not look at me. She only walks, steady and sure, toward a seam cut too straight, too clean. A gate.
Without meaning to, I rise.
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, humming faintly with the patience of the flame.
The compass pulses with a desperate force, warmth rising in my palm until it hurts.
But my mother is ahead.
The whispers swell, vast and deep: One's 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. She does not turn.
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 near the gate tastes of iron, bitter as old blood. My mother passes through without slowing. The other gate lingers in the corner of my eye, narrow and patient, humming softly like the circle's flame. The compass thrashes in my hand, burning, desperate to pull me back.
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 writhes in my grip, searing my palm. Ahead, she opens a door and closes it behind her.
So, I follow. Down this pathway. The compass's pull weakens, and it begins to spin slowly as I place my hand on the knob
And turn.