The air curled once against my cheek — almost playful — then slipped away into the night.
I didn’t have air magic.
I just had hope.
I pushed on, pulling my body through the woods on sheer will alone.
After a long time, the forest had thinned without me noticing. One step hit something hard and loose beneath my boots.
Gravel.
I looked down.
A road.
Relief flared — quick and bright — then faded just as fast.
Because there were no streetlights, just endless black snaking both directions.
I listened for headlights. For engines. For anything.
There was only the river behind me, moving steadily through the night, and the high ringing that had taken up residence inside my skull.
At this hour, the world felt emptied out.
And I was standing in the open.
Cold seeped through my clothes and into my skin, settling deep enough that I couldn’t tell whether I was shivering from the air or from whatever my body had already endured. My legs trembled in uneven waves, muscles misfiring, each stepdemanding more than I had left to give. The edges of the road softened when I looked at them too long, as though the dark were slowly reclaiming what little structure remained.
I stepped onto it anyway.
The gravel shifted beneath me. My balance wavered, and the trees along the verge seemed to sway in slow, unnatural arcs.
Perhaps they were moving.
Perhaps I was.
So, I walked.
I don’t remember deciding to. My body simply kept moving, one step folding into the next, until the trembling in my legs turned violent and my knees gave way beneath me.
There was no time to catch myself.
Gravel tore into my palms. The impact burst white across my vision, a flash that swallowed the road and the trees and left only ringing silence in its wake. For a moment I thought I had gone blind.
Then the world returned at an angle.
Frozen stones pressed into my cheek, their edges sharp enough that I could trace their shape through my skin, grounding and distant at the same time, as though the sensation belonged to someone else and not entirely to me.
The sky above me stretched wide and merciless, a black expanse without edges, and it felt too large to belong to the same world as me — too vast for something so small and shaking to exist beneath it without simply being swallowed whole.
My fingers twitched against the gravel, scraping uselessly.
I couldn’t feel them anymore. The cold had moved inward, past skin and muscle, settling somewhere deeper, somewhere thatmade it difficult to tell where my body ended and the night began.
A strange, detached thought drifted through me, almost curious in its calm.
I wondered, vaguely, if this was how people disappeared.
