I resumed the road, heavy-footed, blank-eyed, breath mechanical, with no true direction, no light to follow, no promise to reach. There was nothing ahead of me. Nothing behind. Just that fractured expanse, that non-world suspended between memory and abandonment. I wasn't walking to move forward. I was walking to keep going. To not extinguish myself. To not become even more silence than I already was.
And step by step, hour by hour perhaps — or eternities, I no longer really knew — something began to stir within me. Slowly. Almost insidiously. Not a jolt. Not a scream. An older presence. Denser. Like an egg cracking beneath the skin. Like a buried pulse gaining ground.
