Something caught me, but it wasn't a rope springing from a last-minute miracle, nor a hand reaching out at the edge of the abyss, nor even a cry of redemption hurled from the other side of the world. No. It was something else. Something archaic. Organic. Deep. A root.
Not a root of soil, gnarled, rough, familiar. No. A root of another order, older, stranger, like a living vein rising from the depths of the void, winding through the very fabric of emptiness, crossing the invisible layers of what I had just betrayed. It didn't appear suddenly — it was already there, it had always been there, hidden beneath the silence, curled in the darkness, lurking like a memory one refuses to name.
