The Crossing
I didn’t mean to come this far.
When I first set out, I thought I’d give it three months - six at most. Just enough time to clear my head after everything that happened back home. A solo trip, something to reset myself. But something odd is happening, I think i'm lost... or I'm losing my mind.
The terrain doesn’t follow the usual patterns. I’ve been hiking for years, and I know how mountains work, how valleys form. But here, the slopes feel wrong - gradual when they should be steep, winding when they should run straight. I tell myself it’s just unfamiliar geography. A region I haven’t studied well enough.
The trees shifted first. I noticed it three days in, though at the time I convinced myself I was imagining things. The bark started looking darker, almost polished. The leaves turned brittle and sharp-edged, catching the light strangely. By the fifth day, whole sections of forest seemed to gleam like they’d been lacquered.
I stopped to examine one of the trunks, running my hand along its surface. Smooth. Cold. Almost glass-like.
A rare species, I told myself. Something regional.
The path kept drawing me forward. That’s the thing I can’t quite explain, I’ve always had good instincts about direction, about when to turn back. But something pulled at me here, a subtle magnetism I felt in my chest rather than understood with my mind.
The animals disappeared gradually. First the birds, their songs fading over the course of a day until the forest fell into a silence so complete it pressed against my eardrums. Then the insects. Then the small rustlings in the underbrush that you don’t notice until they’re gone.
I camped that night beside a stream, if you could call it that. The water looked normal enough, clear and cold, but it almost seemed to have a crystalline glint. I boiled it on my stove, and could swear I saw strangle lights rising from the brume. Nevertheless, I drank deeply, trying to ignore how it tasted faintly of minerals I couldn’t identify. Metallic. Almost bitter.
When I closed my eyes to sleep, I saw the orange glow for the first time.
Just a flicker at the edge of my vision, like distant firelight through trees. I sat up, reaching for my flashlight, but when I clicked it on, there was nothing. Just the darkness beyond my tent, thick and absolute.
The next morning, the sky was... well it was... wrong.
Not dramatically wrong - I noticed it slowly, over the course of hours. But the blue seemed too vibrant, like a painted view into a distant nebula. The sun tracked across it normally enough, but the shadows it cast felt off, angled in ways that didn’t quite match its position.
I checked my compass. The needle spun lazily, unable to settle.
My phone had died two days ago. No signal, no power despite the solar charger. Just a black rectangle of useless glass in my pack.
I should have turned back.
Instead, I kept walking.
The ground changed texture beneath my boots. The dirt became harder, smoother. Sections of exposed rock showed surfaces that caught the light like polished stone, dark and reflective. I knelt to touch one, expecting granite or slate, but it was almost warm under my palm, despite the cool air.
The trees thinned. Then stopped altogether.
I stood at the edge of the forest—if that’s still what it was—and looked out at what lay beyond. No vegetation. No variation in color, just a large, endless expanse of mist.
Every rational part of me screamed to go back. But the pull was stronger now, a physical thing tugging at my sternum. And that orange glow flickered again through the haze, brighter than before.
I walked for hours. Maybe days - time felt slippery here, stretching like butter across a toasted landscape. I rationed my food, but I wasn’t particularly hungry. I drank from my canteen, but I wasn’t particularly thirsty. My body felt light, untethered, like I was moving through something thinner than air.
The stone began to rise around me. The mist thinned and suddenly there were formations, pillars of that black material jutting from the ground like the ribs of some massive buried creature. They twisted as they rose, spiraling in ways that dizzied the mind.
The orange glow was constant now, emanating from somewhere ahead. Not firelight. Something steadier, more diffuse. It painted everything in warm tones that felt oddly nostalgic, like a return to a place long forgotten.
I found the first opening as the sky began to darken - or what passed for darkening here, a dimming rather than true night. A gap between two of the massive pillars, leading downward into the earth. The glow came from within, pulsing faintly like a amber heartbeat.
I stood at the entrance for a long time. My legs trembled. My breath came shallow and quick.
I should have turned back.
But I’d come too far. And some part of me - the part that had kept me moving all this time - knew that back was no longer an option. That whatever I’d crossed, whatever boundary I’d stepped over without realizing, it was behind me now. Irretrievable.
I descended.
The passage narrowed immediately, walls pressing close on either side. That black stone, smooth and cold, reflecting the orange glow in strange patterns that seemed to move independently of my flashlight beam - which barely penetrated here anyway, it's meager light swallowed by the darkness.
The passage twisted. Turned. Branched into corridors that led in directions I couldn’t name -not left or right, not up or down, but something orthogonal to normal space. I chose paths by instinct, following the pull that had brought me this far.
The glow grew stronger. The walls seemed to pulse with it, that warm orange light seeping from the stone itself, or perhaps from somewhere beyond it. The temperature didn’t change, but I felt heat anyway, radiating from nowhere and everywhere at once.
I walked until walking was the only reality I could remember. The twisting corridors, the gleaming black walls, the persistent glow - they became all i knew
When did I eat last? When did I sleep? I couldn’t remember. Didn’t seem important.
The hallway opened suddenly into a vast space, and I stopped, my breath catching.
The chamber stretched in all directions, its boundaries lost in shadow and orange light. The walls rose in impossible curves, obsidian surfaces reflecting and refracting the glow in mosaic patterns until it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. More corridors branched away in every direction—dozens of them, hundreds, twisting into darkness or illuminated by that persistent, sourceless light.
I realized, with a clarity that should have terrified me but instead felt like relief, that I’d been walking for far longer than days. That the world I’d left was impossibly distant now. Perhaps it always had been.
I’d crossed something. Not a border. Not a threshold you could mark on a map.
Something else entirely.
And these halls of twisting obsidian, these corridors lit by that eternal orange glow - this was where I was now. Where I’d perhaps always been heading, from the moment I took that first step onto the trail.
I chose a corridor at random and kept walking, my footsteps silent on the glass-smooth floor, swallowed by a darkness that had never known my world at all.
