I have walked through many kinds of darkness in my time.

Some of it made by men, some made by God, and some made by things that have no business being named.

But the night I stepped beneath the boughs of the Blackroot Hollow… that was a darkness that stared back.

The trees were twisted into shapes no honest forest ever learned, limbs coiled like serpents, bark riven with spirals that throbbed faintly when the wind died. There was no moon. There was no sky. Only the canopy, knotted so tightly above me that it smothered all but the memory of light.

Yet ahead, impossibly far and impossibly near, a single lamp burned.

It flickered at the top of a stone stairway half-swallowed by roots. I felt drawn to it, as a moth is drawn to flame, or a dying man to prayer. I did not want to go closer. I went anyway.

Every footstep sank softly, as if the ground itself were breathing.

And the trees whispered, the way a man whispers confessions when he believes God has already turned His back.

When I reached the stair, the lamp guttered.

The roots around the stones pulled tighter, like a hand closing.

There was a door at the top.

I hadn’t seen it until the flame sputtered, until the shadows moved in ways that had nothing to do with my lantern.

Someone, or something—stood behind that door.

I could hear it.

Breathing. Slow. Deep. Patient. I remembered then a truth the desert had carved into me long ago:

“Some lights were not meant to guide us. Some were meant to lure us.”

And the moment I understood that, the lamp went out. But the breathing did not.