It was a close and dark night pierced only by the occasional, ghostly flash of sheet lightning. The utter darkness of the night was not merely a matter of weather or time. It was something far graver. One could walk these roads forever and never know why they walked. Even in the most absolute dark, there were flickers. Phantom flickers of light, momentary and insubstantial, which spoke, if only briefly, to the possibility of insight. Sometimes they caused the heart to swell, the mind to grow. Sometimes they misled, betraying the hopeful to error. But of one truth it may be said: they were never permanent. The phantom flicker vanished as quickly as it came, and darkness reclaimed the world as though it had never been disturbed.
Two figures walked that road: one upright with a stride too eager for such a night. Her boots splashed lightly through shallow pools gathered in ruts along the path. She lifted her face at every flash as though heaven itself had blinked in recognition, rain beading in her lashes as brief light reflected in her wide eyes. The other did not look up unless the ground required it. His gaze remained lowered, measuring each uneven stone, each soft patch of mud that might twist an ankle. The collar of his coat was turned high against the damp wind that came and went without warning. When he paused, of pressing his thumbnail against his forefinger, perhaps from the need to affirm that the man could still feel or confirm that something solid was still there.
“Did you see it?” she whispered as lightning unveiled, for a trembling instant, the outline of a tree ahead, its branches thrown wide like skeletal arms clawing at the sky. “It wasn’t just light: it means something.”
“It was precisely light,” he said. “Nothing more ambitious than that.”
Another flash: a distant house, windows glinting like watchful eyes, the pale shine trembling against the dark like a promise not fully formed.
“There,” she breathed. “Shelter and warmth.”
“Or perspective,” he said. “Those shadows aren’t shelter nor warmth.”
They walked on.
Lightning tore the sky again, a figure stood upon a hill, or seemed to. She ran toward it. The ground dipped treacherously. Mud sucked at her boots, pulling with each hurried step. Brambles seized her ankles, their thorns catching fabric and skin alike. Stone tore skin from her palms when she stumbled forward, the copper taste of blood rising faintly in her mouth. By the time she reached the hilltop, breath ragged and chest burning, there was nothing there but wind moving through tall grass, bending it in restless waves.
“You see,” he called, not unkindly, his voice nearly swallowed by the open field. “It does not endure.”
Then a mountain, vast and sudden, revealed in full height by a white violence of light. Its jagged ridges flashed silver, its slopes plunging sharply into unseen depths. Her heart hammered, ribs aching from exertion. “A summit,” she said, breathless. “Something worthy of ascent.”
“The road is ascent enough,” he answered. “One survives it before conquering anything beyond it.”
“Then why do you never look up? Why always down? Is there not a world up there too?”
“Not one worth the risk of losing the road,” he said.
But she no longer listened. She chased the next brilliance off the path entirely. The earth gave way beneath her. Gravel scattered into the void, clattering against unseen rock below. Cold air rushed upward from the darkness as though exhaled from some hidden depth. Only his hand caught her coat before the cliff consumed her, fingers closing hard around wet fabric as it strained under her weight. For one suspended instant, her boots scraped uselessly against crumbling edge; loose stones tumbled past her into soundless black. Lightning revealed nothing at all beyond the precipice: no tree, no house, no figure, no cross, and no mountain: only a depth that swallowed even the suggestion of shape.
They lay breathless in the mud. Cold water seeped through their sleeves. She could smell the earth; her cheek was pressed against wet stone. She could feel her own heartbeat in her palms where the gravel had torn them. They did not speak for a long while. All they did was lay. Neither looked at the sky nor the ground. Her breathing slowed, though her hands still trembled. The rain began again in a thin, steady fall, tapping softly against earth and cloth.
“There was nothing.”
“There was light,” he replied. “And there was you, choosing to follow it.”
They returned to the path. Another flash came almost immediately, and with it a shape she was almost certain, for one suspended moment, was a door set into the hillside. She stopped walking; she felt the pull of it in her chest like a cord. She watched it dissolve into the voided darkness, and she did not run.
She still lifted her eyes when lightning came, but she no longer ran. She watched. She let the shapes form and dissolve, letting them pass through her without pursuit. The wind brushed her hair back from her face; the rain cooled the heat of her earlier haste. “It may not promise anything,” she said at last, “but it reveals where we are.”
“It reveals,” he admitted, “that we are still walking.”
He looked up then, briefly, at the next flash. Whatever the light showed him, he did not say. But he did not look away until it had gone. The next flicker showed neither salvation nor deception: only the two of them upon the road, side by side.
The rain fell steadily now.
The darkness closed again, patient and unoffended. The flicker did not remain. It never would. “I wish I had caught you in time.”
“Me too.”
