In The Night: Lost

He sat down on the cold ground. The night wrapped around him like a blanket too heavy to lift. He wasn’t lost geographically. He was lost the way a compass is lost when the magnet’s gone—still pointing, but at nothing true.

Good , he thought.

The headlights cut two pale tunnels through the dark, but they only reached a few feet before the blackness ate them. Elias pulled the car to the shoulder of the empty road and killed the engine. The silence that rushed in was absolute—no crickets, no wind, just the soft tick of cooling metal. Lost in the Night

He walked until the road was a guess behind him. The darkness pressed against his eyes like a blindfold. He stumbled over a root, caught himself on a trunk, and kept going. No destination. No map. Every step felt like falling upward into something vast and indifferent. He sat down on the cold ground