Yellow

It had been standing there for what might have been a very long time.

Time was difficult to measure here. There was no sun to track, no rhythm of light shifting into dark. There was only the darkness, and the lights within it, and the distance between them — a distance that seemed to change depending on how long one looked.

The yellow light was closer now.

Or perhaps it had always been this close, and the being had simply not noticed until this moment. That was the thing about distances in this place — they did not announce themselves. They simply were, and then they were different, and there was no record of the change.

It was small. Smaller than the being had expected, somehow, though there had been no expectation to begin with — only the looking, and the not-touching, and the long, careful stillness that had become its own kind of habit. The light pulsed gently, the way something does when it has been breathing alone for too long and has forgotten there is any other rhythm to keep.

It did not know what it was.

It knew only this: the light had weight.

Not the weight of objects — not the weight of the darkness pressing in on all sides, not the weight of the silence that sat in every gap between one moment and the next. This was a different kind of weight. The kind that the being felt not in any particular place but everywhere at once, a pressure without location, a gravity without direction. The kind of weight that meant: this matters. This has always mattered. You simply did not know it yet.

The knowing arrived without invitation, the way all true things do.

It reached out.

It did not decide to. That was the part that would be difficult to explain, if there had been anyone to explain it to — the absence of decision. One moment the distance existed. The next moment, the distance was closing. Not because it had chosen to close it, but because something older than choice had already made the movement, and the self simply followed.

The yellow light pulsed once — larger, brighter, as though it too had been waiting for exactly this.

Then —
Something moved in the dark behind it.

Fast.

A shape — round, trailing silver-pale light — crossing the distance in a single motion. No warning. No sound. Just the sudden presence of something that had not been there, and then was.

The lantern flared.

Bright. Brighter than it had ever been — then stuttering, lurching, the silver light choking on itself as though the body carrying it had finally done something it was never built to do. The staff cut through the dark like a blade. The egg-shaped form hurtled forward with a force that had no name except wrong — wrong direction, wrong speed, wrong everything, every rule of this place broken in a single movement —
”Auris —“

One word. Torn out of somewhere that did not know it was holding it.

Too late.

The hand — if it could be called a hand — made contact.

The lantern shattered.

Silver fragments exploded outward, each one catching the gold for just a fraction of a second — bright, bright, gone — and in the space they left behind the yellow light did not fill so much as detonate, rushing outward and inward at once, consuming the dark, consuming the distance, consuming every careful boundary between what was here and what was somewhere else entirely —
The Wayfinder reached for something to hold onto.

There was nothing.

There was only gold.

And then there was nothing at all.