The ground starts moving before you see the fire.

You spread your feet, reach for something solid. A faint voice echoes with your name, but the sound arrives too slowly. Even your hands seem far away.

Then the storm comes through, and the world you recognise begins to burn.

You step into the darkness.

From inside, you can’t tell. You reach out on either side and find nothing. There are no walls to follow, no curve or corner, no faint light to walk towards.

There is ground beneath your feet. You test it with your weight, then take another step.

You look back for anyone, someone, who made the echoes. You want them to follow. You wait with your hand stretched out until your shoulder aches, but this place will only hold you.

You lower your arm.

For a while, you count your footsteps. At a thousand, you start again. Somewhere through the next thousand, you lose your place and begin at one, though you can’t remember why the number matters.

You sleep. You wake with your cheek against the ground. You have no way of knowing how long you’ve been here.

Outside, you hear something collapse.

You know that sound. You try to remember the rooms as they were, the things you left where you expected to find them again. You could have walked through that life with your eyes closed.

You know you will never go back.

Nothing will ever be the same again.

The fire keeps burning.

After a time, you notice that you can breathe. You hold out your hands. Though you can’t see them, you can feel the skin, cool and unbroken beneath your thumbs. The heat hasn’t reached you.

You sit with that for a long while.

Beyond this darkness, the fire is taking everything you thought you would return to. In here, your soul has somewhere to survive it.

You wish knowing that made the walking easier.

Your feet hurt. You grow tired of waking to the same blackness. Sometimes you stand still because you can no longer believe that moving makes any difference. On those days, you can’t imagine an end. You struggle to remember having a life before this.

There is nobody beside you to say how far you’ve come.

Then you get up.

You walk until you need to rest. You rest until you can walk. Sometimes you have enough faith for hours. Sometimes you have to stop and find it again with one foot still lifted from the ground.