Between the Years

You step out of the tunnel and the light is wrong — not the gold of morning, not the silver of a future you almost chased. Just afternoon. Plain, unremarkable afternoon. The map is no longer in your pocket. You do not remember dropping it.

Barylon spreads below: the same crooked roofs, the same thin smoke, the same goats picking their way along the same stubborn slopes. And yet something inside you has gone quiet. The hum of elsewhere, the itch of more — both have lifted like a fever breaking.

You sit on a flat stone warmed by a sun that asks nothing of you. The mist, which has clung to these peaks every dawn of your life, finally thins. You watch it go. You do not chase it. For the first time, you understand that some doors close not because you failed to walk through them, but because you no longer need them open.