The Place Between

You open your eyes to a grey sky that has never known sunlight. The hills roll outward in every direction, exactly as drawn a hundred times by hands that didn't know they were drawing—the same soft slopes, the same colourless grass bending in a wind you cannot feel. The crooked tree stands forty feet ahead, and beyond it: the door.

It is open. It was not open in the sketches.

Something waits just past the threshold, and it has been waiting a very long time. It wears a human shape the way a coat wears a person—imprecisely, with too much patience. It has learned the proportions from every visitor who came here and left, and now it stands utterly still, watching you with the quiet attention of something that has finally, finally, seen someone arrive who might stay.