Then you turn — not homeward, but through the night still clinging to your coat — and you carry its silence like a lantern nobody can blow out.

The moon is a sliver of chipped ice, hung low over the heath. Your boots know the way before your eyes do: peat, root, the soft give of sand.

Somewhere left, a fox cuts a seam through the bracken. Somewhere right, the river talks to itself in vowels you almost understand.

No torch. You let the dark press in — not hostile, just ancient, like the inside of a lung before breath.