At a certain point, thoughts began to bore into him.
It wasn't sudden nor violent. They arrived the way water seeps into stone. The type that came slowly, with persistence, and became impossible to stop once it began.
Darkness.
What was darkness?
The simplest answer came easily: the absence of light. A definition taught to children, clean and correct. But Baines understood now how shallow that answer was.
That was something said by people who still expected the sun to rise, who believed night was temporary, who trusted morning to undo the dark.
This place was not like that
Here, the sun never came.
Not once. Not even as a suggestion.
There was no gradual brightening, no change in temperature, no subtle shift in the air. Time did not announce itself here. Day and night were meaningless words, stripped of purpose. And layered atop that was the black smoke, an existence that devoured presence itself, thinning the air, erasing sound, consuming anything that dared assert being.
These factors, each unbearable on its own, combined to alter something fundamental.
Ultimately, they changed what darkness meant.
In the suffocating heart of this cave, darkness was no longer the absence of light. It was something else entirely. Something vast, something almost aware.
It pressed inward, not against his skin, not against bone, but against his thoughts. It was like a mental weight with no physical form, yet undeniable. It seeped into him, thick and viscous, like oil soaking into cloth, clinging to every quiet space inside his mind.
It felt as though the void itself was breathing, slow, deliberate, and patient, timed to the shallow rise and fall of his chest.
This darkness swallowed sound. Rather, it erased it to the point where even the faint echo of his heartbeat felt distant, as if it belonged to someone else, trapped deep inside his skull. There was no reverberation, no comfort in noise. Silence ruled completely, and in that silence, the mind had nowhere to hide.
Yet strangely—
It was not crushing him.
This darkness was heavy, yes, but it did not collapse inward. It did not destroy him, but it lingered. It was waiting and expecting something.
Unlike what he thought, it wasn't a prison.
It was like a forge. A crucible where despair did not end but was transformed if one endured long enough.
Lying motionless, Baines stopped fighting it. He stopped trying to shield his thoughts or distract himself with memory or fear.
Instead, he turned inward, not toward his surroundings or where the black smoke roamed, but toward the darkness itself.
Those thoughts lingered. It was a gradual realization that seemed to layer atop each other.
After staring at the darkness for so long, something struck inside his chest.
Curiosity.
Where is it going?
What is it showing me?
He had nothing else aside from curiosity, and he stared longer.
He didn't see images.
There were no replayed scenes, no voices echoing through memory. There was nothing like that.
What surfaced instead were the truths, which were bare, unadorned, and impossible to deny. Like a reminder.
Yes, his brothers vanished without warning.
Yes, his father was dragged away, powerless to resist.
Yes, his mother lay suspended between life and death.
Yes, his sister would never walk again.
And yes, he was here as a result of a certain action, probably alone, buried, and forgotten.
These realizations did not come with pain anymore. There was no shock, no fresh grief. They simply were facts, stripped of emotion, and presented without cruelty or mercy.
It felt as though questions were being asked and answered at the same time, but not by him. The understanding arrived fully formed, settling into place without struggle.
Wasn't that the nature of darkness?
It did not comfort, it did not reassure, it did not lie.
Darkness did not tell you things would be okay.
It showed you what was.
And in that brutal honesty, something shifted. His lost senses slowly returned to him, and his dull eyes slowly regained clarity.
'Cecilia didn't abandon me.' He thought confidently.
Darkness did not ask him to be brave or to exist without promise or persist without reward.
He didn't hear it, nor could he see it, and when he finally opened his eyes, not to see, but to understand, the fear was gone.
As if something inside him had clicked into alignment. There was no change within or outside his body, but he felt it.
He was no longer afraid. Not because the danger had vanished, or because escape was suddenly going to be possible, but because fear required expectation, and he no longer expected anything.
He simply existed.
That was his understanding now.
Existence without demand.
Endurance without meaning.
And in that stillness, a deeper curiosity bloomed.
Just what sort of thing was it? It was a simple question, formed without words, echoing gently through the void.
Who are you?
The darkness, however, did not answer with language.
It responded with something deeper.
Can you remain?
Baines reached out, not with his hands, but with his everything.
He just imagined himself taking a step closer, and for the first time since awakening in this place, he did not reach for escape.
He reached to stay.