BY NAYT RUNDQUIST
Don’t think about finding Sináit; don’t let it infect your dreams. While walking at night, down back alleys, through unlit wooded paths, don’t imagine finding its guardian at a hidden door. When you grow careless, slip this earth’s grasp, fall through someplace stretched thin, you’ll be there.
Sináit’s geography is amorphous as your soul. Meander grey, low-rolling mists, past what are only trees if you unfocus your eyes and don’t look too long—goddesses, don’t look too long—over pits echoing with every time your loved ones screamed, through lakes filled with each tear you never allowed yourself to cry. Find The Clearing.
For the first time, you won’t feel eyes lingering on you, crawling through your hair, up your arms, between your ribs. You’re alone in this place with no idea how to get back, to where back is. Spin in a slow circle, attempt to drink it all in. Go thirsty. Like a massive cavern whose faraway walls are fog, you’re in Nowhere’s epicenter. Alone. Nothing watches; nothing hunts; nothing can save you from solitude.
Only when panic has eaten away enough ego to willingly unmake yourself—you cannot be lost or go mad if you are not—will you find your way home again. You’ll never be certain, though, if the you reassembled, pieced together from fractures, screams, tears, branches, nothings into something like a self and stuffed back into this world, is really you or something less. Or something more.