As I reached the glooming steps, a veil of mist clung to the cold air, curling like smoke around ancient headstones and bare, skeletal trees. The trees bark was an enigmatic cloak, tightly wrapped and winding around the trunk concealing it's depraved secrets. The path, worn smooth by time and footsteps long forgotten, led upward through a neglected cemetery- weathered stones, it's absolute silence. Pale blue lanterns flickered like ghostly sentinels, their glow casting long, uncertain shadows that danced across the cracked stone steps.

At the summit stood a crumbling mausoleum, its dome silhouetted against a swirling sky of twilight hues — blues melting into green, fading into a sickly yellow mist. The structure loomed, majestic and mournful, as though it held the breath of a thousand stories never told. Light poured from within it, golden and unnatural, as if something within was waiting, or waking.

A lone figure moved steadily toward it, dwarfed by the towering trees that clawed at the heavens. His footsteps made no sound. Around him, the forest was hushed — not in peace, but in watchful anticipation. There was no wind, yet the trees swayed, whispering secrets to one another in a language older than stone.

This place was sacred, perhaps. Or cursed. It pulsed with a quiet, eerie life — the kind that remembered every soul that passed through and never let go of any of them entirely.

It was not a place you stumbled upon. It was a place that summoned you.