It simply waited, patient the way only something with no stake in the outcome can be.

Sals is on a narrow mountain path, blindfolded, one foot caught in a fissure, his body tilting toward open space. The stick is gone. There is no sound to confirm the ground. There is no reference point at all. In that moment, the passage notices something quiet and strange: the void is not hostile. It is simply indifferent. It has no need to push or pull. It just waits, without urgency, without concern for what Sals does next.

That kind of waiting is hard to sit with. We are used to pressure having a direction. We expect danger to lean in. But sometimes the most disorienting thing is the absence of any lean at all — a silence that doesn't care either way.

Most of us know a version of this. A moment when the familiar thing slipped away and we reached for something that wasn't there. The ground we assumed was solid turned out to need checking. We froze. Not because the situation demanded action, but because we suddenly had no way to measure where we stood.

What do you reach for when your usual reference points are gone?