One step is a test. Two steps is a story people tell later, and not kindly.

The dark patch looks like ground. It is ground the way pudding is a chair: it has an opinion, and the opinion is no. Cold water finds your sock. Peat, which is old plants packed into a wet brown sponge, holds your ankle with a polite, terrible grip. You do not sink like a cartoon. You stick like a boot in wet snow.

The nearest glow is still not a person. It sits on a puddle no bigger than a plate. When you tilt your head, the glow slides: sky, bouncing. Then a bubble pops, and a tiny flame no taller than a fingernail dances and dies. The air smells like a match someone blew out in a basement. Marsh gas. Methane, Aunt Mara said once, and other leftovers from plants rotting without enough air.

Jonah’s flashlight wobbles on the boards behind you. “Don’t—” he starts, then stops, because you already did.

Your heart is a drum. Panic wants you to yank. Yanking is how people lose shoes and dignity. The flame is not calling you. You walked toward a light that was never a door.