Woman standing in Winter Landscape - Franz Marc

The world had gone grey. A cold grey fog that swallowed the road and the trees and the man himself. No sound but his own breath ragged in the chill air. Inside him the compass spun and spun. The way lost. The map burnt to ash in some cold fire within. He carried the emptiness like a stone.

Then light. Low yellow light from a window. A shape within. Her.

She sat by the glass. The light on her face. Still. He moved towards it through the grey drift. A moth to a bare bulb. The fog held back from the window’s reach. As if it knew its place.

He stood in the failing light outside the circle she made. The spinning slowed. Stopped. He heard the turn of a page. Paper dry as dust. The air held the scent of old wood and dried herbs. Simple things. Solid things in the grey dissolve.

She did not look up. Did not know he was there. It did not matter. The room held her stillness and the stillness held him. The stone inside him shifted. Did not lift but settled. Became bearable.

The grey was still out there. The way forward unknown as God’s own reckoning. But the frantic dark had ceased its clawing. He stood in the pale wash of her lamplight.

He was not found to a path.

He was found. There.