The Keystone Slate

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOjIcIIClYQW7xRFVLy8X5xcKmA4ebHIN&si=_uLtoKTR...

Official Tracklist (In Order)

1. Where Did I Go
2. Sitting In Between
3. Emergency
4. The Worm
5. On My Way

Act 1: Where Did I go

Kai rests in the old cave, watching the sun stretch itself thin across the ceiling. The light bent low, a lazy slant of orange fading into purple. It felt like something that had been left to rot. Like he'd been here before, or maybe he'd never left.

"I don't want to move forward," Kai whispered

The cavern's darkness stretched far, unmarred by time, as if caught in a loop. Somewhere deep inside, he knew this wasn't real. Or perhaps it was more real than he ever wanted to admit. The world around him was no longer just earth, it was memory.-Memory of love, of loss, of everything he couldn't hold on to. 

The final goodbye between them had been unsaid. The words hung in the air, suspended in time, forever lost. Kai thought of the last time he had seen her, how she'd turned away, leaving. 

All that was left now was the noise, the soft beating of air, a sound that echoes, penetrating every breath, every moment. Tasting the damp air, remembering her. Her eyes, something about them, made it hard to breathe. Hard to forget. They didn't belong to anyone anymore. Not to her, not to him.

"I thought I might find something here," Kai said, but the darkness swallowed the words before they settled. It didn't matter. Nothing here ever gave anything back. 

The tunnel stretched out before him, an expanse of quiet, holding nothing, but so much at once. 

A moth fluttered by, wings pale against the dusk. A rosy maple moth, the kind that used to fill her garden in those late summer nights. Kai half-expected it to land right by him, but it veered away before he could reach for it, disappearing into the shifting shadows. 

He blinked, the vision flickering like something just out of reach. 

Act 2: If Ever I Know You Again 

The world shifted, rattled. Heavy with the kind of warmth that clung to you without asking. This was a strange and unfamiliar place.

The ground beneath him felt wrong, and the shadows, if you could call them shadows, were stretched with twisting veins that reached for Kai like they were holding him together. It was all too much, too foreign. A mess of things that didn't belong together. 

The same tight squeeze, this wrongness. Time was still slipping by. It wasn't her. It would never be her again.

Kai could feel the pull of the earth, the soft embrace of the world outside him, waiting to swallow him whole, to dissolve him back into the rhythm of the natural world. The fear of death, the fear of loss, accompanied by something gentler, a quiet understanding that everything was cyclical, that love and loss, life and death, were part of the same eternal dance. Kai looked through at the pale blue dot in the distance, the tiny speck of light that had always been there. It was the place where everything began and where everything would end. Creeping in the fading light of this old cave, it had become hard to tell whether he was mourning something that had truly been lost or whether he had been hollow from the start. The feeling was deep, a gnawing ache buried so deeply within him. 

Kai thought of her then. 

She had loved him once, he thought but the space between them had stretched to match the distance between stars. She had left him with fragmented memories, her eyes, the way she had looked at him, full of hope, full of questions that Kai could never answer… a question he couldn't even ask himself: "Who am I without you?". 

Kai closed his eyes, imagining a place where he could disappear completely into the deep and unyielding stillness of this memory, trying to inhale even just a bit of air to stop his lungs from collapsing. But all he could feel was his heavy heart. The familiar ache came rushing back, tighter this time. The world slipped into an in-between space where memories and time blur together, leaving behind the overwhelming defeat of knowing there will never be another quite like her. Parts of himself he will never be able to recover. 

The quiet darkness pressed in on all sides, and for a moment, he wished they could go back. Back to the days when love felt like something that could be touched, something tangible, within reach. He longed for her smile, for her warmth, her hands, her eyes, something about them made it hard to breathe. Hard to forget. Dimmed by the fading light, they looked at him as if she could see him all the way through.

Act 3: What Was It All For? 

"Are you still here?" Kai asked, but the words felt useless. They didn't mean anything anymore.

Kai stumbles out, staying low to the ground as the world tilted, the edges of it blurring and pulling apart. Slowly rising up, he could see there was nothing left except the hum of something deep, far away, like the earth was trying to speak to him. Kai wasn't sure if he was still, or if he was falling. He wasn't sure if it mattered. He shook his face and looked up. Before him, the sky hung in that strange, liminal place. It was something big, something close, and for a moment, it felt like the place he had always feared could swallow them whole.

The earth swayed under him, the air light and suffocating. The trees seemed to grow taller. He let his eyes close once more, waiting for something he knew wouldn't come. But it didn't matter anymore. It hadn't mattered for a long time.

When he opened his eyes again, she was gone, like something he could never touch again.

The moth fluttered past once more, its wings pale against the brightening sky, and it, too, slipped away. He didn't need to reach for it this time.

Author - Belle

Special thank you to my wife for her work on the album artwork!