A name is inscribed upon the bricks in crimson ink, where the decrepit eastern wall meets the building’s entryway. Though unfamiliar, whoever wrote the name intended for us to commit it to memory. All I know is that the gap between his birth and death year amounts to a measly 16 revolutions around the sun.

Here, the sun is eclipsed by towering smokestacks. Our lone pair of shadows meander along the blistering concrete, footfalls bruising the yard in shades of trepidation. She passes me by, gaze set on the abandoned mill ahead. A white lighter rests in her left palm. It’s a nervous habit: flicking the switch on and off, shifting from hand to hand, tossing it up in the air, though never allowing it to touch the ground. I’ve never understood why.

Our eyes meet in wordless agreement before we cross the threshold of the building.

The entry hall is vast and striking, despite its bedraggled appearance: a ceiling unfolding eternally skyward, electrical boxes framing the walls, cables and wires intertwining above our heads in an anarchic tapestry of sorts. The floor may as well cease to exist. Glass shards consume the ground beneath our feet for what appears to be miles in every direction, an interminable stretch of demolition. The air is thick with antiquity.

A flash of gold emerges before we begin to navigate a pathway through the wreckage.

It’s not real gold; that much is certain. It flows along the spiked fragments as though it were liquid, forming a road which bleeds into the doorway ahead. There’s something oddly intoxicating about the substance, something which draws you in closer: a sense of wonder which toes the line of lethality. Beneath the flame of her lighter, the auric fibers trickle together into madness, reflecting colors beyond the spectrum of visibility. Staring for longer than a moment at a time induces crippling vertigo, even upon a motionless beholder. Yet tearing your gaze away is far more agonizing.

We mindlessly follow the gilded current as it drifts into a second room, one where crumbling walls embody decades of graffiti. It’s feverishly warm here. As if the fury immortalized upon the brick seeps into this air, dyed red with restless youth. Expletives lettered in bold fonts converge from every direction, drowning each other in a mania as dizzying as the gold at our feet. I can feel the shrieking words claw their way up my neck. They’re alive, bursting with a fervor raw and unrefined, though it’s clear their authors are long gone.

The gold traipses beyond a hole in the wall and into a dingy corridor lined with metal lockers. Emptiness seems to swallow this corner of the building in its entirety. But somehow the faceless voices are amplified tenfold. They echo around the room as they echo within my skull, blurring lines of reality and hysteria. I sense her behind me, gripping the lighter with waxen knuckles. I can’t make out a mere word from the cries above, even as they grow louder with every lumbering step. All I can say is that we are not truly alone.

It is with bated breath and faltering limbs that we wander forward, into a bleak and lightless chamber at the heart of the ruins. The flame soon unveils our surroundings: another hollow room of brick, devoid of all contents save for a central ring of gold.

It forms a deliberate wreath. The trail had evaporated some twenty feet ago. With several steps inward, the adjoining branches of this peculiar encirclement come into bitter focus: the glass shards of the entry hall, crumpled scraps of paper, oak leaves and branches. Gold creeps insidiously among this framework, taking the shape of a haunting omen.

This is a burning pyre.

I watch as the girl who once stood beside me floats onward, dreamlike, in slow motion. I am unable to inhibit her descent into gold and flame, yet I am unable to look away. Even as the white lighter crashes to the ground for the first and only time.