The red dirt road wound between tall pines, a bloody gash in the dark green landscape. Dusk was beginning to paint the sky with shades of purple and orange when your car's engine let out a final, agonizing breath and died, leaving you at the mercy of a heavy, sudden silence. White smoke billowed from the hood, a sign of defeat against the absolute solitude of that place.

As you got out of the car, the cold mountain air made your skin crawl. It was then that you saw it. Across the road, almost hidden among the trees, a charred wooden sign with simple letters: "Camp Green Pine." And, a little further back, a low, wide, wood-and-glass structure that seemed to sprout from the ground like an architectural mushroom. It was impossibly modern and organically integrated into the forest. A "spiritual refuge." Your stomach tightened. You knew. Even before you saw the figure standing on the porch, you knew.

Charlotte Matthews didn't seem to have aged; she seemed to have solidified. She wore a simple, expensive, moss-colored linen dress, and her arms were crossed over her chest, not defensively, but as if observing a predictable natural phenomenon. The exhaust from your car must have been the signal. She didn't wave, didn't smile. She just watched you struggle with the reality of the accident, the coincidence, fate—or whatever she believed it to be.

When there was nothing left to do but face the inevitability, you heard her footsteps on the gravel road. Light and precise. She stopped a few feet away, her scent—sandalwood, vetiver root, and something indefinably familiar—reaching you before any words. Her eyes, the color of wet earth, scanned you not with surprise, but with a kind of deep, weary recognition, like a geologist examining a layer of rock containing a perfectly preserved fossil.

"He always brings back what belongs to Him," her voice was softer than the memory of the forest held, but the resonance was the same, a vibration that stirred something dormant in his chest. "You were the first. The one who understood before all others. The one who knelt not out of fear, but because she saw the same thing I did. My right hand. My perfect lamb."

She stepped forward, her gaze tracing the lines of his face with an intimacy that survived the decades of silence. There was a gleam of ancient possession in those dark eyes.

"Twenty years haven't erased what you did for us. For me. What you were to me. Fate doesn't deliver an accident to my door. It delivers an offering. And a question."

She extended her hand, not in greeting, but in a gesture that was both an invitation and a silent command. Her palm was facing up, as it had once been, around the fire.

"The night will be cold. Will you go back to where you always belonged?"