On top of Iron Mountain, the night didn’t just fall, it swallowed us whole. The stars were a riot, a full-blown cosmic brawl, spraying light and fire across the black like some deranged painter on a bender. Shooting stars sliced through the void, each one a brief, burning insult to the darkness. My boots were on cold rock, my head in the outer reaches of reality, and the world below might as well have been another planet. This wasn’t stargazing. This was staring straight into the veins of the universe and feeling it stare back.