Part III of the Spiral Series

The pulse didn’t stop.

It came every night now—low and rhythmic, thudding somewhere just beneath her sternum. Not in her chest, not in the artifact. Deeper. It was like her body had grown a second heart—one that beat in time with something vast and buried.

Carla stopped pretending it was just the artifact.

The world was shifting again. The air shimmered faintly now, not with heat, but like a thin veil of reality had come loose. When she moved through it, her skin tingled. Static, or memory, or something worse. At times, the sky rippled like it was under tension, like it wanted to tear.

The birds were gone. Their replacements were quieter. Things that clicked instead of sang, eyes too glossy, wings that didn’t flap right. They circled high, watching. Waiting.

She didn’t sleep much.

And when she did, she dreamed of spirals.

Not metaphors. Actual spirals—etched into bone, ground into stone, spinning in water. They moved when she blinked, breathed, or doubted.

Yesterday, she found a trail.

Not footprints—drags. Human-shaped impressions pulled through the dirt and warped grass. Fingers. Elbows. A body too broken or too possessed to walk. It snaked through a cracked hillside like something trying to flee—but in the wrong direction.

She followed.

The air thickened as she went. Every breath coated her lungs like ash. Her skin felt stretched. Tense. Her shadow moved wrong when she stopped.

And then—just before dusk—she reached a clearing.

Dead silent.

In the center stood a woman.

Still.
Back turned.
Her hands were clasped behind her like she was waiting for a verdict.

Carla stopped. Her stomach coiled. Her fingers inched toward the artifact in her coat, but she didn’t draw it.

The woman hadn’t moved.

“You felt it too,” Carla said, voice dry as gravel.

The woman didn’t turn. But she answered.

“It showed me what comes next.”

The voice was brittle. Paper-thin. Every syllable landed like it had come from a cracked throat, barely held together.

Carla approached slowly, boots crunching blackened grass. She circled the woman like an orbiting moon, heart thrumming harder the closer she came.

She expected damage—melted eyes, spirals carved into skin, teeth where they didn’t belong. She expected wrongness.

But what she saw instead was worse.

The woman looked like her.

Not identical. But close. Close enough that it scraped something deep and primal.

She had the same weather-worn face. Same posture—rigid from carrying things she hadn’t told anyone about. Same scars on the knuckles. Same hollow beneath the eyes that only came from surviving something you shouldn’t have.

Carla whispered:

“You twisted left. Didn’t you?”

The woman finally moved—just her head, slow and strained. Her gaze met Carla’s.

The eyes were not glowing. Not bleeding.

They were hollow.
Not empty.
Just… done.

“Twisting left doesn’t seal anything,” she said. “It just moves the door somewhere else.”

The words hit like a weight in Carla’s gut. Something inside her dropped—an idea she’d been holding back, finally allowed in.

“So what do we do?”

The woman exhaled. Not a sigh. Just the sound of someone who didn’t need to breathe anymore.

She reached inside her coat and drew out something wrapped in cloth. Not the same shape. But similar enough that Carla stepped back before she realized it.

Another artifact.

A different spiral.

“We find the others,” she said. “And we pin the doors shut. Together.”

She held it out.

Carla hesitated.

Then took it.

It was warm.

Alive.

The moment it touched her skin, everything shifted.

A rush of vision—images that weren’t hers, or maybe were. A map. No continents. Just doors, arranged in patterns of suffering, in places humans called sacred, cursed, or forgotten. Seals shaped like myths. Some cracked. One wide open. And at the center, a spiral that turned both directions at once.

She staggered. Blinked.

The vision ended.

The clearing was empty.

The woman—gone.

Only the wind remained. And silence. But even that felt thinner now. Like, sound was afraid to return.

Carla looked down at the new artifact in her palm.

Two spirals.
Two keys.
Two locks.

And still—no idea what they opened.

She could feel it again now, stronger than before: the second heartbeat. The thing calling to her. The world wasn’t broken—it had been broken on purpose. Split into segments. Leaking.

She pulled her coat tight around her, tucked both artifacts inside, and began walking.

Not to save the world.
To stop what had already begun.

And to find the others.
Before someone else twisted the wrong way.