Part V of the Spiral Series
She didn’t need the artifact anymore to feel them.
The breaches.
They hummed in her bones now. The closer she got to one, the more the world pulled sideways, shadows lengthening in odd directions, her thoughts stretching thin and snapping back like rubber bands.
Today, even the sky seemed different. Not darker. Just… withdrawn. Pale as if it had forgotten how to color itself. The wind ran its fingers through the dust like it was sifting for something buried. The silence pressed down with the weight of something waiting.
The ruin was shallow—half-exposed stone rising from a wind-scoured crater. Spiral glyphs pulsed faintly across the cracked surface, like veins glowing under tired skin. They didn’t shimmer with power. They pulsed like a warning.
And still, she stepped closer.
Her breath shortened as she descended. The artifact in her coat vibrated, but she barely felt it. The deeper hum came from her hand—the spiral mark burned against her palm like a second pulse. Her own. Not the artifact’s.
She pressed it against her chest, through her coat. Her heartbeat was no longer alone.
The outpost on the crater’s edge was barely intact—walls of sheet metal, half-swallowed by dust, abandoned long ago. Or so she thought.
She heard coughing first. Then the creak of movement behind thin steel.
Carla raised her hand and called out. No answer.
She pushed inside, carefully.
A man crouched in the far corner, bundled in layers of torn canvas and silence. His skin was pale, his beard overgrown. One of his eyes was blind, milk-white and unmoving. The other watched her without blinking.
“Another one,” he rasped.
She didn’t move.
“You’re with them. I can see it in your skin.”
He pointed.
She glanced down.
The spiral on her palm had darkened. And worse, faint, branching lines now traced halfway up her forearm. Barely visible beneath the skin. Like veins. Or roots.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Mikail,” he said. “Engineer. The first time we found one of these places, I helped wire the listening stations. Thought it was just seismic. Or sonic. But it wasn’t.”
“What was it?”
“Pressure,” he whispered. “Held behind something that isn’t a wall. Something waiting for permission.”
He showed her a notebook—filled with hand-drawn maps, symbols, and spirals. Some are marked in red. A few crossed out.
One note caught her eye:
“DO NOT SEAL – CORRECTIVE ANCHOR”
“We closed one,” he said. “In Peru. The whole village disappeared the next day. Not killed. Not moved. Just… missing. Like they were the lid on something else.”
Carla felt nausea rise. Her artifact pulsed once, faintly. Not fear. Not urgent.
Recognition.
Mikail saw the look in her eyes.
“You’re going to seal this one too, aren’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
“You’ll wake the wrong silence.”
She approached the ruin alone. The glyphs brightened as she neared. Not welcoming. Not warning. Responding.
Inside, the chamber was shallow, its ceiling collapsed, spiral markings scored across the stone in every direction. At the center, a broken seal—the remnants of a symbol half-erased by time or force.
The breach wasn’t fully open.
But it was unstable.
A hum built inside her skull—soft at first, then sharp. It wasn’t noise. It was presence. A weight against her will.
She touched the artifact.
It twitched in her hand. Hungry.
But before she could raise it, pain tore through her palm. She cried out, clutching her wrist.
The spiral was glowing.
Not the artifact.
Her.
She dropped to her knees, breath ragged. The glyphs pulsed in time with her chest.
Then she understood: the spiral inside her wasn’t a mark.
It was a key.
And she didn’t need the artifact to twist.
Her palm burned. She clenched her fist, teeth gritted, trying to fight the instinct to surrender to it completely. But the heat climbed her arm like a fuse.
She pressed her palm into the glyph.
The stone flared. Not with light, but heat. Searing. Nearly enough to fry her nerves.
The glyph beneath her hand vibrated. Shifted. And then—
Released.
Not a scream. Not a roar.
A sigh.
Like the earth itself had been clenching something it couldn’t hold anymore.
Mikail’s voice cried out behind her, faint, desperate.
“You’ve synchronized it! Do you know what you’ve done?”
But she couldn’t move.
The chamber was pulsing around her. Her blood felt electric. Her thoughts weren’t her own; fragments of things she’d never seen before flashed behind her eyes: a spiral in a crater, one drawn in frost, one burned into flesh.
The world wasn’t closing.
It was adjusting.
When she woke, the ruin was intact. The spiral is gone.
Mikail was gone too. Only his coat remained, half-buried in dust. Inside the pocket: a torn map. More spiral sites. Some circled. Others crossed out. A path. Or a warning.
Her arm ached.
She pulled back her sleeve.
The lines had spread up her bicep now, almost to her shoulder. They didn’t hurt.
They pulsed.
Like they were waiting for something.
“I didn’t close the door.”
“I let it adjust.”
Memoirs of Madness 