Part VI of the Spiral Series

The next breach opened on its own.

No twist. No artifact. No contact.

It simply opened.

Carla felt it hours before she saw it. The air turned sluggish, sticky in her lungs. The horizon bent subtly, like the earth had taken a deep breath and held it too long. Every footstep became suspect. Every shadow slanted just a few degrees off true.

Her pulse accelerated. Not fear. Not instinct. Just alignment.

The spiral didn’t need her hand anymore. It only needed her presence.

—

The map Mikail left had led her here, to a quiet coastal stretch she’d never seen on any topographic registry. A village tucked between crescent cliffs, surrounded on all sides by worn sea walls and high tides. The cliffs curved inward toward the town in a shape too deliberate to be natural. From above, it looked like a pupil watching the ocean.

The people were still here.

That was the worst part.

They walked slowly. Deliberately. Wearing simple white garments, hand-stitched with spirals that mirrored the ones etched into Carla’s dreams. Their faces were peaceful, but blank. Not vacant. Given.

She stepped into their pattern, and no one stopped her.

—

As she moved through the village, time seemed to soften. The light seemed tired, flat, and gray, without the harsh contrast of morning or dusk. The sea air should have been sharp with salt and rot, but instead it tasted light, almost sterile. Too clean.

She passed an elderly woman seated cross-legged on a worn stoop, staring at nothing. A child nearby stacked rocks into a spiral that folded in on itself.

Someone offered her food—a piece of fish, salt-dried and paper-thin.

“Please. Eat. It’s good,” the man said.

She shook her head. Her stomach was empty, yet distant, as if it belonged to someone else.

“Why are they still here?” she wondered. “Why didn’t they run?”

The answer whispered up her spine:

They didn’t need to. The spiral came to them.

—

The breach was in a collapsed chapel at the cliff’s edge. The roof had caved in long ago, and the sea wind passed through like breath through open ribs.

At the center: a spiral of stones, pale and smooth.

At the heart of the spiral: a hole.

Not wide. Not deep. But falling. An absence shaped like a center. A place that swallowed light without dimming.

She approached slowly.

And the world slowed with her.

Her boots crunched over broken mosaic tiles—ancient murals worn smooth, erased by reverent feet. The hole didn’t call to her. It listened.

She knelt beside it and stared down.

And immediately felt herself tilting inward—mind first.

—

“It opened itself,” she whispered.

“Because you’re near.”

The voice didn’t startle her.

A woman stood in the arched doorway, barefoot and hooded. She wore no artifact, no pack. Just white linen wrapped like ritual. Her presence wasn’t threatening—it was inevitable.

Familiar, like someone from a memory Carla never lived.

“You don’t have to seal it,” the woman said. “You’ve done good already. You brought the spiral here. Now rest. Let it open.”

Carla stood. She didn’t know when she’d knelt.

“You want it open?”

The woman smiled.

“It’s not a fault to be part of something larger.”

Carla’s heart hammered. She couldn’t tell whether it was fear… or resonance.

—

“You could seal it,” the woman said. “But the spiral would find another path. It always does. This place chose to remember. Others will forget.”

Carla’s hand drifted to the artifact, but it didn’t hum. It was still. Watching.

“You could lie down,” the woman continued, her voice now like a lullaby. “Let the spiral hold your memory. You wouldn’t even dream. Just one long nap, inside the pattern. No more fight. No more fault.”

Carla shivered.

She looked at the breach again. It wasn’t pulsing.

It was breathing.

—

“Explore the other side,” the woman said. “We did. And we’re better for it. Lighter.”

“Lighter?” Carla repeated.

“Not weight. Memory. The spiral carries it now. We walk without the burden. Isn’t that what you want?”

The woman reached forward, palm out. Not aggressive. An invitation.

Carla stepped back.

Her knees locked. Her legs wanted to move forward, but her spine screamed against it.

“I’m not here to serve the spiral,” Carla said.
“I’m here to close it.”

“Then do it,” the woman said gently. “Seal it. End it. Slow its speed, its spread. Try to make the world still again. But you’ll only bury your part. The rest will wake. It always does.”

—

Carla stepped to the edge of the breach, her marked hand throbbing under her sleeve.

She clenched her fist.

She felt the warmth of the stone beneath her boots. Heard the ocean breathing behind her. Saw the villagers waiting in the square without moving.

They weren’t prisoners. They weren’t brainwashed.

They had chosen this.

Because forgetting is easier than bearing the weight of what’s coming.

She pressed her palm to the ground.

And twisted.

—

No explosion. No scream.

Just a soft recoil, like a rubber band relaxing after centuries of tension.

The spiral of stones dimmed, then faded. The villagers blinked as if waking from a collective trance. Some dropped to their knees. Others simply walked away. One stared out to sea and wept silently, not knowing why.

The woman was gone.

The chapel was whole.

But the hole was still there—only now it was closed with a thin skin of glass-like stone, faint spiral lines beneath its surface like fossilized breath.

—

Carla stood alone in the chapel’s center.

The mark on her palm no longer burned. It pulsed. Steady. Like a metronome waiting for a new rhythm.

The spiral hadn’t just opened itself.
It had opened her.

---

Author’s Note:
This chapter was happily written for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie and #Wordle #430. Four chapters remain—stay tuned as the spiral tightens.