The Eye pulsed like a buried heartbeat.
Each throb rippled through the broken chamber, bending light into shapes that shouldn't exist arches leaning the wrong way, shadows turning toward the glow instead of away.
Casey clung to Eli, her fingers slipping on the blood slicking his ribs. His breath rasped against her ear, sharp and uneven. Heat rose from his body in feverish waves, but it was the air itself that frightened her most.
It had begun to tick.
A faint, uneven rhythm like a clock without hands echoed inside her skull.
Tick. Tick.
Each sound sharpened the red haze until the walls seemed to twitch in time.
Across the chamber, the shadow of Elias lifted his head.
His form jittered, breaking into overlapping outlines as though reality couldn't decide where to keep him.
One version of his face smiled.
Another winced.
A third simply watched, eyes dark with warning.
"Don't speak," all three whispered at once, voices weaving like a braid of smoke.
"They listen through the silence."
Casey's breath snagged. Her lips formed the question anyway. They?
Before Elias could answer, the tick became a knock a single, low concussion that rolled through the floor like a buried drum.
Not loud. Heavy. A pressure that slid into their bones and rattled the blood in their veins.
The Eye flared above them, veins of light branching outward like cracks in a dying star.
Another knock, closer.
But the door hadn't moved.
Eli's eyes darted to the shadow of his brother, panic splintering his voice.
"I... I saw you die. Twice. I held you when you broke. How"
His words caught on the taste of iron. "How do you keep coming back?"
Elias tilted his flickering head, the movement slow and almost tender.
His fractured smile wavered like a reflection on black water.
"You think death is a door, brother," he said softly, his voice threading with echoes of itself.
"But the Spiral doesn't open doors. It writes names."
Eli's brow furrowed, confusion bleeding into dread.
"What does that"
"I'm not returning," Elias interrupted, eyes burning gold streaked with endless black.
"I'm remembered."
Thin strands of shadow uncoiled from his fingertips, trailing like smoke.
"Every time you call my name, the Spiral answers. It gives the memory shape. It lets me wear myself again. But each time I come back, I'm less me..... and more of it."
Casey shivered, the words sinking like ice down her spine.
"But if you're if this is"
"Don't call me," Elias warned. His many outlines trembled toward collapse.
"Not unless you want the Spiral to know you. Names are anchors. Names are traps."
Another knock.
The wall split with a shriek of grinding stone.
Through the seam seeped a light not of the Eye but something deeper, a color that had no name bluer than memory, blacker than grief. It pooled on the floor in liquid swirls, reflecting nothing.
From that rift a shape began to emerge.
Not walking.
Not crawling.
Sliding, peeled from a nightmare's edge.
Its face came last, assembling piece by piece like a puzzle solving itself:
a cheek, a brow, a mouth stretched far beyond what skin should allow.
Its eyes were spirals
one gold like Elias's,
one red like the Eye
both turning inward, endlessly.
"Brother," the thing said,
its voice wearing Elias's warmth but dragging a deeper resonance,
like a choir singing from underwater.
"You followed the wrong shadow."
Eli stiffened; Casey felt his heartbeat falter against her palm.
Dark threads whipped outward, tasting the air.
Each strand carried a whisper, dozens of overlapping voices calling his name
Eli, Eli, Eli....
until the sound filled every crack in the room.
The shadow of Elias flickered violently, splintering into fragments of light and smoke.
"Don't let it name you," all the pieces hissed.
"If it names you, you belong."
Casey tightened her grip on Eli's hand, but her own name began to itch at the back of her skull, letters rearranging themselves into patterns she could not read.
The creature leaned forward, spiraled eyes widening.
Its grin trembled like a blade.
"Eli," it purred,
each syllable a hook sinking into the air,
"or should I call you by the name he gave you?"
The chamber convulsed.
The Eye screamed
and the world went black.
Black.
Not the black of sleep.
Not the mercy of nothingness.
This black had weight thick as wet soil, heavy as the lid of a coffin.
Sound arrived first: a low hum, like power lines trembling in a storm.
Then the smell of iron, sharp enough to cut thought.
Eli opened his eyes, but the darkness stayed.
Doorways with no hinges rippled at the edge of awareness.
Steps led only downward.
A thousand thin red lines twisted like worms through the void, each thread pulsing to the rhythm of a single word.
Eli.
Not spoken remembered.
His breath hitched.
The name wasn't calling him; it was taking him, peeling his bones away from the memory of who he was.
Every beat of his heart returned as an echo that wasn't his own.
A hand touched his shoulder long, trembling, but warm.
"Brother."
Eli spun, every muscle tightening to break.
Elias stood behind him. Whole. Bleeding light.
But he wasn't right.
His edges stuttered like a bad signal. One second tall, eyes gold-black and fierce. The next, a smear of smoke curling toward the threads.
Each flicker left pieces behind bits of jawline, fragments of a heartbeat that refused to rejoin him.
"I saw you die," Eli rasped, voice cracking like dry wood. "I held you when you died. Twice. How are you"
Elias tilted his head, slow as a broken marionette.
"You still don't understand," he said softly.
"I'm alive because you can't let me go."
Eli staggered backward, throat tight. "No..... no."
"The Spiral writes names," Elias continued, his fractured smile trembling between sorrow and something darker.
"Each time you call me, each time you need me, it gives the memory shape. But with every return..."
His eyes flared, a storm of gold and ink.
"…I become less of who I was. And more of what waits behind the Eye."
A cold shiver clawed down Eli's spine.
"You're saying… you're not really you."
"I'm saying," Elias murmured, stepping closer until the black threads licked at his heels,
"that if you call again if you think me too loudly
the Spiral won't send me.
It will send what it thinks I am."
The void pulsed.
Something deep and wet shifted behind the dark.
A slow knock echoed through Eli's chest.
Knock. Knock.
Like a heartbeat buried in stone.
"Don't answer it," Elias warned
but his outline flickered once, twice
then split like glass under pressure.
Casey woke choking on smoke.
The world around her was dim but wrong, like a photograph burned at the edges.
The street where the Eye had fallen lay quiet too quiet.
No birds. No wind. Only a low vibration that made her teeth ache.
"Eli?"
Her voice cracked the silence, a brittle thing swallowed by the air.
She staggered forward, boots slipping in the slick crimson streaking the pavement.
The blood was still warm.
She found the door half torn from its hinges.
Inside: ruin.
Stone scorched black, walls veined with cracks that pulsed faint red.
And Eli
on his knees in the center, head bowed, fingers clawing the floor as though to hold himself to the world.
His shoulders shook with a rhythm too steady for sobs.
"Eli," she whispered, stepping closer. Her breath clouded though the air burned hot.
He didn't turn.
Instead, he spoke to the floor low, raw, and wrong.
"I'll follow him. I'll find him. Save her."
Casey's chest tightened.
"Who? Eli, look at me."
A ragged laugh cracked from his throat.
He lifted his head, and her breath caught.
His eyes dark, wet, empty glowed faintly gold at the edges. Not fully his.
"He keeps coming back," Eli murmured.
"I watch him die. And then… he stands again.
Every time I call his name, he finds me.
What if the next one isn't him?"
Casey's stomach turned cold.
"Then stop calling," she said, kneeling, gripping his wrists.
"Stay with me. Please. Right here."
Eli trembled beneath her touch, jaw locked, breath coming in sharp, uneven pulls.
His lips formed a name Elias but he bit down before it escaped.
The floor answered anyway.
A ripple of shadow slid across the stone, curling toward their feet like smoke with a heartbeat.
It climbed Eli's arms, fingers of black tightening over his skin.
Casey's breath hitched.
"Eli"
The shadow formed a hand.
It pressed flat over Eli's trembling fist with impossible tenderness.
A voice threaded through the dark, sharp and soft all at once:
"Stay. Don't make me come for you again."
Eli's eyes filled, tears mixing with blood.
He whispered into the trembling air:
"Brother… how many times can you die for me?"
The shadow leaned close, the faint curve of a smile flickering like a dying star.
"As many times as you call," Elias's voice murmured.
"But each time… a little less comes back."
The ground shuddered.
Somewhere beyond the ruined walls, the Eye began to breathe again
slow, hungry, patient.
The ground quaked with a low, bone-deep moan.
Casey tightened her grip on Eli's bleeding hands.
The shadow tightened too its fingers cold, deliberate, almost… possessive.
"Elias," Eli choked, tears streaking his dirt-stained face. "Don't don't let go."
The shadow leaned close, its smile flickering like a dying filament.
"I'm not the one holding," it whispered.
Casey froze.
"What do you mean?"
The floor beneath them breathed a slow, wet inhale.
A second shadow taller, broader, wrong peeled itself from the first.
It wore Elias's outline… and Eli's eyes.
From the darkness came a tremor of anger, low and human.
"Why can't you listen for once?" the new shadow rasped, each word cracking like dry bone.
"All I did… for nothing."
Casey's heartbeat slammed against her ribs. "Eli"
The shadow tilted its head, mouth stretching into a grin that split far past human bone.
"Names," it purred, voice layered with both brothers and something older.
"You called once. You will call again. Next time…"
Its spiraled pupils locked onto Casey.
"…we'll answer together."
The chamber went black.
Life seemed to be reality yet every heartbeat felt counterfeit, as if the world itself was only pretending to exist.
Only the sound remained
Knock.
Knock.
Knock.
Then, with a hiss like tearing silk, a single word slid through the dark
not spoken, not thought, but written across their blood:
CASEY.