Chapter Eleven: The Inheritance of Ash and Blood

May 2024 – Eastern Ukraine / Suffolk, UK

Peter stood at the lip of the yawning sinkhole in the Donbas forest, the wind whipping his collar as if to warn him away. He’d told himself he’d returned for the story—an exclusive on the frontline’s new horrors—but every dream since he had visited Eleanor had driven him here. In sleep, roots writhed beneath his skin like living fingers, the trenches in his nightmares mouth-shaped and hungry.

He stepped closer. The air smelled of damp earth and ozone. Local legends called this crater “the second womb.” Dogs wouldn’t cross its rim. Old men spat in the soil as though purging sin. Peter unslung his camera, but before he could raise it, a voice—dry, rasping, utterly alien—curled through the trees:

“You came back.”

He fell to his knees. No memory of words forming on his tongue, only a chant escaping him. The spiral’s slick mud seemed to pulse beneath his hands, cradle him rather than cling. And then the visions came.

First, a world before language or time, when Earthbinders—primal women and men—wove magic into stone and soil by speaking the world awake. Fire-haired shamans danced spirals of ash; their blood fed the bones of the planet, sustaining a balance now lost.

Next, betrayal: Eithar, once a healer whose hands could knit torn flesh, turning instead into a devourer of legacy, sealing the old rites away out of envious fear.

Finally, the entity’s whisper:

“She made herself the gate… but you, Peter, will be my key.”

The crater released him. He crawled back, clutching his bleeding palms. In his fist was a sliver of bone—warm, slick with mud, humming with intent.

On the windswept Suffolk heath, Eleanor moved to the church’s derelict basement. Her sight had fled years ago, but every line of the Codex lived in her memory: each spiral, each rune. By candlelight, she traced them in crushed coal and salt, the symbols bleeding onto crumbling stone. She worked without haste, knowing the world’s axis tilted toward undoing.

Five faces emerged from the shadows behind her: the Circle reborn.

Kemi Saif, the Cairo linguist, fingered the charcoal lines. Her hands trembled—she’d first read these spiral tablets near the Black Sea in 2006, only to see her team vanish beneath a landslide. Kemi’s eyes still flicked to the edges of reality, hunting phantom words that bled in her dreams.

Father Tomasz Zielinski knelt beside her, breath rattling like dead branches. A defrocked exorcist, he’d once heard trees scream in a Polish forest chapel, mud forming children’s names. His faith now dwelled in broken hymns, but here he sensed the thin places where earth and spirit entwined.

Amari Kodjo stood watch at the doorway. The former soldier had crawled from a collapsed Afghan trench, mud whispering his name as friends died around him. He carried his survival like a wound—his presence rooted them all, a bulwark against the spiral’s lure.

Louise Delorme sat cross-legged in the silt. The Marseille psychometrist traced the Codex’s lines with her fingertips, her breath hitching as long-buried memories of Earthbinder rites flooded back. She’d been institutionalized for recounting murders no history recorded—until Eleanor’s summons reignited her ancestral gift.

And, at Eleanor’s side, Wren Vale watched in reverent silence. The Suffolk care worker had drawn spirals as a child, half-seeing their pulse beneath her fingers. When she found Eleanor chanting in sleep, Wren repeated the words aloud, tearing open the barrier between past and present.

“You are not soldiers,” Eleanor intoned, voice steady despite her blindness. “You are anchors. You will hold what I cannot.”

They rose as one. Under dying candlelight, Eleanor guided them through rites in the old tongue—syllable by deliberate syllable—each echoing spiral carving their destinies.

Peter’s jaw ached where the mud had pulled at his flesh. He laid the bone shard on a fallen log. It throbbed. Soft sighs—whispers, really—unspooled like steam: dreams of burying and unburying, of a god abandoned. He opened his journal—Eyes Wide in the Trenches—and scrawled:

“It doesn’t lie. That’s what scares me. It’s not evil. It’s abandoned. They called it a god, then a monster, then sealed it away like a child in a grave. But it remembers. It feels. And it wants to come home. I won’t stop it. I’ll help it speak. Let the earth crack. Let it scream.”

Back in Suffolk, Eleanor felt the pull—as though Peter’s marrow resonated with the same subterranean hum. She placed a hand on Louise’s shoulder.

“He’ll become the bridge,” she whispered. “When he falls, the earth will open. We must be ready.”

The new Circle of Elys exchanged solemn nods. Soon they would journey east, into smoke and ruin. Eleanor would not lead the charge—her body too frail—but she would stand at the center once more, binding the spiral with ancient words. And this time, they would face Eithar not as frightened heirs but as wielders of the old power, determined to bind jealousy and reclaim the world’s first promise.