Chapter Eight: Blood Remembers

October 1973 — Two Weeks After the Arras Incident

Military Quarantine Zone, France

The debriefing lasted seven hours.

She told them everything: the descent, the chamber, the breathing earth, the thing that spoke in her father’s voice.

They asked about her crew.

She gave them names. They wanted remains. There were none.

Just mud. Piles of it. Some of it still warm when the emergency team arrived. And a single camera, melted into its tripod like bone fused to metal.

She didn’t fight when they recommended “medical observation.” She knew she couldn’t trust her own eyes anymore. Because sometimes, in reflections, she saw herself standing still while her body moved.

Observation Log — St. Mary’s Hospital, Mental Ward, Paddington, London, October 30th, 1973

Patient: Dr. Eleanor Mercer

Condition: Non-catatonic, intermittent dissociation, mild aphasia

“…says she hears ‘ancestral voices’ in her sleep.”

“…has drawn dozens of sigils in her journal—none match known occult symbology.”

“…repeated statements: ‘It followed me. It remembers. I come from jailers.’”

“…no signs of drug use or head trauma. Psychosis unconfirmed. Recommend further observation.”

Eleanor didn’t sleep anymore.

Not without hearing it.

Sometimes it spoke with her father’s voice. Sometimes with a woman’s voice, a voice she didn’t know—but recognized deep in her blood. Sometimes it whispered in a language she couldn’t speak, yet understood.

And sometimes it called her by a name that wasn’t hers.

“Daughter of Elys. Blood of the Circle. You are the last jailer.”

It showed her visions.

A great pit beneath a forgotten hill. Figures in bronze and chalk standing in a circle, chanting. A mouth in the earth held shut by bone stakes driven with human hands. Fire, smoke, blood.

And then the last part: the betrayal.

The thing in the mud had once been worshipped. Fed. Loved. Until her ancestors, a sect of pre-Roman mystics known only as the Earthbinders, sealed it underground.

“Your blood built my cage,” it said.

“Your line was my undoing.”

“You wear the same bones they wore, Eleanor. But your marrow is mine now.”

Letter Never Sent – Eleanor Mercer’s Journal

(Written, then torn out. Later found screwed up and discarded under her hospital bed.)

To whoever finds this: I didn’t survive that place. Not truly. I came back wearing my skin, but something else walks inside it now.

It dreams through me. It remembers through me. It’s showing me things I shouldn’t know—burial rites, old wars, the taste of blood given freely and the sound of roots breaking around a skull.

It doesn’t want just revenge. It wants to be remembered. Every time someone digs… every time someone remembers it, …it breathes deeper. And I… I keep dreaming of a trench filled not with soldiers, but with my ancestors screaming. I am the last gate, and I don’t think I can hold it closed.

They discharged her after 89 days. Deemed fit. No signs of psychosis. No recurring episodes.

Eleanor moved to an isolated cottage in Cornwall. No phone. No visitors. But the dreams persisted. And then came the first sign. A postcard. No return address. Only a line, printed in faded typewriter ink:

“We’ve found another spiral in Belgium. Shall we open it?” She burned the card. The fire hissed like a living thing.

Later that night, the whisper came again—clearer than ever, close to her ear:

“You will help me open every door they closed. And when the earth splits, it will be your voice calling them home.”

Eleanor didn’t scream.

She took out a notebook and began sketching the spiral again.

Chapter Nine: The Last Rite

Spring 1974 Bodmin Moor, Cornwall

Four months since the Arras Incident

The wind carved runes across the frostbitten ground.

Eleanor stood barefoot in the circle, salt and ash coating her skin, eyes closed. Beneath her, the standing stones hummed.

“Come back,” it whispered. “We are the same. You bear the marrow of traitors, and the weight of my chains.”

Eleanor dug her fingers into the frozen soil. “Let it bleed.” She’d learned this part from a barrow near Avebury—one of the few places still echoing with Earthbinder presence. When her blood struck the stone, the wind stopped. The fog breathed in.

And she remembered. A memory That Was Not Hers.

A circle of twelve, robed in earth-colored skin, their feet coated in mud and chalk. The sky burned red.

In the center: one of their own, no longer human.

His name had once been Eithar of the Deep Root, a binder of storms and soil. But he had torn free of the Circle, consumed by what he called “the deep promise.”

He fed on memory. On bones buried improperly. On war.

The Earthbinders could not kill him.

So they sang the soil closed, sacrificed six of their own, and buried him beneath the spiral, his body bound in bone stakes, his name erased. “We buried one of our own,” the memory whispered. “But he dreams still.”

Eleanor screamed. The earth had moved beneath her.

She hunted for and found The Codex Of Elys, hidden in a crypt behind the ruined priory of Lanivet—a book with no pages, only carved bone plates, each covered in symbols that pulsed when touched.

Through trial and pain, she translated them.

From it, Eleanor learned:

How to bind a name to stone, sealing it beyond time. How to speak to the blood in soil. How to summon the old fire—the whispering ash that purifies and imprisons.

And the truth: that she, as a descendant of Elys, bore the right to complete the binding. But she would need to go where the second spiral had opened—Belgium, where the bones of war still poisoned the land.

She traveled under false names, carrying a satchel of bone-wrapped sigils, a ceremonial dagger made of flint and iron, and a scroll bound in her own blood.

The site was in the forest of Houthulst—once bombed flat in 1917, now rewilded and restless.

The spiral had emerged in a sinkhole behind a crumbling Belgian farmhouse.

Locals called it “la gueule silencieuse”—the silent maw.

The team that found it had vanished.

On the eve of the solstice, Eleanor stood at the spiral’s edge.

The ground pulsed like a breathing lung.

She laid down the bone plates in a ring, stabbed the ceremonial dagger into her palm, and began the invocation:

“Blood of Elys, returned to root. Bone to stone, name to silence.

Awake, you who dream— and sleep, you who hunger.”

The soil cracked open.

And the entity rose.

It no longer needed to pretend. It had grown, shaped by war and worship, by every remembered wound.

It stood before her now—a giant of mud and ash, stitched with bones, its face flickering between her father, herself, and a blank mirror.

“You cannot bind me,” it said.

“You carry my voice now.”

“When you scream, I am born again.”

Eleanor raised the sigil. The spiral beneath them ignited with white fire. She chanted louder, drawing on every rite she had carved into her skin and memory.

The ground shook. The entity screamed—but not in pain. In recognition.

“Daughter of Elys,” it bellowed.

“You will not jail me…AGAIN”

“You are my kin.”

Eleanor stepped into the spiral. Fire licked her calves.

The Codex plates spun into the air, circling the entity like blades. The soil hissed.

One final word—the oldest name, the one she had seen only in dreams—formed on her tongue:

“EITHAR”

It froze.

For one second, it looked human again. As if pleading.

Then the spiral closed. The ground swallowed it, plates crashing into place. The fire died. The woods fell silent. Eleanor fell to her knees, eyes bleeding.

She awoke in a hospital in Bruges. No documents. No witnesses.

Just her notebook, with the words:

“I did not kill it. I only closed the door. Pray they never open another.”