Chapter Ten: The Eyes That Remain
March 2024 – St. Joseph’s Residential Care, Suffolk, UK
50 years after the Belgian Spiral
The world had grown quieter for Eleanor Mercer.
Not silent—never silent—but quieter in the way winter muffled sound: dull, heavy, soaked in memory. She had been blind for over four decades, her eyesight gradually fading in the years after she had battled Eitar and still, her dreams were painted in vivid earth tones—black mud, red spirals, bone-white runes.
Sight was overrated. The important things she could still see.
The Codex of Elys had long since crumbled to dust in a field fire she may or may not have started. But she didn’t need it anymore. The rites were inside her.
And lately… they stirred again.
“Dr. Mercer? You have a visitor.”
The nurse’s voice was warm, practiced. Eleanor turned her head slightly, tracking by the vibrations in the floorboard. Someone young. Nervous. Shoes too clean. Laptop bag.
She inhaled through her nose and said softly, “He’s not a student, is he?”
The nurse blinked. “No. A journalist, he says. Freelance. American.”
Eleanor nodded once. “Let him in.”
His Name Was Peter Raines
Twenty-six. Smart enough to cross the sea, dumb enough to believe he was the first to do it.
She heard him before she heard his voice—a hum in the air, like static wrapped in flesh. Not from him. Clinging to him. Something had followed him across Europe.
“It’s awake again.” She heard the silent voice say.
He introduced himself, told her he’d been investigating “odd disappearances” near defensive lines in Eastern Ukraine—trenches swallowing men, squads going silent without contact, one soldier found alive, babbling in Latin.
She said nothing until he finished.
Then she asked, “Did you walk the field?”
Peter hesitated. “Just to get photos. There’s this sinkhole—”
Her voice cut through like stone over bone. “And did you feel the breath of the ground?”
That rattled him.
She Told Him a Story about war. About blood. About an ancient spiral dug into the bones of Europe. About something older than myth—a binder turned god, turned prisoner, turned hunger.
She told him about the rites. The Codex. The fire beneath Belgium.
She told him what it cost to bind it.
Peter’s hands trembled as he typed. “But you beat it.”
“No.” Her blind eyes twitched. “I slowed it.”
“You don’t kill the earth, Mr. Raines. You only pray it forgets your name.”
Interlude: Frontline Report – Luhansk Oblast, Ukraine
(Encrypted Transmission, Redacted Source)
• March 2, 2024
• Units 113 and 114 last contact at 23:17 hours.
• Thermal drones show heat signatures disappearing one by one.
• No signs of explosive force.
• Mud was boiling when recon team arrived.
• Field notes include screaming in a dead Slavic dialect.
She knew he would go back. They always did. Curiosity was a kind of worship. But Eleanor sat quietly, fingers wrapped around her tea, lips barely moving. She was chanting again.
Not a prayer of sealing.
A call to the others. The ones like her. The ones who remembered.
“Elys endures,” she whispered. “And if the gate is breached again… I will be the key or the knife.”
That night, in her sleep, the spiral returned. But this time… she wasn’t alone in the center.
Peter stood there. Barefoot. Bleeding.
Behind him, the earth split wide, and something stepped through—wearing her face.
Eleanor woke screaming.
And in a trench fifteen hundred miles away, a soldier opened his mouth and spoke her name.
