Anaya woke to a draft entering her bedroom through the window that morning. She could hear
the low whistle of the wind as it rushed through the trees outside, but it was too cold for what
it should have been. This wasn’t a cold autumn air, a crisp feeling one would want at this time.
It was sharp, unnatural- like the cold had settled within her bones somehow.
She rubbed her arms and pulled the blanket tighter around her. Her sleep had been restless.
Images from the symbols, shadowy figures, and whispers danced in and out of her mind.
Something was very wrong; she could feel it. Like she was tied to it somehow, tied to the relic,
to the forsaken realm, and to Dr. Mehra’s journal.
Anaya tried to shake the feeling as she walked to the kitchen, but it lingered. There were no
answers in the soft glow of her morning coffee, no clarity in the simple warmth of her home. As
she sipped, she couldn’t help but glance at the journal sitting on her kitchen table. She had left
it there the night before, after talking with Nathaniel. Its leather-bound, pages were full of
riddles that enthrall and disturb her.
Something within tugged at her sense of familiarity, something that she could not explain. She
put down the coffee and took up the book once again, scanning its pages again. The symbols,
the half-formed entries, and the descriptions of dark figures danced from the pages. Every word
struck harder and sounded more insistent with every reading.
Just as she could think of nothing else to do, her phone buzzed.
She looked at the screen. It was a text from her source at the local police station.
“Report of disturbances at the excavation site. Tools scattered, symbols marked out, strange
figures at night. Suggest you check it out.”
Anaya’s heart sank. The site of the excavation. She had been experiencing visions and whispers
already—this just proved she wasn’t imagining things. She finished off her coffee in one gulp
and headed for the door. This felt too important to ignore, she thought as she pulled on her
coat.
It took what seemed longer than it could to drive back to the site. The fog was rising once more,
heavy and otherworldly, so it had begun to envelop the horizon. She felt chilled at the
appearance of skeletal trees like outstretched fingers reaching up toward the pale gray mist.
She could not stop thinking about breathing but was consumed with visions of her dreams, of
the journal, of shadows.
She came to the dig site with a heavy heart. The place was quiet, an unnerving quietude,
considering not so long ago, it was bustling with people.
Anaya parked her car on the edge of the dig site and stepped out. The wind had picked up,
tugging at her hair and coat. She could feel the tension in the air, like a vibration running
beneath the ground.
The excavation site was as she had left it the day before: half-dug earth, broken stones, and the
remains of a tent. But something felt. off. The tools strewn about on the ground seemed
different, more chaotic as if they had been deliberately overturned. She knelt down to inspect
the area. Her gloved hands moved over the dirt, her eyes scanning for clues. That was when she
saw them—the symbols, hastily etched into the stone.
Her breath caught. These weren’t the marks she had seen before. They were different—
scratched, hasty, almost like someone had etched them in desperation.
She was about to study them closer when the wind shifted. The noise came again—a whisper.
Low and faint, but unmistakable.
Her name.
“Anaya.”
She froze. Her blood ran cold. She looked around the dig site, trying to locate the source of the
sound. There was nothing but fog and trees, but the whisper felt real; she could almost feel it
brush against her ear. Her attention snapped toward the tree line. No movement was visible,
but her hand tightened on her flashlight as if it might make her feel safer in any way.
“Anaya,” it came again, louder this time.
Her heart was pounding in her chest. She wasn’t alone. She felt this. The wind shifted once
more, and she felt an overwhelming sense of compulsion that something was watching-paying
attention to her. She stood up and pulled the coat as tight as it would go around her, before
rapidly moving back to her car. Her footsteps were heavy on the earth, and with each step she
felt like she was being followed.
She walked up to her small rented house and tried to persuade herself that everything had an
explanation. Maybe some animal had frightened her. Maybe the symbols and whispers were
some kind of production of her mind, stimulated by the lack of sleep and dark discoveries of the
last couple of days.
As she stepped inside her home, the coldness gripped her again.
It had seeped into her living room as if the air itself had grown icy. Anaya shivered as she laid
her coat over the chair and checked the heater. It was running fine, but the chill lingered. Her
eyes roved over the room, and that was when she saw them: shadows in the corner of the
room.
Her breath caught.
They were no ordinary shadows. They stretched out, amorphous. It was like they moved by
themselves. They flickered across the walls when she wasn’t looking straight at them, and if she
turned her head, they would vanish. She could feel them something was wrong.
“Is this in my head?” she whispered, trying to get her breath steady. But she knew, deep down,
it wasn’t.
She walked to the couch, wrapping her arms around herself, warmth in a desperate attempt to
keep it at bay, but she felt it again—a voice. Whispering. Louder this time.
This came into her head.
“You are not meant to find the truth.”
A jolt in the midst of her brain. The mug she was momentarily cradling dropped onto the floor
with a sonorous crash as she clutched at the sides of her head, an attempt to silence words that
wouldn’t stop.
“You’ve opened the door.”
Her knees felt weak. She sank onto the couch, clutching at her coat. Her hands trembled as she
tried to make sense of it. These weren’t hallucinations, were they? Not entirely. Something was
happening to her, something tied to the relic, the journal, and the symbols. She could feel the
pull, a thread tugging at her mind, and it was growing stronger.
Her thoughts seemed disjointed as if they belonged to someone else. A memory, a vision,
maybe—a voice coming from the journal.
She closed her eyes to block out the whispers. Anaya’s body ached from fatigue, but the unease
lingered. She felt an inexplicable attraction to the journal on her table. It was as if the journal
knew secrets she had yet to uncover; she could feel its weight in her hands.
The nights that followed were sleepless. Her dreams became broken images and nightmares –
old symbols, misty figures, fog, and red glows in her eyes. And every time she woke up, she felt
the cold there beside her even in the warmth of her bed. The whispers followed her at the edge
of understanding.
Anaya couldn’t help but feel that she was being pulled, lured into this mystery, and in this way,
she felt inescapably connected to it, to the degree that frightened her. She found herself sitting
over late nights unable to ignore the pull of Dr. Mehra’s journal.
It was as if the journal had a voice of its own, guiding her toward answers that felt closer yet
farther away, tormenting her with fragments of clues and half-truths.
The question became unavoidable:
Was she becoming part of the mystery itself? Or was it becoming part of her?