The symbol on the dryer door brings it all rushing back. Memories I've spent years trying to bury surge to the surface, as vivid as yesterday. The acrid smell of incense. The cold stone beneath my bare feet. Mother Superior's voice, always gentle, always insistent: "You are chosen, Vesper. You are the bridge between worlds."
Fifteen Years Ago
The Temple of the Eternal Eye rose from the Wyoming wilderness like a mineral growth, all sharp angles and black stone. To the outside world, we were just another isolationist religious community – strange perhaps, but harmless. The kind of place that made local news when someone escaped and told stories too fantastic to be believed. But beneath the visible temple, beneath the dormitories and gardens and schoolrooms, lay the true heart of the Church.
I was seventeen, and it was time for my daily communion.
"Focus, Vesper." Mother Superior's fingers pressed against my temples, her touch fever-hot against my skin. "Open yourself to Its presence."
I knelt in the center of the meditation chamber, surrounded by concentric circles of carved symbols. Candles flickered at cardinal points, their flames unnaturally still in the stale underground air. The darkness behind my left eye pulsed in time with my heartbeat.
"I'm trying." My voice cracked. I'd been kneeling for hours, joints screaming in protest. "It's not... I can't reach It today."
Mother Superior's fingers tightened, sending little sparks of pain through my skull. "You can. You must. The Convergence approaches, and you are our bridge. Our messiah."
The word sent a shiver down my spine. Messiah. They'd been calling me that since before I could walk, since they discovered the gift I'd been born with. The ability to touch something vast and ancient, something that existed in the spaces between reality. The Thing they worshipped, that they believed would usher in a new age of enlightenment.
What they never understood was that It terrified me.
"Please," I whispered, though I knew better than to beg. "I'm tired. Can we try again tomorrow?"
Her nails dug deeper. "The weakness of your flesh is a barrier you must overcome. Your comfort is insignificant compared to your purpose. Now. Open. Your. Mind."
I did as I was taught. Relaxed my mental barriers one by one, like peeling away layers of an onion. The darkness behind my eye expanded, reaching tendrils through my consciousness. And then...
Contact.
Imagine trying to describe color to someone born blind. Imagine trying to explain what water feels like to someone who's never been wet. That's what it was like, touching the Thing that lived between dimensions. It was vast beyond comprehension, ancient beyond time, alien beyond any framework of reference I possessed. It filled me with knowledge I couldn't process, showing me truths that human minds weren't meant to contain.
Mother Superior's grip gentled. "Yes, perfect. Let It in. Let It show you the way."
Images flooded my mind. A city of impossible geometry, where angles bent in ways that made my brain scream. Creatures that shifted and flowed like living mercury. A sky filled with eyes that all turned to look at me at once. And beneath it all, a hunger vast enough to swallow worlds.
I tried to pull back, to shut down the connection, but Mother Superior held me firmly in place. "No, child. You must see. You must understand."
The visions continued. I saw what they wanted – not enlightenment, but consumption. Not transcendence, but transformation. They wanted to use me as a door, and through that door would come... would come...
I screamed.
The candles exploded, showering the room with hot wax. Mother Superior was thrown backward, her grip finally releasing. I collapsed onto my hands and knees, retching bile onto the stone floor.
"Blasphemy!" Mother Superior's voice had lost all its gentleness. "You dare reject Its gift?"
"Gift?" I looked up at her, my left eye burning like it had been stabbed with an ice pick. "You call that a gift? It wants to destroy everything!"
She slapped me, hard enough to split my lip. "You see only what your limited mind can comprehend. The destruction of the old order is necessary for the birth of the new. This is why we've prepared you, trained you since birth. You alone can survive the opening. You alone can birth the new reality."
Blood dripped from my lip onto the stone. In that moment, something crystallized in my mind. All the doubts, all the questions I'd been afraid to ask – they cohered into a terrible clarity. "You're insane," I whispered. "All of you. You're going to kill everyone."
Mother Superior's face hardened into the mask I would come to know well in the following weeks. "Take her to the Sanctuary," she commanded, and two acolytes materialized from the shadows to grab my arms. "Clearly we need to purify her mind of these... doubts."
The Sanctuary. My stomach clenched. I'd seen others taken there, seen how they came back – if they came back at all. Empty-eyed and compliant, their wills broken by whatever techniques the Church had perfected over the centuries.
They dragged me through torch-lit corridors, down deeper into the earth. The air grew colder, damper. The walls changed from worked stone to natural rock. And ahead, the heavy iron door of the Sanctuary waited.
"This is for your own good," Mother Superior said as they shackled me to the wall. "Pain purifies. Suffering illuminates. When you embrace your destiny, this will all make sense."
The door clanged shut, leaving me in absolute darkness. Almost absolute – there was a faint phosphorescence from fungus growing in the corners. Enough light to see the implements hanging on the walls, to see the dark stains on the floor.
I don't know how long they kept me there. Time loses meaning in the dark. They came regularly with food and water, enough to keep me alive but never enough to satisfy. They came with pain, with prayers, with Mother Superior's endless lectures about destiny and duty. They came with drugs that made the darkness behind my eye expand until it threatened to swallow me whole.
But they made a mistake. The Thing they worshipped, the power they wanted me to channel – it had left its mark on me in more ways than they knew. Each time they forced contact, each time they made me touch that vast alien consciousness, I learned. Not just about It, but about them. About the Church. About the true history that stretched back to before recorded time.
I learned their secrets, their weaknesses. I learned that the darkness in my eye wasn't just a connection to their god – it was a weapon. And in the depths of the Sanctuary, in between sessions of torture and indoctrination, I taught myself to use it.
It took three months to find the right moment. Three months of pretending to break, of letting them think their methods were working. Three months of gathering power like a battery storing charge. And then, during a communion ceremony where they'd brought me up to the main temple, I struck.
I remember fragments of that night. The way the darkness exploded out of me like a solar flare. The screams as it touched the other acolytes, driving them mad with visions of what lay between dimensions. The look of betrayal on Mother Superior's face as I turned her own techniques against her.
The next clear memory I have is of running through the snow, stolen clothes soaked through, bare feet bleeding. I ran until I couldn't run anymore, and then I crawled. A trucker found me on the highway, half-frozen and babbling about eyes in the darkness. He thought I was just another cult refugee, took me to the nearest hospital.
That's where Marcus found me. He'd been tracking the Church for years, it turned out. Gathering evidence, building a resistance. He offered me a choice – disappear into witness protection, or help him fight back. Help him stop what I knew they would try again.
Some choice.
The buzz of my phone snaps me back to the present. I'm still standing in the laundromat, staring at the symbol on the dryer door. But something's different. The spiral at the center seems to have moved, twisted in on itself like a closing iris.
My earpiece crackles. "Vesper?" Marcus sounds worried. "Cleanup team is two minutes out. Why aren't you responding?"
"Sorry." My voice sounds distant to my own ears. "Got lost in memories."
"Yeah, well, get lost in them somewhere else. You need to clear the scene."
He's right, of course. But as I turn to leave, I catch movement in my peripheral vision. The symbol is definitely changing, the spiral contracting like a pupil adjusting to light. And in the center, in the depths of that impossible geometry, something looks back at me.
Mother Superior's voice echoes in my head: You are the bridge between worlds.
I run.