The tide licked the blackened shore of Holyland, dragging ribbons of kelp and broken shells, their pallid undersides gleaming like cadaverous flesh beneath the dying sun. A murder of crows perched along the skeletal remains of a shipwreck, their beaks pecking idly at the salt-swollen wood, as though divining omens from the decay. The air carried the scent of brine, damp rot, and something less natural—a whisper of iron, like old blood long dried yet never truly gone.
Dr. Evelynn Blackthorn arrived under a twilight sky, the cold wind clawing at her coat as she stepped from the carriage. Holyland's entrance loomed ahead—a stone arch crumbling at the edges, its keystone defaced with scratches that suggested writing, though no human tongue had ever formed such glyphs. The very land itself seemed to recoil from its own existence, as though aware it should not be.
Beyond the gate, the town sprawled in jagged defiance of sanity. Buildings slouched like dying men, leaning against one another for support, their wood warped and bloated with damp. The cobbled streets twisted in ways that confounded the eye, narrowing into alleys that led nowhere, or widening into courtyards where doors opened to vacant voids.
Her hands tightened around the leather handle of her medical satchel. She had seen horrors in London's asylums,patients who spoke in tongues never recorded, men who clawed at their own eyes to rid themselves of unseen horrors,but this place was different. Here, the air itself conspired against reason.
A figure approached, a man clad in a physician's coat, though time had reduced it to a tattered ruin. Dr. Lysander Voss. His face was a thing of angles, too sharp for comfort, his nose aquiline, his lips thin and colorless. Eyes like twin wells reflected nothing, not the light nor the burden of a soul.
"Dr. Blackthorn." His voice carried no warmth, only the weight of knowing. "Your brother awaits you."
A beat of silence. Evelynn swallowed hard.
"He's dead," she said.
"Yes," Voss answered, tilting his head slightly. "But waiting all the same."
The mortuary was a relic of another age, its architecture reminiscent of a cathedral stripped of its faith. Stained glass windows wept condensation, the colors long faded to muted specters of their former vibrance. The air was thick with the scent of formaldehyde and something deeper, something wrong.
Voss led her inside without ceremony, down a corridor lined with anatomical sketches only, the forms depicted were all off. Limbs bent in unnatural angles, skulls bore too many eye sockets, ribcages stretched in ways that should not have sustained life.
A single lantern swung from the ceiling, casting flickering shadows as Evelynn stepped to the steel table where her brother lay.
She had not seen Elias in years, and yet, he had changed beyond time's cruelty. His body was untouched by decay, his skin smooth as wax, though his chest did not rise with breath. His lips parted slightly, as though he might whisper some final confession.
But it was his head that unnerved her most.
His skull had been sawn open with meticulous precision, yet the cavity was not empty. Where gray matter should have lain, there was instead a labyrinth, no larger than a coin, yet its passages coiled infinitely inward, a fractal of impossible geometry. The walls of the tiny maze pulsed faintly, as though breathing.
Voss regarded it with a quiet fascination. "A Fractal Vault," he murmured. "Self-replicating. A piece of something much greater than itself."
Evelynn stared, nausea curling in her gut. "How did this happen to him?"
Voss reached for a scalpel, tapping the edge against the vault's outermost layer. A sound like a thousand whispering voices filled the room, murmuring in a language that was not meant for human tongues. The lantern flickered violently, its light failing against an unseen weight pressing in from all directions.
"Elias sought understanding," Voss said, stepping back. "And the Eschaton answered."
Evelynn's breath came shallow. She had spent years dissecting cadavers, studying the intricate symphony of flesh and bone, yet this, this was not science. This was something that had bled in from the edges of reality itself.
She turned sharply. "Burn it."
Voss exhaled through his nose. "It cannot be burned."
"Then destroy it, crush it, drown it, anything"
His eyes gleamed like cut glass. "That is beyond our power, Dr. Blackthorn. Your brother was given knowledge, and knowledge does not die."
Evelynn clenched her fists. "Then why did you bring me here?"
"Because you are the only one left who might finish what he started."
A chill licked her spine.
Voss gestured toward the far end of the room. There, resting on a wooden chair, was a mirror. Its frame was blackened silver, the glass surface seemingly mundane, yet something within it shifted, subtly, just beneath the threshold of sight.
Her own reflection was absent.
Instead, Elias stood within the glass, his eyes wide, lips moving silently.
Her breath hitched.
The mirror laughed.
Not with sound, but with motion, a ripple that ran through the surface like disturbed water, distorting her brother's image until he was nothing but a smear of color. And then came the whispering.
It slithered into her ears, filling her skull with numbers, equations, spirals of logic that meant nothing yet demanded understanding. She clutched her head, gritting her teeth against the sensation of her own thoughts being unwound, rewoven into something else.
"Dr. Blackthorn," Voss said gently, watching.
"Do you see now?"
She did.
And she wished she did not.
The mirror's voice was not her brother's. It was something older, something hungry. And it knew her name.
Evelynn staggered back, her breath coming in sharp gasps. The whispers still curled in the hollows of her skull, tangled equations flickering behind her eyes like ghostly afterimages. She pressed her fingers to her temples, forcing herself to focus, to think, to be.
"Elias," she whispered. "Is that really you?"
The mirror gave no answer, only the ripple of movement behind the glass. Her brother's form reassembled in broken, disjointed moments, an arm where his neck should be, a pair of eyes floating separate from a body that refused to hold a single shape. And then, in a blink, he was whole again.
His lips parted. No sound emerged.
Evelynn's chest tightened.
She stepped closer, her reflection absent from the glass, her brother's eyes wide and pleading. It was then that she saw the bruises lining his throat, deep, violent indentations, as if he had been strangled by a hand far larger than any human's. The impression of fingers, elongated and thin, stretched from his jaw to his collarbone, the flesh bruised black with a rot that seemed older than death itself.
Her mouth went dry.
"Doctor," Voss said behind her, his voice calm, but with something new woven beneath it, curiosity, or perhaps anticipation. "Step away."
But she could not.
Because in the depths of the mirror, past the shifting veil of glass, past the horror of her brother's mutating form, something else was watching.
A shadow moved in the deep.
Not a shape, not a form her mind could comprehend, only the absence of one, an intrusion of pure negation. It was not black, for black was a color, and this thing was less than that. The way it moved was wrong, without fluidity or pause, like a thought forced into physicality.
Her body seized with cold terror. The whispering deepened, the equations in her mind unfurling into sigils, numbers curling into glyphs that burned behind her eyelids.
She swayed, dizzy with the sudden knowledge that she had come too close, that she had leaned too far over the edge of something vast, and that now, it saw her.
"Evelynn!"
Voss's hand seized her wrist, yanking her backward just as the mirror shattered from the inside.
The glass did not break in shards, it dissolved, unwove, as though it had never been solid at all. The void within surged forward like an exhale, a breath from something older than time, and for a moment, Evelynn felt herself falling.
Then Voss was dragging her back, pulling her away, and the weight of whatever had looked at her receded like a tide, slithering back into the abyss.
The room fell silent.
She collapsed to her knees, her fingers trembling. Her breath came in ragged pulls, her heart hammering against her ribs.
Voss crouched beside her, his gaze sharp, searching. "Did it speak?"
Evelynn forced herself to swallow. "It whispered."
He exhaled slowly. "Then it knows your name."
A sickening weight coiled in her stomach.
Voss rose, brushing dust from his sleeves.
"Come, Doctor. Your work begins now."