It was the summer of 2002 when Dr. Evelyn Rourke first read the Dunridge journal.
The document had floated through obscure archaeological circles for years—a photocopied manuscript attributed to one Thomas Calloway, filled with sketches of spirals, notes on "Ylva-thuun," and pages where the ink itself seemed to bleed. Most scholars dismissed it as forgery, or madness disguised as folklore. But Evelyn didn't dismiss things so easily.
Her work focused on mythic memory—the notion that certain stories survived not through language, but through architecture, ritual, and landscape. Her thesis: there are places where the Earth remembers what humans forget.
Dunridge was not on any map. But using satellite data, declassified RAF records, and a strange letter she received from a nameless sender—postmarked in black ink, bearing only a spiral—she found coordinates.
Nothing remained on the surface.
But stone remembers.
---
She arrived at the edge of the moor on foot. No roads led in. She carried only a backpack, a notebook, a compact drone, and a strange weight pressing against her thoughts, like déjà vu that wouldn't leave.
What she found was a crater, exactly where the village had once stood. Perfectly circular, twenty meters wide, lined in black glass-like stone that hummed beneath her boots.
The grass around the rim grew in concentric circles, as though memory itself had taken root in the soil.
She lowered the drone.
It descended ten meters before the camera failed—shutting off not with static, but silence. When she pulled it back up, the battery was melted. The casing was warm. The lens was cracked inward.
That night, she camped nearby.
She dreamed of voices.
Not whispering, but rehearsing.
Practicing syllables her mouth wasn't built to form.
When she woke, her notebook had a spiral drawn across the page. She hadn't touched it.
---
Evelyn stayed for a week.
Every night, she recorded strange vibrations in the earth—not earthquakes, but rhythms. Patterns.
On the fourth day, her compass began to spin.
On the sixth, the birds stopped singing.
And on the seventh, she found the stairway.
It was just outside the crater's rim, previously hidden beneath a mat of moss and stone. Steps carved into the earth—too precise, too clean.
She should have left then.
But the thing about memory—true memory—is that it doesn't just stay with a place.
It reaches for people.
And Evelyn had been marked long before she ever stepped on that moor.
---
The stairway led into a tunnel.
The walls were curved, smooth, carved from the same black stone as the crater. There were no seams. No marks of tools. Just the faint echo of breathing—not hers, not anyone's, but the architecture's.
The deeper she went, the more the tunnel tilted. She realized it wasn't curving into the earth—it was spiraling.
Light behaved strangely. Her lantern flickered without burning fuel. Her shadow began to split, branching like antlers.
The silence deepened into pressure. She could hear her own blood. Her heartbeat. Her thoughts, echoed back wrong.
She reached a chamber.
It was vast.
At its center stood a column of flesh and stone, twisting upward into the dark. The surface was engraved with symbols that moved. Spirals folding into eyes. Mouths forming, then melting away.
And there, embedded into the base, she saw Thomas Calloway.
He was part of the stone now.
His face was there—frozen, mouth agape, eyes hollowed—but the rest of him had fused into the pillar. His skin had become inscription.
As she stepped closer, his head turned.
Stone shouldn't move. But it did.
His voice was the scrape of a glacier against bone:
"You shouldn't have come."
---
Evelyn stumbled back, heart in her throat.
"You're alive?"
His jaw creaked.
"Alive... not as you understand it."
"Why are you part of this?" she asked, almost whispering.
"I watched. I listened. I let it speak."
His head twitched again.
"It learns faster now."
The pillar pulsed.
A hum filled the room—not sound, but the shape of thought. Evelyn's mind burned with impossible syntax. Her thoughts frayed at the edges.
She turned to run.
But the exit was gone.
The tunnel had spiraled itself shut.
Then the floor began to whisper.
---
It was not sound, not truly. It was memory made vocal.
She saw the first villagers, building homes around the well. Heard the prayers, the sacrifices, the weeping. She saw the day the sky turned inside out and the well became a mouth.
She saw Thomas, wide-eyed and shaking, pulling himself up with bloody fingers. She watched him scream at the sky. She watched the villagers disappear, one by one, into the waiting spiral.
And then—
She saw herself.
Not now. Not past. Later.
Older.
Changed.
Leading others down these stairs.
Singing.
Teaching the spiral how to echo through flesh.
She screamed, and the whispering stopped.
But the column answered.
---
A slit opened in the stone-flesh. Not a door—an invitation.
Inside, darkness moved.
Not like shadow. Like intention.
She felt her body shift. Her skin tightened. Her thoughts stuttered.
Then came the voice.
Clearer than in Thomas's journal. More fluent. Closer to human.
> "You remember Me."
Evelyn wept, not from fear, but from recognition.
> "You gave Me shape."
"No," she whispered.
> "Your bones have always known My name."
"What are you?"
> "What is breath before lungs? What is fire before a match?"
She fell to her knees.
> "You called Me god once. I was never that small."
---
The column cracked.
Stone peeled back like paper, revealing a mouth, lined not with teeth, but with mirrors.
Each one showed her a different life.
—One where she never found Dunridge.
—One where she did, and never left.
—One where she spoke the spiral tongue and the stars listened.
—One where her eyes were spiral-shaped, and her voice was not hers.
"You're not a god," she said.
> "Correct."
"You're a question."
> "You are an answer."
Evelyn reached out, and the mouth closed.
Everything went dark.
---
She woke on the moor.
The crater was gone.
In its place stood a well—new, clean, its stone glistening in the morning sun.
Villagers moved about around her.
New ones.
Unfamiliar, yet familiar.
Their eyes turned to her—not with suspicion, but reverence.
They knelt.
A child walked up to her, placed a hand on hers, and said, "We remember."
The air shifted.
Somewhere deep below, a spiral sighed.
---
Ten Years Later
Dr. Evelyn Rourke vanished from public life.
Her papers stopped. Her lectures ceased. Her name was scrubbed from university records. Most assumed she disappeared during a sabbatical.
But some rumors spread—of a village returning to maps where none had existed, of a stone well too smooth for human hands, and of a new language that sometimes crept into dreams.
Her journal was never found.
Only one note surfaced—sent to a graduate student who had written to her a year prior, asking if "Ylva-thuun" was based in any real legend.
The note contained only this:
---
> "The stone speaks now.
It speaks fluently.
It is no longer learning our tongue.
It is teaching us its own."
– E.R.
-----------
I wrote my first three part story with this storyline. I tried something new with the next part, comment whether you guys like it.