CHAPTER 1439: STORY 1439: THE POUNDING BELOW

Mira stayed kneeling beside the sealed iris for a long moment, her hands trembling over the smooth, shell-like surface. She pressed her ear to it. The pounding wasn’t random—it had a pattern, a slow, deliberate thud, like something knocking from the other side of a heavy door.

She whispered Elena’s name, but the spiral gave nothing back.

The red ash from her fingertips had begun to stain the pale shell, forming faint swirling shapes where she touched. Her ankle throbbed with a cold so deep it numbed her toes, yet her skin prickled with heat. The voice was quieter now, but it hadn’t gone.

Do not burn. Do not close the gate.

Mira staggered to her feet and scanned the courtyard. The cracked stone, the skeletal remains of old benches, the hollow windows of surrounding buildings—it was empty, but she felt watched. Every shadow looked deeper than it should.

Her eyes caught on the knife Elena had dropped. It lay near the dry fountain’s base, the blade still wet with the strange milky fluid from the creature’s arm. She picked it up, and as her fingers closed around the handle, the pounding grew louder, faster, as if whatever was below could hear her choice.

A memory—one that wasn’t hers—flashed in her head: flames roaring across the courtyard, the shell iris split open, and something vast forcing itself through, wearing the faces of the dead like masks. In the vision, she stood holding the knife, but she wasn’t aiming at the creature—she was carving symbols into the stone.

Her breath caught.

“Elena told me to burn it,” she whispered. “But what if burning it—”

Her thought broke as a shadow slid across the fountain.

Mira whirled. A figure stood in the courtyard’s archway—a man, or something shaped like one. His clothes were rotted almost to threads, and his skin looked drained, parchment-thin over bone. Where his eyes should have been, there were only pits filled with slow-turning red liquid.

“You... opened the way,” he said. His voice didn’t echo in the courtyard—it echoed inside her skull. “You can finish what the others failed.”

“I’m getting her back,” Mira said, voice shaking.

The man tilted his head, listening to the pounding beneath them.

“She is already inside the climb. But you could go after her. You could even survive... if you stop resisting it.” He gestured to her ankle. “The change has started.”

Her fingers tightened on the knife. “And if I don’t?”

The man’s smile was dry, cracked.

“Then the gate will open anyway. Without you. And it will not be kind.”

Before she could speak, a new sound split the air—not the pounding, but a muffled scream from deep below. Elena’s voice. The pounding surged, urgent, almost desperate.

Mira’s choice was no longer between burning the gate or leaving it. It was whether to dive into the spiral before it was too late.

The iris twitched under her hand.