From Echoes Beneath Ohio
by Esi Noire
Dr. Anaya Toussaint returned to the site at dawn.
The blade she’d uncovered the day before had remained silent through the night, yet something had shifted in the air – as if the ground itself was listening. The nettles that clung to the ruins looked like they had curled inward, waiting. The same way her thoughts curled around a question she hadn’t dared to ask: What had she awakened?
She set her satchel down gently, opened her leather-bound journal, and began sketching the symbols she’d seen flash across the blade. The images refused to settle in her mind; they flickered and changed like they didn’t want to be remembered. She had studied many languages in her time – ancient glyphs, long-dead tongues, mathematical ciphers – but these were different. They felt alive. Unfixed.
When her pencil snapped mid-sketch, she cursed and reached for her backup. That’s when she heard it again.
A voice – not outside her, but within. Soft. Hollow. A wind of memory.
“You called us. You do not know your name, but the stone remembers.”
She froze.
“Who’s there?” she said aloud.
Only the wind answered. But the voice returned, this time from inside the blade itself. Anaya gripped it again — and the moment her skin met the hilt, everything shifted.
MEMORY GLITCH:
A throne made of roots and rust.
Eyes in the sky blinking like forgotten satellites.
A woman kneeling at the edge of a red river, whispering:
“The Bound One is not dead. Only dreaming.”
Anaya staggered back. Her knees hit the soil.
The blade had spoken.
She wasn’t hallucinating. The ground beneath her pulsed with warmth, as if acknowledging the message. Her journal had slid into the dirt, open to a page she hadn’t written on – yet now a single line was scrawled in ink she didn’t carry:
“We are the Weavers of Void. You were never meant to forget.”
Her breath caught in her throat. The edges of the world seemed to warp around her. Her hands trembled – but not from fear.
From recognition.
She looked at the ruins again – and now she saw them differently. This was not an archaeological site. This was a memory chamber. A station of the unspoken.
The blade was not an artifact.
It was a key.
And somewhere beneath this timeline, something ancient – and unfinished – had just opened its eyes.
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