09 Apr The Whispering Era

Part I

Dr. Neal Farrow stepped down from the rust-scorched cab of the Hilux, his boots sinking slightly into the orange dust as the wind carried dry grains in lazy spirals across the barren flat. The engine idled for a moment longer before the driver cut it and peeled away with a nod, leaving Neal alone at the edge of the dig site. The horizon pulsed faintly in the heat, blurring the division between earth and sky, as if the continent itself resisted definition.

He slung his bag over one shoulder and adjusted his hat, eyes narrowing against the harsh glare. Even with polarized lenses, the landscape vibrated with intensity, a heat that was less sensation than pressure. He had spent time in arid zones before—in North Africa, in southern Utah—but nothing quite compared to this stretch of the Pilbara, where time and terrain had eroded together into a kind of geological hallucination.

A cluster of low tents and modular trailers stood farther up the hill, their outlines soft against the shimmering air. The cave system was somewhere beyond that ridge, nested in ochre-stained cliffs that looked like they had bled their color into the ground.

By the time Neal reached the main tent, his shirt was soaked beneath the arms and along his back. Flies, undeterred by repellant, clung to his collar and ears. Inside, the air was scarcely cooler, though it was shaded. A field table bore trays of stone fragments, ceramic dust, and two laptops, both shut.

“Farrow?”

He turned to see a woman seated behind one of the tables, scribbling into a worn notebook without looking up. Her accent was clipped but not unfriendly—Australian, vaguely academic.

“Dr. Helena Winterfield,” she said, rising and offering a hand. “I’ve read some of your work. Semiotic Variance in Pre-Linguistic Societies was required reading in my graduate program.”

Neal offered a modest smile. “That was years ago. Most of it has been disproven.”

Helena shrugged. “That’s the point of a living discipline, isn’t it? Still, we were glad when the university agreed to send you. I’ll warn you upfront—the locals didn’t find this site. A mining company did. It was almost bulldozed before someone noticed the cave mouths.”

They crossed the camp to the edge of a shallow ravine, where a narrow path snaked down into the rock. Neal followed Helena, noting the sloped stone walls narrowing to a jagged fissure barely wide enough for a person. The deeper they went, the cooler it became, and soon the sun was a memory replaced by dim sodium lanterns mounted at intervals along the cave walls.

“This whole system winds back about a kilometer,” Helena said, her voice echoing faintly. “Mostly pictographs and ochre layers, some evidence of sediment transport. But we found one chamber that doesn’t conform to the rest.”

She led him through two adjoining caverns into a third, where the ceiling narrowed and the floor sloped toward a small hollow in the rear wall. The air inside had a stillness to it, a texture that suggested long abandonment. A single lantern stood at the center, casting light across the uneven stone.

Neal approached the wall and crouched.

At first glance, the glyph resembled a coiled shape. It was carved with precision, though the tool marks were worn down. It lacked the familiar stylistic elements common to regional rock art—no surrounding motifs, no anthropomorphic figures, no fauna, no handprints. Just the glyph, embedded alone in the stone.

“It’s unlike anything I’ve seen,” Neal said. He traced the edge of the symbol with his eyes, noting the curvature and the symmetry. “No companion glyphs?”

“None,” Helena said. “We triple-checked. It’s also unlike any glyph in the surrounding regions. We ran comparisons against the Bradshaw and Wandjina styles—nothing matches.”

Neal glanced at her. “May I photograph it?”

“Of course. Just no rubbings or contact without gloves. The rock is sensitive to oil exposure.”

He nodded and retrieved his field camera. The flash washed the chamber in harsh white, and for a brief moment, the glyph seemed to recede, as if shy beneath the light. He took several photos from varying angles, adjusted for depth, and then knelt again, jotting in his notebook.

“Any theories?” Helena asked.

Neal paused, then looked up.

“It’s not a pictograph. There’s no representational structure. No syntax or context. If it is language, it’s not part of any known family. But it has the feel of… recursion. Of self-reference. That’s unusual.”

Helena folded her arms.

“One of the locals—the contractor who flagged it—said it reminded him of something called ‘the Whispering Era.’ Ever heard of that?”

Neal frowned.

“No. That’s not part of the Dreamtime corpus.”

“I looked it up. Nothing in the published literature, but a few oral accounts from fringe researchers. Some Aboriginal communities refer to it obliquely—‘the time outside time.’”

Neal tapped his pen against his notepad.

“Folklore, then. Possibly syncretic.”

“Or possibly misremembered,” Helena added. “Still, it’s the only context we’ve got. I thought it might interest you.”

He offered a thin smile. “It does.”

* * * * * *

That night, the wind moved in long, slow sighs across the tent fabric, and the insects chirped with mathematical precision beyond the camp’s border. Neal sat beneath the glow of a small desk lamp, reviewing the photos on his laptop. The glyph stared back at him from every angle, unchanged, defiant.

He played with phonetic arrangements in his notebook, sketching hypothetical articulations. It wasn’t uncommon for linguists to attempt pronunciation of non-verbal symbols. Assigning sound was a means of familiarization—a way to tame the unknown.

After an hour, he settled on a string of consonant-heavy sounds, balancing what he imagined to be the breath control required by its central curves.

He leaned forward, closed the laptop, and spoke the sound aloud.

It left his mouth with a dry rasp, not unlike the scraping of stone against stone. The sound lingered for a moment in the tent air, then was gone.

He waited.

Nothing moved. The world outside the tent continued its low, insect rhythm. No tremors. No lights. No voice. He chuckled once, under his breath, and wrote the phonetics down again, this time noting intonation. A test, he told himself.

Satisfied, he closed the notebook and powered down the lamp.

As he rolled into his cot, the wind returned, stirring the edge of the tent flap with a soft, scraping flutter. He stared at the canvas ceiling for a long time, his mind already drifting into the contours of the glyph—its movement inward, the spiral that wasn’t a spiral, the suggestion of something collapsed or turning in on itself. Then, sleep.

Far above the campsite, the red hills sat motionless in the moonlight, their faces blank, the glyph deep in the cave undisturbed.

Or so it seemed.

Part II

Neal awoke to the murmured cadence of his own breath, the air in the tent filled with the scent of vinyl, stale sweat, and something he couldn’t place—something mineral, perhaps, or earthen in a way that suggested recent excavation. The dream, if there had been one, slipped away before he could grasp it. His eyes moved toward the fabric walls where dawn filtered through, casting soft golden shapes against the canvas.

“He turned over in his cot,” a voice whispered, its tone soft and neutral, as though spoken from a respectful distance, its cadence aligned precisely with the moment he did just that.

Neal froze.

His first instinct was not fear but confusion—a rational, clinical reflex honed over decades in academia. He remained still for several long seconds, waiting to determine whether the sound had been a hypnopompic fragment, some neural misfire in the transition from dream to waking. When nothing else followed, he slowly sat up.

The air stirred faintly, but there was no one else in the tent. No movement outside. The sound had not come from a direction but from within, as if spoken directly behind his eyes.

He dressed, made coffee, and took his notebook outside, settling at the camp’s edge beneath a brittle eucalypt whose bark peeled like parchment. The heat was already building. He reviewed his notes from the night before, re-examining the phonetic breakdown of the glyph, checking his logical pathways, and adjusting minor symbols. He had not, he reminded himself, expected anything to come from speaking the glyph aloud. It was a thought experiment—nothing more. And if he was now hearing phantom voices, it was likely due to dehydration, stress, or exhaustion. None of those things were new.

“He lifted his pen, hesitated, and crossed out the vowel cluster.”

Neal’s hand jerked. The pen tip left a crooked scratch across the margin of the page. The voice had returned, identical in tone, as if reading a line of text he had not written.

He glanced around, rising from his chair. There were no researchers nearby, no murmured conversations from the other tents. No radios. The voice had not passed through his ears. It had risen, instead, from somewhere inside the hollow of his skull.

He waited again, poised for it to repeat itself or continue, but it did not. The silence that followed was pervasive, until at last the buzz of flies reasserted itself, breaking the spell.

Back inside the tent, he opened his laptop and reviewed the photos of the glyph, magnifying the central curl until the pixels blurred. He stared into its spiral for what felt like an hour.

* * * * * *

Over the next two days, the voice returned intermittently. It narrated with precision, neither urgent nor emotional. It did not editorialize; it merely observed.

“He entered the left passage this time, not the right.”

“He drank from the canteen without tasting the water.”

“He considered the glyph again, though it no longer needed his attention.”

Each time, the phrasing was exact, and always aligned with his actions. At first, he chalked it up to the kind of internal monologue common to people who work alone for extended periods. But Neal had studied language long enough to recognize pattern from noise. And what he was hearing was not thought but speech—structured, externalized, and autonomous.

The turning point came on the third morning.

He had walked out toward the secondary ridge, intending to trace the path to the northern escarpment, which Helena had warned was unstable due to runoff channels. But as he reached the midpoint of the ridge, the voice returned—not as an observation this time, but as something else.

“He decided not to return to camp yet.”

The words were subtle, almost courteous, but their implication was immediate. Neal stopped walking.

His legs trembled slightly, as though bracing against a wind that wasn’t present. The voice had not described something he was doing. It had described something he had not yet decided. And it was correct. He had intended to return. But upon hearing the voice, he paused, suspended in the moment of indecision, and began to reconsider.

He waited several beats, then turned back toward the camp.

A sharp pressure blossomed behind his right eye, sudden and nauseating, as though something had hooked into the muscle above his cheek and twisted. He doubled over, vision blurring, and let out a low grunt. After thirty seconds, the sensation passed, leaving only a thin trickle of sweat down his spine.

He did not attempt to change course again.

* * * * * *

That evening, he found Helena reviewing core samples outside the geology trailer. The sun had begun its descent, staining the cliffs with blood-colored light, and the air smelled faintly of ozone.

“You look like hell,” she said without looking up.

“I’ve been hearing a voice,” he replied, flatly.

Helena’s expression shifted. She set the sample tube down and wiped her hands.

“Sleep deprivation?” she asked.

“I thought so. But it’s… contextual. It’s following me.”

Helena watched him carefully. “Following you how?”

“It narrates. What I’m doing. Sometimes just after. Sometimes just before. And now it’s begun to… suggest.”

Helena crossed her arms.

“Hallucinations can emerge from extreme isolation, especially in environments like this one. The heat. The light exposure. Maybe even something in the water table. You know that.”

Neal shook his head. “It’s not random. It’s linguistic. It observes. Predicts. I’ve begun to—”

He stopped.

The voice had spoken again, just behind his eyes, cool and indifferent.

“He decided not to tell her everything.”

Helena frowned.

“You’ve begun to what?”

Neal paused, then forced a thin smile.

“To write it down. Document it, I mean. I’ll keep a record.”

She nodded cautiously. “Good. Maybe it’ll help to offload it. Just don’t keep it to yourself if things get worse.”

* * * * * *

The next morning, the air was hazy, a low wind moving across the camp from the southeast. Neal stood at the crest of the ridge with his field recorder in one hand, the notebook in the other. He had not spoken the glyph aloud again, though he’d been tempted more than once.

He clicked the recorder on and held it up.

“I’m documenting a… phenomenon. A voice, audible only internally. It began three days ago, shortly after phonetic experimentation with the glyph uncovered in Chamber C. The voice—”

“He began to describe the voice again, knowing it would come for him later,” it said.

Neal swallowed hard. The voice had arrived on cue, as though sensing the recorder’s activation.

He continued speaking.

“The voice narrates my actions. At times, it anticipates them. It never introduces itself. Its tone is neutral, lacking emotional inflection, and yet it seems… aware. Not only of what I’m doing, but of what I will do. It is—”

“He wondered whether this would play back. It wouldn’t.”

Neal stopped the recording and hit rewind. He played it back, holding the device close to his ear. White noise hissed through the speaker. No voice. Not even his own.

He rewound it again. Static.

He turned, slowly, and that was when he saw her.

Kaely.

She stood at the far side of the ridge, where the rock shelf dropped sharply into a dry basin below. Her figure was small, backlit by the rising sun. She did not move. She simply watched.

And just before Neal’s eyes met hers, the voice returned.

“She watched him first.”

Neal felt something turn in his gut—a slow tightening, like thread drawn through cloth. He took a step toward her, but when he blinked, she was no longer there.

The voice did not speak again that day.

Part III

The days unraveled.

Neal could not remember, with certainty, when Thursday had ended and Friday had begun, nor how long it had been since the last supply drop arrived by chopper. The sun still rose and fell, but its rhythm no longer aligned with his own. He would sleep after breakfast, then rise at twilight believing it to be midmorning. Hours passed too quickly or not at all. The digital clock in his tent reset itself to zero each night, and his watch hands had grown sluggish, trailing behind real time by margins that widened daily.

Even his body betrayed him. He would glance down to find his boots caked in red dust, though he had not left the tent. At least not recently. The canteen would be half-empty when he could not recall opening it. A pen he had used moments before would vanish from the table and reappear later tucked behind his ear. He had begun labeling items with masking tape and dates, but the handwriting on the labels sometimes shifted—still his, but looser, almost cursive, as if another hand had borrowed his and returned it changed.

The voice did not rest.

It spoke when he moved, when he sat, when he blinked. It spoke when he tried to form thoughts. There was no longer a separation between idea and utterance. Every impulse felt observed, verbalized, and finalized before he could act.

“He thought about standing,” it would murmur, “but remained still, confused as to whether the thought had been his at all.”

Neal tried to occupy himself with cataloging, sorting artifacts, cross-referencing phonemes, but the moment he began to formulate a plan of action, the voice recited it first, stripping the gesture of intent. He felt like a page already read, the creases of each decision pre-folded, each moment shaped in advance.

Then the sun moved backward.

It happened late in the afternoon, as he stood near the southern bluff recording soil patterns. He had raised his phone to take a reference shot of the escarpment, and as the shutter clicked, the shadows on the rock face reversed. The amber light climbed upward, then shifted westward in a gentle arc, casting the cliff in rising luminance. It lasted only five or six seconds—just long enough for Neal to register the impossibility—before the light resumed its downward trajectory, as though reality had stuttered and recovered.

No one else reacted.

At dinner, Helena and two other researchers discussed a regional wildfire. Simon’s latest email droned on about funding logistics and an overdue call with the department. The rest of the world, it seemed, continued unaffected.

Neal said nothing.

* * * * * *

That night, he opened his notebook and found new markings.

They were not recent additions or accidental ink transfers, but deliberate etchings: three glyphs, each nested along the inner margin of the page where his linguistic notes ended. One resembled the original spiral he had found in Chamber C, though more elongated, with a small wedge dividing its center. The others were unfamiliar—linear, intersecting forms that suggested something architectural or anatomical.

He flipped back through earlier entries. On several pages, faint impressions bled through as if written in invisible ink made visible only now. Symbols emerged in clusters. A few matched the glyph he had spoken aloud. One bore resemblance to a proto-cuneiform ideogram denoting “breath” or “word.”

Neal had no memory of drawing them.

He stared at the newest additions for a long time, and for the first time, he did not attempt translation. He simply let them exist. They did not need him to understand.

* * * * * *

Helena confronted him two days later.

She found him outside the main cave mouth, seated cross-legged on a flat slab of stone with his notebook open and a recorder propped beside it. He had been speaking to himself, though he could not recall the words.

“You’ve been disappearing,” she said, approaching slowly. “We thought you’d gone into the canyon again. You’ve been skipping meals. You’ve stopped logging samples. And people are beginning to notice the way you talk.”

Neal looked up.

“What way is that?”

“You speak like you’re reading. As if the sentences are coming from somewhere else. There’s no intonation. No pause.”

He opened his mouth to reply, but before he could speak, the voice spoke for him.

“She would say that. She had always doubted his clarity, mistaking comprehension for obsession.”

Helena flinched.

“I didn’t say that,” she said, frowning. “But I was going to—”

Neal stood abruptly.

“Don’t follow me,” he snapped.

His voice echoed loudly against the rocks. Her face darkened, and for a moment, neither of them moved. Then she turned away.

Neal remained frozen for several seconds longer, his chest tight, as though the words had been spoken through him, not by him.

* * * * * *

That night, the dream came.

It began with the sensation of pressure behind his eyes—a rolling, static buzz, like distant insects humming from inside stone. When the darkness receded, he was standing in a forest that bore no relation to the landscape outside his tent. The trees were ancient and towering, their coiled roots aboveground. Light filtered down in motes the size of ash flakes. The air was cool and wet.

Around him, shapes stirred—limbed but indistinct, walking upright but lacking definition. He could not tell how many there were, only that they were older than language and closer than sight.

Then the voices came. They did not speak aloud. They intoned within him, resonant and in unison, reverberating in the hollow spaces of bone and thought.

“We were before.”
“We are still.”
“We will always be.”

With each line, Neal felt his skin tighten, as though preparing to shed. The trees around him seemed to bend with intention. From one of the trunks, a glyph emerged—identical to the one from Chamber C, though alive now, pulsing with a biological cadence.

The trees whispered again.

“You gave it voice.”

“Now it remembers.”

“Now it wants.”

He woke gasping in the dark. His hands were clenched around the recorder, which he did not remember retrieving.

He hit play.

Only silence answered.

* * * * * *

The following evening, Kaely returned.

He saw her just past sunset, standing atop the same bluff where she had first appeared. Her silhouette was perfectly still, framed by the amber sky.

Neal approached slowly. She did not move.

When he reached the base of the ridge, she raised one hand and pointed—not at him, but beyond, toward a canyon carved deep between the rocks.

The wind was rising from it, steady and rhythmic. But it did not howl—it chanted. The sound was low and layered, comprised of syllables he could not parse, yet each seemed known to him in the way a word once forgotten might return unbidden. With the wind came voices, emerging from the canyon.

Kaely said nothing. She only turned and walked away, disappearing into the dusk without looking back.

Neal stood there long after the wind had died.

Part IV

By the time the voice learned to think ahead of him, Neal had surrendered the idea of ownership over thought. The internal monologue he once trusted—the silent, familiar rhythm of private cognition—was now a palimpsest overwritten in real time. It was not just that the voice anticipated his decisions. It composed them.

Even his resistance had grown performative. When he believed he had refused an idea, the voice would gently correct him.

“He thought he had chosen not to enter the cave,” it would whisper, “but the choice had already been made.”

And then, unblinking, he would find himself at the cave’s entrance, his boots coated in dust he had not consciously walked through, the lantern already lit in his left hand, his right adjusting the strap of a bag he did not recall packing.

The dissonance between intention and action widened daily. His limbs moved with practiced certainty, but his awareness always arrived a beat too late, lagging behind motor function.

Sometimes he would speak and hear the words as if read aloud by a stranger. The cadence was stilted, the emphasis wrong, and his voice—still recognizably his—carried the flat affect of rote recitation. Others noticed.

Two field assistants had stopped addressing him altogether, passing notes instead of questions, choosing Helena when possible. She, too, had begun watching him with narrowed eyes, her posture guarded. There was no longer confrontation in her face, only caution, as if she suspected contagion and did not wish to speak it aloud for fear of making it true.

* * * * * *

He tried to write it down, hoping perhaps to map the progression—if not as science, then as confession. He sat at the folding table outside his tent, twilight settling over the ridge, the crickets already beginning their low chorus.

He opened his notebook to a blank page. His hand trembled as he brought the pen down.

Before he could begin, the ink scrawled across the page in a smooth, fluid motion.

The words formed perfectly, each one centered in neat lines. He watched as his own hand rendered phrases he had not yet considered, the voice rising in perfect tandem with the pen:

“He sat to write what had already been written. There would be no first draft, no hesitation. He was not the author.”

Neal dropped the pen. It rolled across the table and fell into the dirt. His hand still twitched, the tendons straining slightly against invisible tethers.

When he opened the notebook again later, he found three more pages filled, each line signed only with a symbol—an unfamiliar variation of the original glyph, now elongated, segmented, almost vertebral in appearance.

* * * * * *

He tried to leave.

He chose the western trail at dawn, following a dry riverbed that curved around the basin and led through a narrow pass beyond the canyon’s mouth. He brought only essentials—water, a flare, a small radio—and avoided looking at the ridge where Kaely often appeared.

The sun climbed higher. The path widened. He walked for what felt like several hours. The trail should have led to a service road. It had yesterday, and the day before.

But when he crested the final rise, the camp lay below him, unchanged.

The same tents. The same dust. The same flags fluttering from the generator.

He turned around, paced backward, and retraced his route— testing each turn and marker. He walked slower this time, tried cutting diagonally across a stretch of scrub to forge an alternate route.

When he climbed the next hill, the camp was there again.

The voice did not mock him. It did not explain. It simply observed.

“He understood now. There was no outside. The threshold had shifted.”

That night, he began to carve.

It started with his notebook margins, but soon his hands found other surfaces—rocks, tent poles, the aluminum skin of the supply crate. At some point, he discovered a small chisel in one of the storage bins. He did not remember retrieving it, nor selecting the stone slates stacked near the cave mouth. But each night, new symbols appeared.

He would wake to find the grooves already shaped, the tools beside his cot dusted with stone shavings. Some glyphs mirrored those found on the walls of Chamber C. Others were newer, more intricate. Their lines curled inward in layers, as if folding time into form.

He stopped questioning the origin of the carvings. The knowledge of their creation arrived only after the fact—understood like instinct, like muscle memory.

Each symbol shimmered faintly in his peripheral vision, their lines bending slightly when he tried to look away.

* * * * * *

Helena was gone.

No one saw her leave, though someone claimed they had heard her voice calling near the gorge. Her tent was undisturbed, her gear untouched. The radio still buzzed faintly with static, but she did not return the next morning, or the one after.

The team filed a formal report. A helicopter swept the surrounding region. A few of the others began packing.

No one asked Neal what he thought had happened. No one came near him.

Kaely, however, remained. She stood at the entrance to Chamber C at dusk, her frame outlined by the torchlight within. She did not enter or speak.

Each time Neal passed by the chamber, she was there, calm and silent, her eyes following him.

* * * * * *

Neal no longer dreamed.

His sleep had become episodic and fractal, filled with fragments of half-formed memory and interrupted by moments of consciousness that did not belong to him.

He would close his eyes and open them in new places, his hands already moving.

The voice had stopped speaking aloud. It no longer needed to. There were now two streams of thought in his head—one silent and ancient, the other still clinging to the shape of his old self. And he could feel them converging.

One afternoon, he stood inside the chamber and placed his palm against the original glyph. His fingers trembled, but his hand did not withdraw.

He understood now.

He was no longer alone inside himself.

He was being overwritten.

Part V

He moved with practiced rhythm, the motions of the body governed now by a script that no longer required rehearsal. Each step traced the outline of a path long since memorized, though not by the man himself. He no longer thought in terms of desire, nor of doubt. What once had been Neal Farrow—scholar, skeptic, man of language—was now a vessel shaped by utterance, carried forward by the momentum of a voice that required no breath.

He rose at dawn and moved from tent to tent, ensuring each sample was sorted, each note indexed. He returned to Chamber C before the others woke. There, he carved—always the same symbols, always the same spiral at the center.

The others had come two days prior, a fresh crew dispatched by the university to replace those unsettled by the disappearance of Helena Winterfield and the silence that followed. They arrived in convoy, their laughter strange and sharp against the muted backdrop of stone.

They found Neal seated beside the firepit, smiling faintly, his hands folded in his lap. His eyes were calm, clear, and distant, like someone mid-recital.

When they spoke to him, he responded politely. He welcomed them to the site. He offered his assistance.

At first, they did not notice the odd cadence of his speech.

He handed them his notebook, worn and dust-filmed, the cover stained with ochre dust and sweat. Inside were pages of glyphs, carefully drawn and annotated. At the center of each page was a spiral, its shape identical across entries. Beneath it, a phrase:

“This is the first breath.”

Some of them studied the symbols, intrigued. A few dismissed them as pre-contact derivations, outside the regional style. One young researcher, fresh from graduate work in Darwin, suggested they represented a mnemonic encoding system—an ancient attempt to store sound.

That night, he dreamed of a voice.

* * * * * *

On the fourth evening, another followed.

She was older, experienced, respected in the field. She had scoffed when Neal first spoke of the glyph’s phonetic architecture, calling it speculative indulgence. But she had taken the notebook to her tent, and under lantern light, she had traced the spiral with her fingertip.

She had sounded it out, quietly. A whisper, barely audible above the breeze.

The moment passed. She felt a brief nausea, and then nothing. She closed the notebook, muttered something about superstition, and went to sleep.

At 3:17 a.m., she sat bolt upright. Her tent was silent. The voice had just described her waking.

The next morning, she spoke little. Her eyes followed Neal’s as they crossed paths. She did not smile.

By the afternoon, she had begun taking notes in the margins of his notebook.

Neal said nothing.

The others noticed subtle shifts. Tools were misplaced, their labels rewritten in different handwriting. Symbols appeared overnight along the cave’s walls—clean, precise, and unweathered, as though newly etched by someone with unshaking hands.

A linguistics intern was found muttering to herself in the storage tent, eyes closed, the same phrase repeated with each breath:

“We are before. We are still. We will always be.”

When asked about it later, she remembered nothing.

Neal observed without interference. His presence became an anchor. The others felt safer near him, even when they could not explain why. He remained helpful, quiet, and attentive.

Only one of them expressed concern. A technician named Griggs, who had arrived late due to illness, began to ask questions. He confronted Neal one evening beside the canyon.

“You haven’t said a thing about Helena,” he said. “Or the others who left. That doesn’t bother you?”

Neal turned to face him.

“She was spoken,” he said. “She remains.”

Griggs stared, unsure if he had heard correctly. He started to reply, but paused.

Somewhere nearby, the wind shifted. A low murmuring filled the air, a layering of syllables too faint to be words.

Griggs looked up.

“Do you hear that?”

But Neal was already walking away.

* * * * * *

That night, the stars faded too early.

The moon rose and trembled in the sky like a dropped coin. Several on the team remarked on the shift in air pressure, the sudden stillness that seemed to settle just before dawn.

The wind came again at sunrise—steady, rhythmic, and full of whispering.

And the spiral began to reappear. One morning, carved into a radio casing. Another, etched into the dust on a windshield. Once, found beneath the lid of a lunch container, drawn in oil from a worker’s fingers.

None of them claimed responsibility.

No one could remember seeing it done.

From the ridge above the camp, Kaely watched in silence.

Her silhouette framed the dawn light, unmoving. She stood where she always had, at the edge of things—at the boundary between what had been and what would be.

From the canyon mouth, the chanting wind rose again, threading between stone and memory.

Below, someone spoke the glyph aloud.

The word moved.

And the myth spread.