Chapter 17 – Excavation
906 Words
The old Blackwood District had always been a graveyard of its own history—abandoned factories, half-collapsed warehouses, rusted fences curling like ribs around forgotten land. But tonight, it felt different.
Alive.
Awake.
Watching him.
Damian parked at the edge of the district and killed the engine. The cold bit into his skin immediately, sharp and deliberate. The place hadn’t changed in five years; if anything, it had rotted deeper. The same broken windows. The same graffiti. The same hollow echo when the wind pushed through the alleyways.
But there was one difference.
This time, he wasn’t here by accident.
He stepped out, boots crunching over gravel, flashlight in hand. His breath fogged in front of him as he moved deeper toward the one place he had sworn never to return to:
The Mill.
A towering, rust-eaten husk of metal and broken glass. The site of the original murder. The site that had started everything—Selene’s obsession, the symbol, the secrets, the boy screaming in the dark—
Damian shut the memory down before it could swallow him.
He reached the entrance. The massive steel door hung crooked, bent like something had ripped it off its hinges years ago. Damian pushed it aside and stepped inside.
Silence greeted him.
A deep, cavernous silence—thick enough that even his heartbeat felt too loud.
He raised his flashlight.
Dust.
Shattered beams.
Broken machinery.
And a stain on the concrete floor that no amount of rain had ever washed away.
His stomach tightened.
This was where the first victim had been found.
The boy.
Throat slashed.
Triangle carved.
Eyes open.
Damian crouched beside the stain, trying to force his mind to stay calm.
One clue, he told himself.
Anything. Just one clue.
He took a slow breath and let his flashlight sweep the room.
And then—
a glint.
Small.
Metallic.
Unnaturally clean for a place so abandoned.
Damian moved toward it, careful, deliberate. He knelt down and picked it up.
A coin.
Black.
Engraved with a symbol he knew too well:
the jagged triangle.
But this one had something different—an inscription around the edge.
“We are the eyes that never close.”
His chest tightened.
The Oracles weren’t just a rumor.
They were real.
Organized.
And bold enough to leave a token behind like a message.
But the question was—
why leave it for him to find now?
Damian turned the coin in his fingers, thinking—
Click.
Damian froze.
A sound from deeper inside the mill.
Not the wind.
Not metal shifting.
A footstep.
He stood slowly, gun drawn, flashlight steady despite the adrenaline clawing up his spine.
“Come out,” he said, voice low. “Or I’ll drag you out.”
Silence.
Then—
Another click.
Damian pivoted sharply, aiming the gun into the shadows.
“Damian.”
The voice wasn’t loud.
Not echoing.
Not threatening.
Familiar.
Feminine.
Damian’s breath caught.
Isadora.
He stepped forward instinctively—only to stop dead.
It wasn’t her.
It was a recording.
A tiny speaker embedded in the far wall blinked red, the light pulsing in rhythm with her voice.
“Damian,” her recorded voice whispered, trembling slightly, “you shouldn’t have come here.”
His grip tightened around the gun.
The speaker clicked again, and her voice continued, soft, shallow, like she was afraid of being heard by someone else.
“You’re getting too close. They know. They’re watching. Please… please stop.”
The message stuttered.
Glitched.
Her breath cracked into static.
Damian’s jaw clenched. “Isadora—where are you?”
The recording didn’t answer.
Instead, a new voice came through the speaker.
Male.
Smooth.
Controlled.
“Mr. Blackwood.”
Damian’s pulse spiked.
“We told you to follow the shadows. Not return to the beginning.”
Damian stepped closer. “Coward. Show yourself.”
The voice chuckled softly. “You’re predictable. Reckless. And now, a danger to yourself.”
The red light blinked faster.
“Turn around,” the voice said.
Damian did.
His heart stopped.
On the far wall—
drawn in thick, dripping red paint—
was a massive mural of the jagged triangle.
Painted over it were five words:
YOU WERE NOT ALONE.
Every muscle in Damian’s body locked.
The memories he’d buried for five years crashed back like a wave—
The old mill.
The storm.
The boy screaming.
Damian stumbling through the dark.
His hands slick with something warm.
A shadow behind him—
someone watching—
someone close—
He forced the memories away, chest tight, lungs burning.
The speaker crackled one last time.
“We are almost done, Mr. Blackwood. But before this ends, you must remember your role.”
The recording ended with a soft beep.
The mill went silent.
Damian stood there, frozen, breathing hard, fighting the ghosts clawing up from the depths of his past.
He wasn’t alone that night.
Someone else had been here.
Someone who had seen everything.
Someone who had been waiting for him to come back.
Damian closed his eyes for a moment, gripping the coin so tightly it bit into his skin.
The Oracles weren’t just hunting him.
They were rewriting the story.
His story.
His past.
And now, they wanted him to face the one truth he’d buried—
The truth he feared more than anything.
He wasn’t the hero of that night.
He might have been the reason it all began.
⸻
- Writer
