The Ouroboros Cycle

Step 001/08

THEN

— - —

A phone is ringing.

Aaron Siegel stands outside of a church. Its walls, rotted and crumbling, strain to hold up the towering, pockmarked roof above it. One of the doors hangs loose on a single hinge, swaying softly in the wind. The windows, long since stripped of their panes and frames, whistle an eerie song as the wind slices through them. The entire structure creaks and groans.

A phone is ringing.

Aaron looks behind him. He can see Arians standing next to their car, watching him. Between the haze of the dust and the setting sun, he almost looks like a mirage. He’s too far away, and Aaron can’t make out his features. All he sees is his friend’s coat, whipping in the wind, and the dark glasses on his face.

A phone is ringing.

Aaron looks off in the distance, and sees fire. He hears the moaning and screeching of metal on metal, and sees smoke rising over the mountains. Every so often he hears the thunderous cacophony of an explosion rip across the badlands and sees lights flashing across the horizon. He sees, very briefly, a clockwork mountain, illuminated by an inferno. A dark star hangs low in the sky.

A phone is ringing.

Aaron hears voices. Nine voices, calling to him from the earth. They know. They know he carries the trigger, and they ache for its release. They cry out to him, begging him for the elation of their own torment. They cannot hear each other, but they can hear him. Each footstep sends their tiny bodies writhing in their concrete tombs, their broken arms outstretched, grasping towards a god they cannot see. “Come back,” they say. “Make us whole again.”

A phone is ringing.

Aaron steps towards the church, but his gait is unsure and his pace wavers. Inside the church, he will find truth. The sky burns bright in the light of a blighted god. Horror seeps through the soil, wrapping tiny, shredded fingers around his shoes. He pulls away, and struggles towards the church. The sun sinks below the mountains, and as it does he sees a Red Right Hand hanging in the heavens. The wind knocks the doors of the church wide, and from within its ruined hall he hears the sound of a man laughing.

Inside the church, a phone is ringing.

NOW

— - —

“This is it?” Olivia said.

Calvin consulted the journal. The location was right, so far as he could tell, but the smoking ruin they had come upon was not the fortress described in the text. Shielding his eyes from the sun, he tried to make out some features noted by the author, but was unable to. As a whole, it was an unrecognizable mess.

“Yeah,” Calvin said slowly, “this is it.”

Adam squinted through the smoke that drifted towards them. “You think somebody else got here first?”

Anthony grunted. “Likely not. I can’t imagine the Overseers have made it public that their contract is broken.”

“One of ours, then?” the young man inquired.