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  Chapter 3: The Orb

  Sam sat hunched at the edge of Cas’ secondhand desk, the surface cluttered with crumpled receipts, scattered notes, and rings from long-evaporated cups of coffee. Yet none of it existed to him now; his entire world had narrowed to the thing before him. The orb.

  It rested like a tumor against the mundane debris of modern life. Spherical and smooth, yet carved with such impossible intricacy that it defied categorization; neither purely technological nor archaic, neither alien nor holy. The thing was wrong. Not broken or dangerous in any conventional sense, but discordant. A discord that hummed through his bones when he looked too long.

  Light didn’t quite behave around it. The carvings caught illumination but never shadow, the etched lines seeming to shift when viewed from the corner of his eye; an endless unfurling of patterns too fluid, too alive, to have been etched by tool or hand. Some part of him wondered if they were still being etched, imperceptibly, even now.

  He turned it again in his hands, for what must have been the hundredth time, his fingertips mapping the same alien grooves. The lines were thinner than spider silk and deeper than they had any right to be; etched into the orb’s surface like scars burned into glass.

  The memory of the theft replayed in fragments. Not as a coherent sequence, but as bursts of color and sound and pressure. The museum’s low-lit hall, the sterile hush of exhibits in slumber, the glass case; how it hadn’t even shattered when he’d touched it. How the orb had pulsed once, just once, like a heart being startled awake.

  He hadn’t meant to take it. Not really. But the moment his skin touched it, the rest of the world had blurred. His thoughts, his body, the security systems; all muffled behind a single, deafening imperative: hold it.

  Now, sitting in the silence of Cas’ apartment, surrounded by the sallow glow of computer monitors and the stifling scent of old books and burnt coffee, Sam didn’t feel regret. He felt chosen.

  He began with logic. Tap, shake, press. Searching for seams, hidden clasps, or magnetic locks. The orb refused him; soundless, seamless, immutable. He tried heat. Cold. Running it under water, holding it near a speaker, even whispering to it in the dark. The silence mocked him.

  Then tools. Pliers, screwdrivers, jeweler’s loops. A gentle tap with a steel pick; no dent. No scratch. He tried to pry at the deepest grooves, but the tool slipped every time. It was as if the orb rejected interference. As though it was aware of intrusion and simply refused.

  “Come on, you smug bastard,” Sam muttered, running a thumb along the largest of the glyphs. “You’re not a damm paperweight.”

  He tried to map it digitally. Angles, contours, depth measurements. He spent hours photographing every inch, uploading the images into modeling software, isolating the lines and tracking their curvature. He cross-referenced religious symbology, alchemical runes, dead languages.

  Nothing matched.

  No side was symmetrical. No pattern repeated. Yet the carvings flowed like branches from a single root; unfurling in spirals and crescents, threading together like veins beneath a wooden skin. Each time he thought he’d found a starting point, the geometry would slide away from comprehension.

  He didn’t eat. Not really. Not deliberately. Coffee replaced meals. Water was something he remembered only after nausea reminded him he was flesh. His phone buzzed occasionally; Cas asking where he was, a missed call from a number he didn’t recognize, a bill reminder; but he barely saw them. Time distorted. Hours vanished like vapor. The blinds stayed closed. The overhead light died sometime on the second night, but he didn’t replace it. Shadows were easier to think in.

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  The dreams began then.

  They came without transition; one moment he was hunched over his monitor, the next he was walking through a forest of monoliths that breathed. Beneath a sky of molten pewter, snow fell in reverse. The air howled with no sound. Always, he saw it; a shadow on the horizon, lumbering forward with the weight of extinction. Something vast, gnarled, and wrong. Its silhouette swayed between man and monster and something older than either. The dreams left splinters. He’d wake sweating, coughing, hands clenched tight around the orb as though prying it from a burning world.

  One morning; or maybe night; he blinked and realized the orb had moved. Not much. Barely a breath. But its central glyph, the one shaped like a root splitting into teeth, was now facing him directly. He hadn’t placed it like that.

  He didn’t panic. He couldn’t. Whatever instinct might have demanded flight had long since been muffled. Instead, he felt; expectant.

  Later that day; or night; while manipulating the digital model, Sam saw it: a pattern. A rhythm in the chaos. He aligned three of the largest glyphs: a vertical slash, a spiral, and an angular claw-shape. He turned the orb in his hands. Twist. Flip. Rotate. Again. Twist. Flip. Rotate.

  The carvings began to cohere.

  It was like watching a cipher unspool itself. Symbols flowed into one another. Interlocking. Folding. Breathing. On one side, a creature emerged; jaws agape, fangs curved like scythes, its body striped with impossible geometry. A predator etched in divine fury.

  On the opposite face, a figure cloaked in wings, radiant but faceless. Its arms outstretched in an ambiguous gesture; welcome or judgment, impossible to tell.

  The orb pulsed. Once.

  Sam’s breath caught.

  For the first time, it didn’t feel like an object.

  It felt like a door.

  And he had just; unlocked it.

  Sam didn’t move for a long time.

  The symbols had aligned, perfectly. The orb lay in his hands like a locked heart finally offering its beat. A faint warmth radiated from it; subtle, pulsing in time with something deep inside his chest. Not metaphorically. Literally. His heart was syncing to it.

  He ran his thumb over the newly revealed creature; its fanged mouth yawning in a silent roar; and felt a shift. A click.

  Not audible. Not physical. A click in the air, like pressure collapsing.

  Then the orb breathed.

  The surface rippled like ink dropped into water. The carvings, once static and deep, began to rise and fall, reforming, sliding over one another with impossible grace. Sam’s eyes widened. He held it tighter out of instinct, but it moved in his grip, molding itself, almost liquid but with the weight of stone.

  A line opened down the center; an impossibly thin seam that widened not by breaking, but by unfolding. From the crack, a soft blue light bled out. Cold. Ancient. Alive.

  Sam’s breath hitched. His hands trembled, but he didn’t let go.

  The orb peeled itself open, petal by petal, as if blooming. Within, something floated; no, hovered. A fragment of crystal? A seed? It pulsed like a beacon, delicate and terrible, as though it contained a star suffocating in slow motion.

  He reached for it.

  The moment his finger brushed the thing inside, the room shattered.

  Light erupted; not bright, but deep, a light that was inside things, pouring from walls and furniture and bone. His senses inverted. He couldn’t tell if he was falling or rising. There was no floor. No desk. No breath.

  Then pain. A sudden, perfect line of fire across his palm. He looked down.

  A cut. Thin, precise. Blood welled up; and when it did, the orb responded.

  It drank.

  The petals folded inward like a living trap, snatching the drop before it hit the floor. The carvings flared red, then black, then vanished entirely. The orb began to spin slowly in the air, untouched by gravity.

  A sound cracked across the apartment; a tone that wasn’t quite sound, more like pressure against the skull. A scream buried in iron.

  The walls bent inward. The ceiling rippled. His vision narrowed, darkened, tunneled; and at the center was the orb, blooming again, petals wider, impossibly wide now, revealing not a core; but a gate.

  And beyond that gate: an Ancient tree.

  A vast forest of trees stretched beneath a storm-choked sky. Lightning forked in complete silence. Towering monoliths stood crooked in the distance like forgotten gods. Something vast moved beneath the ice. Watching. Waiting.

  The roots came.

  Then the world grabbed him.

  They erupted from the earth like serpents; thick, gnarled, pulsing with green veins of light. They coiled around his legs before he could run, yanked him down to his knees, then deeper still. The ground split open like a wound, swallowing him whole. Soil filled his mouth, his lungs, his eyes; yet he didn’t choke. Didn’t die. The forest had claimed him.

  Somewhere in the darkness below, he heard a whisper not meant for human ears. A low, feminine voice, ancient and cruelly amused:

  “Grow.”

  Sam screamed; but the sound warped, drawn backward through a tunnel of wind and light and memory. The orb expanded, swallowed him, and collapsed into a pinprick in the air.

  The apartment was empty.

  Only the coffee pot hissed, steaming on a forgotten burner.