Cold.
That was the first thing Ren felt.
Not pain. Not movement.
Just cold—sharp and wet, threaded into the fibers of his coat and soaking into the base of his spine. His eyes opened slowly, the light blinding and blue.
Sky.
Not ceiling. Not stone. Not water.
Sky.
He bolted upright with a gasp.
The ground beneath him was black—volcanic stone softened by a layer of moss. Wind tore across a barren ridge ahead, and the sound of distant waves echoed from below. Sharp cliffs. Sea.
And across from him, half-curled in a patch of tangled grass—
Layla.
Her skin was pale. Her jacket half-open. Her left hand still clutched the spiral vellum like a lifeline. Ren scrambled toward her.
“Layla—Layla!”
She stirred. A sharp inhale. Then she blinked up at him, confused, groggy, and already shivering.
“Where—?”
“I don’t know.” He looked around. “We’re out. We’re—”
He stopped.
The terrain was completely unfamiliar. Black sand. Cliffs. No trees. Only sharp grey sky and wind.
“I think we’re in Iceland,” he said.
Layla sat up fast. “What?”
“Look at the moss. The stone. The cold.” He pointed toward a distant shape near the ridge—a white and orange dome, modern, like a temporary shelter or research camp.
She looked down at herself. Her boots were wet. Her fingernails were caked with dust—the same dust from the spiral chamber.
“How did we get here?” she whispered.
Ren just shook his head. “We were underground. We never turned around. We never surfaced.”
She held up the vellum spiral. It was dry. Clean.
Pristine.
She whispered, “It protected us.”
Ren stared down at the pattern in her hands.
“No,” he said. “It released us.”
A loud gust of wind tore across the shoreline, carrying the briny scent of saltwater and snow.
And below them—far down the cliffside—they saw the dark curve of the Atlantic, pulsing and black.
They were back on the surface.
But nothing about this was over.
The wind didn’t stop. It just shifted, curling around the cliffs like a warning.
Ren and Layla made their way up the slope toward the orange-and-white dome, shoes slipping on wet moss and jagged basalt. Neither spoke. Every question they could ask had too many possible answers—and none of them made sense.
The structure ahead turned out to be a temporary observation post, perched near a coastal ridge above the Arctic current. It looked empty, except for a narrow radio antenna and solar rig half-buried in snow.
Then the door opened.
A man in a high-visibility jacket stared at them, wide-eyed.
“What the hell—?” he muttered in Icelandic, then switched fast to English. “Are you okay? Where did you come from?”
Layla was too cold to answer. She just held up the vellum in her shaking hand.
The man looked more confused.
Ren coughed. “We don’t know.”
An hour later, they were in a makeshift emergency shelter—wrapped in foil blankets, sipping hot water and glucose from metal flasks.
The local medic, a stocky woman with windburned cheeks, checked their vitals. Pulse normal. Reflexes sharp. Dehydrated, but not dangerously. Skin showed signs of cold exposure, but no frostbite.
“You should be worse,” she said, frowning. “You’ve been missing five days.”
Ren stopped mid-sip. “No. That’s not possible.”
“It’s Thursday,” she said.
“We were underground yesterday.”
“No,” she replied. “You were reported missing last week. French civil rescue posted your descriptions. You were last seen in Marseille.”
Layla stared at the ground.
“Iceland is three thousand kilometers from Marseille,” the medic added.
Ren opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Five days. No food. No sleep. No memory of ascent.
No jet lag. No soreness.
Just… placement.
Like they’d been moved.
The medic watched them carefully. “Who brought you here?”
Ren and Layla looked at each other.
And neither of them answered.
They gave their statements in a cramped prefab room just off the research site—two chairs, one table, and a single overhead bulb humming louder than necessary.
Layla explained first. She gave the truth.
She told them they’d entered an unmapped system beneath Marseille—subterranean, possibly tectonic, certainly unnatural. That they’d found a series of spiral-aligned shafts. That they hadn’t exited, but simply... appeared.
The woman across from them—a liaison from the Icelandic coast guard—blinked slowly. Then wrote something down in her notebook.
Ren spoke next. He kept it simple. Direct. He told them about the storm in Japan. The tunnel that took him under. The journey across space that didn’t make sense.
He didn’t say “folded geography.”
He didn’t say “living spiral.”
Not yet.
After they finished, the liaison stood and said calmly, “I’m going to ask a doctor to speak with you next. Just in case.”
Then she took their gear.
The laptop. The vellum spiral. Even Layla’s recorder.
“No, wait—” Layla tried to protest, standing half out of her chair. “Those are mine. That data—”
“We’ll give everything back,” the woman interrupted. “We just want to make sure you’re not in danger. Or… unstable.”
She didn’t say “delusional.” She didn’t have to.
Ren sat still, watching the door close behind her.
“They think we’re lying.”
“No,” Layla said. “They think we’re confused.”
Later that evening, they were allowed to speak with Dr. Emil Vagnsson, a local marine geologist stationed at the nearby hydrology lab. Middle-aged, thoughtful, perpetually skeptical.
Layla asked for ten minutes. He gave them five.
She showed him the vellum spiral before it was taken. She described the patterns—how they mapped against riverbeds and trenches. She even sketched one of the activation sequences they’d seen on the underground machines.
Dr. Vagnsson gave her the kind of smile reserved for harmlessly obsessed people.
“That’s interesting,” he said. “But these are symbolic geometries. Not predictive models. I’ve seen similar spirals in Celtic iconography.”
“They’re not symbols,” she said. “They’re topological.”
He shook his head. “If something like this existed beneath the Earth’s crust, we’d have found it by now.”
Ren spoke.
“You did.”
The doctor turned to him.
“You just didn’t know what you found.”
At dawn, alarms blared from the docks.
Ren and Layla heard them through the thin walls of the temporary housing—low, brassy sirens rolling over the icy cliffs like thunder dragging its feet.
Within minutes, people were rushing past the windows, voices raised in Icelandic, half-dressed in thermal jackets and snow boots. Layla threw on her coat and pushed open the door.
She didn’t need to ask where they were going.
You could see it from the ridge.
The harbor was gone.
A half-mile stretch of ocean that had been calm the day before now lay dry, like someone had pulled the plug on the sea. Cargo ships listed on their sides in thick gray sludge. Fishing vessels tilted against the docks, hulls cracking from their own weight.
Ren stared, unblinking. “How…”
They joined the group at the edge of the overlook.
Below, where the water should’ve been, was something no one had words for.
A shape.
Carved into the seabed. Wide, exact, with five curling arms and a central node—each arm deepened with precise grading, like the base of a vast whirlpool etched into stone.
A spiral.
Not a metaphor. Not a symbol.
Real.
“Someone had to have dredged that,” one of the scientists muttered.
Ren shook his head. “No one dredged that.”
“Then how did it get there?”
Layla whispered, “It didn’t ‘get’ there.”
He turned to her.
“It was always there. The water was hiding it.”
Later, Ren found footage from a surveillance buoy—the camera mounted to the bay’s outermost mooring. It had recorded the entire event.
There had been no quake. No warning. At exactly 03:12 a.m., the water began to swirl—slowly, methodically. Not down a hole, but across a curve.
The entire harbor spiraled downward, water folding into itself, until nothing remained.
Not even steam.
Just silence.
Just mud.
Just the spiral underneath.
It was near midnight when the knock came.
Soft. Intentional. One sharp rap, then silence.
Ren opened the door.
The man standing there was lean, wrapped in a windbreaker too thin for the temperature. Salt-gray beard, dark eyes. Someone who watched more than he spoke. He looked over his shoulder, then stepped inside without asking.
Layla sat up from the cot. “Who—?”
“Dr. Júlíus Þorsteinsson,” he said quickly. “I work with Emil. But I’m not here officially.”
He pulled a folded photograph from his coat and handed it to Ren.
“This was taken in 2017. Drone survey of the same harbor that emptied today.”
Ren unfolded it slowly.
There, beneath the water—blurred by sediment and distortion—was a faint but unmistakable spiral.
Same size. Same position.
Just… dormant.
“I ran pattern analysis on it back then,” Júlíus said. “Assumed it was a volcanic erosion. But when I saw the footage today—when I saw it active…”
He stopped.
Layla stood. “You knew.”
“I suspected. But I didn’t believe.” His voice dropped. “Until now.”
Ren studied the photo. “Why come to us?”
Júlíus hesitated. Then pulled a second paper from his coat—a copied fragment of Layla’s vellum map, the one they'd shown Emil.
“I know this symbol,” he said, pointing to a narrow ring outside the spiral. “This isn’t just geometry. It’s a growth cycle.”
Layla stepped closer. “You mean it’s alive.”
“I mean it’s blooming.”
They stared at him.
Júlíus looked between the two of them. When he spoke again, it was barely a whisper.
“Did you go inside?”
Layla didn’t answer.
Not yes. Not no.
She just held his gaze.
And didn’t blink.