Echoes of Ruin
That’s when I felt it.
Something collided with me, not physical but like a memory trying to take root in bone. My breath hitched. An entity wove through my brain, winding beneath skin and down to marrow, cold and slick and wrong. It whispered through the back of my mind, tugging at old pain like it could unravel me from the inside out. I stumbled, hands clamped to my chest, as my vision darkened at the edges.
And then it laughed.
The sound wasn’t human. It was cracked, reverb, a hundred whispers at the small of my back. The thing that had wormed out of the splintered ritual wasn’t whole. It wasn’t anything alive. Spectral, Nora had said. Minor. Contained.