1072: Story 1072: The Eye Beneath the Earth 1072: Story 1072: The Eye Beneath the Earth In the rust-bitten mining town of Vandle’s Hollow, silence reigned—not the peaceful kind, but the strained hush of breath held too long.
Beneath the cracked soil, something watched.
The survivors of the Eldritch Bloom—a group of weary scavengers led by former geologist Dr.
Lena Bane—had come to Vandle’s Hollow chasing whispers: tales of a living cavern, a place where the earth pulsated like flesh and time slowed to a crawl.
They were hunting shelter.
What they found was the Eye Beneath the Earth.
It started at the edge of the quarry.
No wind.
No birdsong.
Just a constant low hum, like a monstrous heartbeat echoing from the mine’s belly.
Bane, once a woman of science, could feel the tremors not in the ground, but in her skull—a pressure behind the eyes, a pull in the teeth.
“It’s not seismic,” she whispered, examining the strata.
“It’s… conscious.”
They descended.
Rust-streaked ladders led them into a subterranean maw of tunnels—once carved by men, now reformed by something older.
The walls pulsed faintly, veins of quartz rearranging themselves into sigils, into staring orbs.
Some of the team—Fletch, Griggs, and poor Anna—started speaking backwards.
They claimed it was “how the dirt speaks.”
Anna vanished down a shaft.
When they found her, she was smiling ear to ear with soil packed into her eyes.
At the lowest level, they found it.
A pit.
Circular.
Perfect.
Too perfect.
A formation that should not exist in nature—a massive eye-shaped sinkhole lined with obsidian teeth.
And in the center: a pupil, a stone disc carved with writhing, shifting runes.
It opened as they watched, blinking upward.
The air tasted like blood and memory.
The eye spoke.
But not in words.
In visions.
Bane saw her childhood—saw it devoured by worms with human faces.
She saw the future: a world swallowed in rot, skies blackened not by ash, but roots.
She saw herself kneeling, arms open, ready to be taken.
But she did not kneel.
Instead, she threw the last flare into the pit.
The eye recoiled.
The ground screamed.
The collapse was deafening.
Tunnels crumbled.
Light vanished.
She doesn’t remember how she escaped—only that when she awoke, she was aboveground, caked in dirt, alone.
Vandle’s Hollow was gone.
Not destroyed—consumed.
Replaced by a smooth field of black stone shaped like an iris.
And sometimes, when the fog is low and the wind stands still, Bane swears she sees something blink beneath her boots.
She left the others behind.
Buried under miles of watching earth.
But their voices call to her in her dreams:
“Look long enough, Lena…”
“…and it will see through you.”