1080: Story 1080: The Crimson Spiral 1080: Story 1080: The Crimson Spiral The sky over Korr’s Hollow bled crimson as if a wound had torn open the heavens themselves.
Survivors whispered of a spiral—a twisting storm of red lightning and smoke—hovering above the collapsed cathedral at the town’s heart.
It pulsed in rhythm with no heartbeat, sang in tones no ears could decipher.
Priestess Vanya Elrow, once a devout guardian of the old catacombs beneath Korr’s Hollow, now stood at the epicenter of this eldritch cyclone.
Her eyes had long since turned red, as if the Spiral had replaced her soul with raw entropy.
She spoke in spirals, her sermons looping like the pattern branded into the earth beneath her feet.
Those who entered the Spiral’s influence did not return the same—if they returned at all.
Their bodies remained intact, but their minds were twisted, frayed, and coiled into impossibility.
Some spoke of seeing time unravel.
Others screamed about “the red god” whispering beneath the stone, urging them toward ascension through madness.
Roake, the Hollow’s last sane watchman, led a group of survivors through the red haze, desperate to break the Spiral’s hold.
They wore blindfolds smeared with ash, followed string trails like children through a haunted maze, and murmured names of the dead to keep the present anchored.
They reached the cathedral ruins, where Vanya stood with arms raised and mouth stretched too wide.
The Spiral churned above her like a vortex of bleeding galaxies.
The earth cracked in concentric rings around her, and beneath the soil, something old was waking.
“This is not possession,” she said to them.
“This is evolution.”
Roake shot her, but her blood spiraled upward instead of falling.
It didn’t matter.
She had become a conduit, not a woman.
The Spiral was alive—not a force of nature but a cosmic parasite.
A godling born in collapse.
It nested in sacred geometry, fed on linear thought, and grew through recursive worship.
To end it, Roake realized, they had to destroy the pattern.
His team spread throughout the cathedral grounds with black powder and salt from the elder mines.
Every sigil, every symbol, every line drawn in worship of the Spiral had to be unmade.
But the Spiral fought back.
Reality fractured.
Time looped in on itself.
The dead returned to scream into the mouths of the living.
One team member was folded into a Möbius strip of flesh.
Another turned inside out emotionally, sobbing joy and laughing grief.
In the final moments, Roake reached the Spiral’s core—a massive glyph scorched into the cathedral’s foundation.
He knelt, lit the salt-soaked fuse, and whispered a final word: “Forget.”
The explosion was not loud.
It was silent and absolute.
The Spiral collapsed in on itself like a thought withdrawn, leaving behind only a crimson smear on reality.
Roake was never found.
But the survivors speak of his voice echoing through their dreams, warning:
“Beware the perfect pattern.
It remembers you.”