Chapter 8 The Cycle Begins

We left the chamber with the journal and more questions than answers.

Above ground, the sky had changed.

The sun was dimmer-blurred behind a high, silvery haze. The birds were gone. The trees, still and tense, stood like silent sentinels. The air pressed heavier against our skin. Everything in the valley felt... aware of us now.

We made camp again near the lake, but no one slept.

That night, Samir pored over the journal, flipping between symbols and sketched diagrams. "Your grandfather understood the gate wasn't a door," he said. "It's a cycle. A convergence. This place exists in our world, but also-somehow-outside it."

"What does that mean for us?" Will asked.

"It means," Samir said, tapping a passage with a shaking finger, "this valley could be a bridge. A weak point between dimensions. And every seventy years, that bridge thins."

Derek frowned. "So whatever's on the other side... could come through?"

"Worse," I said. "What if something already has?"

That silenced us.

Just before dawn, I took the journal and walked down to the lake. The water was calm again. But in its reflection, I didn't see just myself. I saw movement-like shapes beneath the surface. Watching.

The journal grew warm in my hands.

I flipped to the last few pages. My grandfather's writing grew jagged, rushed.

"I tried to seal it, but I failed. The valley resists. The key is in the chamber below the second gate. If they open it again-if they wake-it will not be like before. The Others remember now. They are listening."

Below the entry was a sketch-an arch of black stone with a single phrase etched above it:

"To close the gate, blood must return."

My blood.

I turned back to camp just as a low vibration shook the ground beneath my feet.

"Earthquake?" Will called.

But it wasn't. The sound didn't come from beneath.

It came from the sky.

We looked up-and saw it: a tear in the clouds, thin and bright, spiraling open like a pupil. From its center, a shaft of white-blue light reached down toward the valley.

The gate.

"Cycle's already started," Derek said, grabbing his pack. "We need to find that second chamber. Now."

"But we don't know where it is," I said.

"Yes," Samir said. "We do."

He flipped the journal open to the last map. A trail, marked faintly in red, leading east of the lake-beyond the old growth trees, into a section none of us had dared explore yet.

A place labeled only with one word:

"Sanctum."