The Glyph Key
The glyphs are the key. But to what?
There was a rule. Don’t touch the glyphs.
Not because they were dangerous—though they were—but because no one fully understood what they did. The carvings had been found in caves, in ruins, in places no human hands had made. Some glowed when approached, some whispered in languages no linguist could translate. Some hungered.
But Sasha? Sasha was a rule-breaker.
She ran her fingers over the stone, tracing the deep, twisting lines. They felt too smooth, too deliberate, as if something had burned the rock into this shape rather than carved it.
A thrill of wrongness ran up her spine. The air shifted, the way it did when a storm was coming.
And then—
Nothing.
She exhaled. Maybe this was just a myth after all. Maybe the glyphs were just another ancient mystery, locked away by time and fear. She pulled out her camera, angling for a shot—
Then the world lurched.
The walls of the cave melted around her. No, not melted—peeled away, layer by layer, as though reality itself were being stripped down to some unseen core. Sasha stumbled, heart hammering.
Her flashlight flickered, and for a second, she saw them—shapes, watching from the dark, just outside the reach of her beam.
She sucked in a breath.
The air smelled different.
It wasn’t damp anymore. The scent of earth and stone was gone, replaced by something rich and metallic.
Blood.
She turned, and the cave she had been standing in was no longer a cave.
The stone had changed—smoother, polished, marked with glyphs that still moved, still wrote themselves, as if the very rock was alive and remembering. The air was thin but pulsing with some unfamiliar energy, like a second heartbeat against her own.
Sasha turned slowly.
The figures in the dark stepped forward.
They were tall. Not human. Not entirely.
The same glyphs that covered the walls shimmered faintly along their skin, tracing their cheekbones, their forearms, shifting subtly in the dim light.
One of them smiled.
“You called,” it said, its voice like silk over steel.
Sasha’s stomach dropped.
She had thought the glyphs were just a record, a warning, maybe a message from a lost civilization.
She had been wrong.
They were a door.
And she had just unlocked it.