The name wouldn't leave his mouth.
Even as he sat in bed that morning, coffee cooling in his hand, Sarah curled beside him under a heavy blanket, Ace could still feel it carved behind his teeth. Anakeion.
A name that didn't belong to him, yet clung like old scars.
Sarah was scrolling through grainy scans of township records on her laptop. Her fingers paused suddenly.
"Ace."
He looked over.
She turned the screen toward him. The document was almost unreadable. But in the center, below signatures and ink stamps, was a line:
"Land ceded to the Order of the Black Hollow, 1843. Witnessed by Priest-Voice Anakeion. Blood seal confirmed."
Ace blinked. "Anakeion wasn't a title."
Sarah nodded slowly.
"It was a person."
They dove deeper.
The Order of the Black Hollow had operated under a dozen different names over two centuries—none recognized by any official record, all buried under property transactions and sealed court files. But the few pieces Sarah could find painted a clearer picture.
"They believed the earth had a voice," she said. "Not nature. Not spirits. Just... the land itself. Alive. Dormant. Starving."
Ace exhaled sharply. "And they fed it."
Sarah nodded.
"Not people. Not at first. They fed it secrets. Truths no one else knew. Whispered them into the soil."
"And then?" Ace asked.
"They say the land began to whisper back."
Ace spent that evening in the attic.
He didn't remember climbing the steps.
He didn't remember opening the old chest tucked beneath the eaves.
But he remembered what he found inside:
A journal. Bound in skin.
Its pages were filled with the same spiral symbol as the one carved into the basement wall.
Only this one bled through the page, like ink that never dried.
He turned to the first entry.
The earth has a memory. It dreams. It knows the shape of every footfall. The weight of every lie. It remembers me before I existed.
Ace slammed the book shut.
The spiral on the cover was warm.
Sarah found him an hour later, still sitting on the attic floor.
"I need to tell you something," she said.
He didn't speak, but his eyes met hers.
"I think you're descended from them," she whispered.
He swallowed. "From the Order?"
She nodded.
"From him," she said. "The first Anakeion."
Ace looked down at his hands.
They were shaking.
"So what does that make me?"
Sarah stepped forward and touched his arm.
"It makes you the one who gets to choose."
But that night, Ace dreamed.
Not of the house.
Not of Sarah.
Of roots.
Thick, black, writhing. Coiling around the stone door in the basement, rising up toward him like fingers made of soil and bone.
And when he looked down at his own chest in the dream, he saw the spiral carved into his skin.
It glowed.
It opened.
And he heard the earth whisper—not in threat, but in welcome:
"Come home, Anakeion."
He woke gasping.
And Sarah was already up, standing by the window, watching something through the curtain.
"What is it?" he asked, voice raw.
Her voice was barely audible.
"The field."
Ace got up, joined her.
His breath caught.
The crops had withered overnight. Every stalk.
Blackened. Curled.
But only in a perfect spiral.