Character POV: Inspector Damian Drexler
Location: Vienna, Austria
Inspector Damian Drexler didn't believe in curses.
He believed in rot, time, and psychology. Most cases unraveled under pressure—people broke, people confessed. No shadows. No whispers. No myths.
But this… this body on the table…
It didn't obey any natural law.
Drexler stood over the corpse under cold white light in the city morgue. Female. Approximate age: late 20s. No ID. No missing person match. But what unnerved him was not the absence of records.
It was the markings.
Her entire chest and arms were covered in spirals. Not tattoos. Not scars. Burns. Deep, perfect spirals—as if something had etched her with searing light, from the inside out. Her mouth was frozen in an open scream. Eyes missing, but no signs of trauma.
Dr. Weiss, the coroner, approached silently.
"She bled from her pores," Weiss said, trembling. "There's no record of how that's even possible in this amount. Every vein… ruptured. Simultaneously."
Drexler said nothing. He'd seen war crimes, cult murders, human disfigurements in his earlier years with Interpol. But this was different. This body had not died in violence.
It had died in… revelation.
"Something else," said Dr. Weiss, gesturing. "We found this in her throat."
He held out a small object in a sealed bag. It looked like bone, carved with symbols. Ancient. Impossible. The same spiral Elara had seen. The same as in Kenji's dreams.
Drexler took it.
The moment he touched the bag, a voice echoed in the back of his mind:
> "You've seen it before."
His vision darkened. The room twisted. And for one terrifying second, he wasn't in the morgue.
He was in a cathedral of stone and ash, surrounded by faceless statues weeping blood. A doorway loomed before him. On its surface, his own name was written… backward.
He dropped the bag.
The vision ended.
He looked up at Dr. Weiss, who hadn't moved. Who hadn't noticed anything wrong.
Drexler stepped out into the cold Vienna air. His phone buzzed.
A blocked number. He answered.
Static.
Then a voice, female, frantic.
"Elara Voss is still alive. But if she enters the city beneath—we're all dead."
Then silence.