They said the restraints were for our safety, but whose safety
did they mean? We escaped to the holding room,
but not the experiment. Every breath feels borrowed,
every shadow watches back, and in this room, the walls remember
more than we do. This is episode 3 of the Psychic
Odyssey, the Trappist Enigma, also known as The Awakening.
Episode 3, The Archive. The heavy rumbling of the
massive Obsidian blocks stilled, but the memory of its chaos
clung to the air like smoke after fire.
I stumbled back, my body betraying me with a shudder that
rippled from gut to fingertips. It could have crushed us,
smeared us into nothing but dark stains on this sterile floor.
The thought carved NASA trail down my throat, thickening it to
silence. Around me, Emil, John, Kathy and
Sarah scrambled to get upright, their movements frantic,
twitchy, half formed, as if the strings that animated them had
frayed. Their faces twitched mid motion,
caught between panic and something worse.
Their mouths opened wide, yet no sound emerged, leaving only the
wet animals stink of our terror, thickening the room with sweat,
bleach and the sharp metallic Tang of ear woven into a
suffocating fog. I dare to glance back at the
ominous block. It hung there, humming.
The Obsidian block didn't just hum.
It breathed, then pulsed. Faint sparks licked along its
surface, shifting, flickering like the heartbeat of something
far too large to understand. Strange symbols, fractured
hieroglyphs etched by Madman's hand, writhed along its edges,
flashing in a sickly Gray light. The symbols raced along the
surface, wrong angles, broken patterns that twitched at the
edge of sight. They were just symbols.
They were moving inside my mind, carving groups I couldn't erase.
A hard, thunderous pulse, a heartbeat stuttering like a
hangman's last gasp. The block pulsed a slow, sick
rhythm. My teeth rattled like a glass on
a bone cathedral. With each drop, the cymbals
burrowed deeper, etching themselves into my optic nerves.
They weren't just writing, they were rewriting.
Then it spoke, Not in sound and scars.
Look, it hissed the voice, like a scalpel sliding between
vertebrae. My vision blurred at the edges,
the symbols writhing like insects under glass.
They weren't just etched into the stone, they were etching
themselves into me. Something inside me stirred.
This unusual feeling coursed through me, cold and hot at the
same time. As I touched the Obsidian block,
fragmented visions bombarded my mind, not just of the hostile
hospital bed with its bulky restraints, but of the past, my
past, I with all of its failures.
Oh, I wish I heard the mellow voice of my father saying I
how's daddy's baby girl? With a dashing smile as he
brushed his index finger to my nose, I.
But what did I hear? The echo of my mom's shrill
screaming at me. Keep it to yourself.
The block showed me the funeral again, but wrong.
Mother's corpse sat up in the coffin, her Milky eyes fixed on
me. You knew, she mouthed.
You let me. The block hard, prickly and
warming. It isn't just warm, it's
feverish, pulsing like a living Oregon.
Another blood hurting the pulse. I'm tired.
It didn't help. They burned behind my eyelids.
The symbols reminded me of my old archaeology class, where
they'd whispered if languages not meant for human tongues.
Magician glyphs. Yes, these were wrong,
unnatural. Its angles fought against the
eye they spun dissolved reef languages not meant for human
eyes, glyphs that didn't just describe reality, but rewrote
it. This was that you should ever
cut down my spine, not cold, deeper, like someone dropped ice
directly into my don't stir, a voice whispered in my head.
It sees you back. I couldn't look away, couldn't
even blink. It was alive, watching, judging.
What was his purpose? I weighed blood for my nose to
remember it, starting, a wrench of dread tightening my gut, cold
and serrated, slicing away rational thought.
My legs trembled, quaking like reeds in a storm.
The logical part of me, the tiny surviving ember, tried to
reason. Maybe the block held answers.
Maybe it was a key, a map. Salvation.
Maybe it was a loaded gun dressed against our skulls.
Look. The block hissed at me.
Did the others hear it? Am I losing my mind?
I glimpsed my arms and the hands that touched the block.
My arms still bore the black bruises from the injections,
tiny blooms of Violet and sickly yellow across my skin.
My wrist ached from the two tight restraints, evidence that
whoever had dragged us here didn't care if we lived through
this, only that we served some purpose.
Was there a way to speak to it, to open it?
Or were we already trapped inside whatever ritual had
begun? The way insects thrash inside a
spider's web, doomed long before the fangs descend.
Cathy, Emil, John and Sarah stood slack jawed now, eyes
vague and trembling. Their expressions had flat and
drained of self yet, though something invisible slipped into
their minds, though the rest of us weren't watching.
Were they hypnotized? Why wasn't I?
Sudden monstrous blare tore through the space.
A deafening bass note, a shattered thought.
I clap my hands to hear my ears. Pain lanced through my skull,
the brushure rupturing the thin membrane of balance inside my
head. The world swam sideways.
There became thick, gelatinous, sticky in my throat.
Then a blast of searing white light.
It ripped from the block in a wave, flattening the air,
buffering, buffeting through my hair, across my face, a low gun.
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