If You See His Hammer

 

Kael was alive, but his face bore the marks of questions asked with brutality. He was weakened.

"There, the old stone cathedral rises majestically under the stars. The statues at the gates are silent. That doesn't seem right to me. Where is the guardian I know? I've forgotten the password I need to say each time to reach the true destination," Kael said.

Morgana had a bad feeling.

"You're delirious. Try to calm down."

"I don't even need to announce my presence. The problem is I've forgotten the protocol. I remember that the priest in the white robe has the duty to greet me. Spirits are following me and telling me there's no life after death, and I hate that."

Morgana felt overwhelmed and had no idea if it was worth saying anything more to him.

Back at the Refuge, Essie gave him a quick hug, but her gaze lingered on the woman who had restored her hope.

"You kept your word," Essie said. "As promised, the card is yours."

She handed it to her. An old data card, wrapped in plastic. On the edge, an engraved numeric code: CH-001. A key, perhaps the only one, to the White Room.

"I want something more," Morgana said.

"Tell me."

"When we met, you mentioned the Retrievers. And that so-called Fixer. Do you know where I can find him?"

Essie paused for a moment. Then she smiled.

"I like how you think. Constructively. I have someone here who claims to have met him. Or maybe he just got too close to him."

He's isolated, in a space we call the Pavilion.

"What is the Pavilion? I haven't heard of it until now, which means it's a secret you've guarded well."

"Memory is a fragile and treacherous fabric, a labyrinth of the mind where past and present merge into shadows and faded lights. Here, amid the fleeting slips of consciousness, hides a madness of recollection. A game of distorted fantasies, foreign echoes, and seemingly meaningless fragments. The Pavilion is a collection, an odyssey into the abysses of minds that no longer know how to distinguish between truth and illusion. Memories become toxic spells, and reason, a shaky relic. Prepare to enter the realm of 'Limitless Rift,' where false light blinds you, and living darkness ensnares you in its webs. A journey that leaves marks. We simply call it the Pavilion. Many seek it under other forms and names. Mnemonautica, Insania Machina, or the Beautiful Terror of Creation."

"I have a destiny. Is it self-confidence or arrogance? I've chosen the courage to stand by my choices. If you show me a clear destination, I'll strive to reach it and eliminate any obstacles in its way. I believe in an inner compass and a guardian angel. I accept these guides and give them the attention they deserve. It's not a motto. It's just my personal opinion," Morgana said. "So, I'm ready."

They descended two levels below the platform. The corridors grew narrower, the air heavier. The Pavilion's door was made of welded iron plates. Old impact marks were visible from inside to outside.

On the floor, a puddle of oil, and in the air, a smell of damp insulation and rust, mixed with traces of burned silicon from electrical improvisations. Officially, no one lived there.

When they entered, the room was bathed in a diffuse, orange light.

"This is Philip," Essie said. "Be careful how you ask him. He's sensitive about that sort of thing. I assume he was once subjected to certain interrogations."

"Help me," the man said.

"I can't save you for sure, but I can try."

"We're all variables in an equation called survival. Except you. I know you, you know. You're the one who killed seven people in the KYC Sector."

"They weren't innocent," she replied. "They were exterminators."

Morgana stood still for a few moments, her eyes fixed on the void where, on a camp bed, sat this thin man with hair stuck to his forehead. His eyes were half-closed, the expression of an exhausted person.

"Can't you sleep?" Morgana asked him.

"I fully woke up seven years ago," he replied. "What followed was just insomnia. The owl left. But its feather still watches me."

"Tell me about the Fixer."

"He's not human. He's not a machine either. He's in between. He comes at night. He hammers on walls, on pipes. Says he's fixing things. The first time, he hammered on the drainpipe next to my bed until I forgot my own name."

"What's his real name?"

"He has many. The latest was the Fixer."

"Can you give me some of his old names?"

"It's been a while. I can try. But it hurts."

"Is the Fixer real or imaginary?"

"He's a ghost, a memory, a shadow, a lie."

"When did he come?"

"When did I start hearing him? I don't know."

"Do you hear him now?"

"No. I couldn't get the words out. It was like I was drowning. I couldn't speak, I couldn't think, and the only thing that seemed real was him, hammering right in front of my door."

"What did you do?"

"I screamed."

"You screamed?"

"I screamed and kept screaming, and he was still there. So I got out of bed and threw myself at the door, and he was still there, hammering and hammering and hammering."

"What happened?"

"I was screaming, and he was hammering. I felt him entering my head, changing the way words sounded. I couldn't remember his name. I couldn't remember my name. He hammered hard, and I screamed, and everything was about to disappear."

The last time I was on a train. Alone in the compartment. He found me. He came in. He said, "I've come to fix your head. I've received reports that you're defective."

I jumped from the train. I hit myself. That's how I woke up here.

"Before you passed out, what did you see when you fell from the train?"

"I saw a morning that wasn't new. A morning reborn from ashes. The trees, tall and black, were actually silent statues. Smoke wandered lazily. It came from a dismantling workshop. The Fixer was standing on the workshop steps, smoking from an Indian pipe.

A car was driving in circles around the workshop. In the car were four speakers. It kept repeating that from now on, every day represents a rebirth. But what exactly would emerge with this rebirth wasn't clear."

"You should have seen something else. Something that at first glance seems unimportant."

"I think I saw a decayed tooth. It caught my attention because it made no sense to see a decayed tooth there in the dust."

Philip looked at her suspiciously. His eyes narrowed.

"This conversation is turning into an interrogation. I don't like it. But I'll tell you this much: The Fixer isn't just a name. Some dream of him. Others hear him. But if you see his hammer, it's already too late."

He turned his back.

"For the first time in seven years, I'm feeling sleepy. Good night."

Morgana pulled a blanket over Philip and slowly left the room.

You've read it. You've unlocked the door. Now you're aware. You're a potential defect.

If one day, you see a silhouette with a hammer, it's already too late. Don't run. You can't escape what fixes defects in reality. It's already too late.

Put the phone down. Blink once if you understand. Blink twice if you've escaped.

C2. When Darkness Unhinges You

 The Liberation of the Cartographer

Cirtha had once been a lively city. Now it was a memory that barely breathed. Buildings with prying eyes hidden around every corner, streets that seemed to twist toward nowhere, and a thick fog that haunted like a raging plague.

Morgana got out of the vehicle.

Those who arrived in Cirtha without permission to enter were doomed.

A slow, orchestrated misery. An experience of "original justice." And the Bone Judge was the executive part of the experiment.

Morgana stepped onto a narrow alley between two rundown blocks. A faint light pulsed on an upper floor, like a heart under resuscitation. With every step, the ground cracked with the sound of fragile bones. Silent black birds watched her from fallen electrical wires.

In the middle of the square, a circle of ashes. A man waited inside the circle.

"Have you come to end the trial?"

"If the trial means suffering, yes."

"The Judge doesn't judge suffering. He weighs the soul you abandoned on the day you chose to live."

"You're not what you seem. You're just an arrowhead. An arrow still seeking its target."

"Fine. The Judge awaits you in the Tribunal. Only one can be released."

"Kael," Morgana replied.

The Tribunal in Cirtha no longer had a roof. The main hall was a deep pit.

In the center of the room, on a wooden throne, sat he.

The Bone Judge wore a robe made from various patches. Over his face was a mask shaped from scraps. Where his mouth should have been, half an unlit cigar was stuck. He held a rusty scale in his hand. In one pan was a tooth, and in the other, a dried leaf.

"Your name," he said in a voice that creaked like a half-tuned violin.

"Morgana."

"Welcome, Morgana," the Judge said. "Have you come to tell me you'll pay your debts? Is that why you're here?"

"No."

"You have the look of a woman who has failed."

"I won't pay."

"That's a poor choice."

"I'm not afraid of death."

"Death?" The Judge laughed. "Death isn't your debt, Morgana. It's your payment."

"I want a jury. I want a trial with a jury."

"I'm sorry, Morgana. There's no time. You have the look of a desperate woman. Are you a desperate woman?"

"No. What are the charges?"

"You'll be judged by the consequences of your actions. Let's see if I grant you access to the city. What are you writing on that napkin?"

"Your sentence. I enjoy reading it, not writing it. You won't open the gates for me," Morgana said. "Instead, I'll close these gates for you."

The Judge raised his hand. The scale tipped. The leaf weighed more than the tooth. The Judge took the tooth and looked at it.

"This tooth is decayed. A reject. Pull a healthy tooth from someone. The scale of justice suffers."

Morgana watched him impassively.

"Guilty. Because you chose winter over memory."

"I chose to punish you," Morgana said, and drew the sign of the broken spiral in the air.

The spiral stopped on the Judge's left shoulder. For a few moments, the Judge trembled. Words caught in his throat. The scale fell. And the throne sank.

Three people rose from the floor. They were pale, blind, their bodies marked by suffering.

"Only one can be released," the man from the circle had said.

"Kael the cartographer, you are released and come with me," Morgana said.

A long howl echoed through the entire city. The ground cracked. Several fissures formed.

Morgana left the Tribunal, and behind her, the city began to burn. The Judge could no longer pronounce sentences. Someone else would take his place.

Morgana nodded, looking toward a distant tower where a blue light pulsed faintly.

Let them come. Now they know the spiral is open. And I'm still alive.

From now on, you'll sometimes feel a cold shiver on your left shoulder, like an invisible spiral. You'll hear a sinister creak, like a rusty scale. The Bone Judge wasn't destroyed, just replaced. Don't seek to find the Refuge.

Just be careful what you write on some napkins that you then throw away.

When Darkness Unhinges You

 C1. Morgana

There were days when the shadow lounged patiently over a crumbling world.

Morgana dwelt in an underground hideaway, disguised as an abandoned apartment in a sector where industry had died along with the people who once populated it.

Officially, Morgana did not exist. She was a void in the narrowing fabric of reality. A presence that fed on light carved from the silence of centuries.

One evening, in an underground canteen where information was bartered for ration coupons like in ancient slave markets, two men entered. They were not simple customers. They wore civilian clothes, but their gestures betrayed training from secret military academies. One showed the bartender an identification photo. Even from a distance, Morgana recognized one of her former faces, which she believed she had buried in the tomb of dead identities.

Morgana had a single purpose. To survive.

Her peace had been shattered. The Order she had once been part of and had abandoned had found her.

The flight was instinctive. What followed was an episode where she was captured. That memory remained her greatest nightmare, for it was not a dream. It was a recording from the Central Unit called "The White Room," a laboratory for the wandering of the soul.

There she found a note. "You are the only living person."

She knew, on an instinctive level beyond reason, that it was not true. It was a trap, a challenge to her mental balance, an initiatory test meant to crush her will. But each time, a part of her had to verify it, like a pilgrim determined to reach the last temple raised in the shadow of the world's end.

She wandered days, weeks, months, without meeting anyone else. In the end, she collapsed, and in that moment of surrender, as she melted slowly, she found the exit. It was a lesson about death and rebirth, about how only by fighting can one find salvation.

The next morning, Morgana felt the burn on her ankle. A red mark, incandescent, pulsing in the shape of a broken spiral. The Mark of the Lost, a symbol that should never have returned. The spiral was the path to the center, but being broken, it symbolized the road to something else.

On that morning, Morgana transformed.

At the edge of Quarantine Zone 7, the Sign appeared.

Morgana was guided toward the signal. She headed to an industrial sector known on old maps as "The Sleeping Colossus." It was a network of abandoned factories and warehouses, now a labyrinth of rusted metal, a temple of industrial decay.

Three hundred meters away, in a square surrounded by the skeletons of cranes like giant crucifixes, a survival ritual was unfolding.

Four armed people with metal pipes and crowbars had formed a defensive circle. They were surrounded by seven mutants, beings that had once been human until chemical waste and the devouring disease had transformed them into something belonging to the world beyond. They had asymmetrical limbs and skin that seemed perpetually wet with putrefaction secretions. They moved in spasmodic leaps, driven by a blind hunger, a demonic instinct to destroy anything still human.

The four fought with the desperation of those on the threshold between life and death. One of them, a tall man, was grabbed by a mutant and thrown to the ground. Morgana did not hesitate.

The mutants did not see her coming. She was a shadow among shadows. The first mutant collapsed with a short sound, a thin white blade emerging from its nape like the tongue of an invisible snake. Another stopped abruptly, staring blankly as Morgana crushed its trachea with an invisible force. She moved among them like a dancer of divinity, each motion a choreography of death. Every strike was precise, lethal. In less than a minute, all seven mutants lay motionless.

The four survivors gazed at her in astonishment, a mix of fear and admiration, as if beholding a warrior goddess from ancient legends.

Morgana withdrew her blade, forged from esoteric metals that existed only as long as it was invoked through her will.

During the fight, the fabric of her pants had caught and torn at the ankle. Now, the mark of the broken spiral was visible, pulsing with a faint reddish light.

The woman in the group, with an injured arm, was the first to notice.

“The Mark,” she whispered. “You’re one of us. You’re a Lost One.”

Morgana did not respond, but her gaze tacitly confirmed it.

If you’ve forgotten your name or see a shadow in the room, close this page now. Morgana is not a simple character. She lives in the space between words, and each time you understand her motivations, you could become a potential ingredient in her magic. Search for your name in old notes, in the journal you lost. If you find it written in ink you don’t recognize, it’s already too late. Morgana knows who you are. And now, she’s searching for you.

Search for your name. Then search for the exit. They are the first steps to becoming an urban legend yourself.

One of the men approached.

"How did you get here? This is a restricted area. And even if it were open, not everyone would have the courage to wander around here."

"Does it look like I'm out for a stroll?" Morgana replied.

"I'm sorry," the man added quickly. "Who sent you? Was it Dirk, the great initiate?"

"I don't know any Dirk," Morgana said.

"Essie, the leader from the Refuge, will be thrilled to thank you personally," the man added.

They led her through a maze of alleys and underground passages until they reached the entrance of an abandoned subway station, hidden behind a pile of old scrap metal.

The main platform was lit by bulbs powered by a generator that showed signs of wear. A fragile but lively community survived in this concrete settlement. A few people tended small hydroponic gardens, while children played or drew with charcoal on the cracked tile walls.

It was a "Refuge."

In the past, when these abandoned underground networks were still under authority control, refugees had gathered in these last remaining places.

There were dead ends, shelters, empty rooms, abandoned sheds, and disused aqueducts. Passages or secret locations unknown even to those who lived here.

Homeless people decided to live underground, venturing into the darkness only for a bit of fresh air.

A bed and table stuck to the wall, a few essential items on the floor, photos taped to the walls, a single bulb—it was a last attempt to establish a home.

Morgana was led to the end of the station, into a control car, which turned into an office. There, on an old chair, sat a woman around 50 years old. Her hair was completely white, and on the left side of her face, she had a fan of fine scars. It was Essie Hanksa, the leader of the Lost Ones. She looked up, and her faded blue eyes studied Morgana with obvious curiosity.

"Your mark burns brighter than any I've seen. Welcome home, sister."

"I don't have a home," Hekate replied.

"Yes, you do. Anyone who carries this burden finds a home here," Essie replied, pointing to her own temple, where the same broken spiral was visible under the skin. "We are the ones who were pushed to the edge of the abyss and refused to fall. The ones who saw what's beyond and came back. That's why they hunt us."

"Who hunts us?" Morgana asked, though she already knew part of the answer.

"They have many names, but we call them 'the Retrievers.' A faction obsessed with 'perfection.' They think we're errors, defects that need to be fixed or eliminated. Their envoy, the one with the hammer, is also called 'the Fixer.' He's the most well-known. Just one of many. Now they've become bolder than ever."

"I didn't come here for a family reunion game. I think you know what's going to happen. So, if you can't really stand against these things, head east and leave all this behind."

"We're not leaving here. Ever," Essie said. "Until today, the gods haven't entered this area. The Lost Ones, those who wanted to find freedom, have been waiting all along. And now you're here."

"I'm not a god."

"We have a defense system set up here, and another one to the west. I know it's not enough. Those who want to help are welcome, of course, and we have a duty to show them a way."

"You're really that crazy. That's because you don't realize the real dangers."

"Like you, I've been defeated too many times. Fate knocked me down for the last time when my family died. I found a place to protect me. A place that's far from peaceful. For now, we're invisible to most eyes. We're not real soldiers. Most of us never were. What matters is what we'll do from now on."

Essie leaned forward.

"We have a problem, Morgana. The Retrievers have captured one of ours. Kael. He's our cartographer, the only one who knows the locations of the other refuges. They'll destroy him, piece by piece, until he gives up all our secrets. My people are good fighters, but you're something else. Help us get him back. Do it for us."

"I never fix serious errors," Morgana replied coldly.

Essie smiled sadly, understanding. She didn't feel offended. She reached out and picked up a small object from the table. It was an old military-style data card.

"I know who you are. Or rather, what you were. I know about the Order and its programs. I got this a long time ago, at a price you can't imagine. It's a map. Incomplete, but accurate. It contains the coordinates of three secret facilities of the Order. One of them, we suspect, is the main unit. The one they called 'the White Room.'

Morgana's eyes narrowed. For a second, the nightmare invaded her.

Essie was offering her not just information, but access to her revenge.

"I want Kael back. Alive," Essie continued. "Do this, and the card is yours."

Morgana looked at the card, then at Essie. For the first time since she escaped, her path wasn't just a random journey through the darkness.

Now she had a destination. A way to settle an old debt.

"You know I could take this card without your permission?"

"Yes, I know. But I also know you won't. You're convinced I can offer you much more."

"Tell me everything you know about the place where they're holding him."

"You'll find him in the city of Cirtha. Until you go there, I invite you to dinner," said Essie.