Your feet ached, your clothes felt grimy and snagged from your flight through bushes and fences, and your mind felt like a radio tuned to a dead station–all static and fragmented whispers just below the level of comprehension. The words from Arthur’s notebook echoed relentlessly.
A?e?s?h?t?’?R?h?a?l?’. Thoughtling. Nexus. It’s arriving by belonging.
Meaningless? Or the Rosetta Stone to a reality you desperately wished you hadn’t uncovered?
After what felt like hours, you found yourself on a grimy commercial strip bordering the industrial wasteland near the river. Neon signs advertising cheap liquor, pawn shops, and hourly motels cast flickering, unreliable light onto the cracked pavement. It wasn't safe, not in the conventional sense. But it felt… unseen. Less likely to be under the specific, focused surveillance you felt emanating from the city’s more orderly districts.
You ducked into the lobby of the Starlight Motel, a place whose name was a cruel joke given the flickering fluorescent tubes overhead and the distinct smell of stale cigarette smoke, cheap disinfectant, and despair. A bored-looking clerk behind a scratched plexiglass barrier barely glanced up as you paid cash for a room, using a fake name mumbled incoherently. He slid a keycard across the counter. Room 113. Ground floor. Rear building. Perfect.
The room was exactly what you expected: stained carpet, particleboard furniture, a buzzing mini-fridge containing nothing but disappointment, and a television bolted to the wall that looked like it predated the digital age. The window looked out onto a crumbling brick wall and a dumpster overflowing with refuse. It was grim, depressing, and blessedly anonymous. You double-locked the door, jammed the flimsy metal chair under the knob for good measure, and finally, finally allowed yourself to collapse onto the questionable bedspread.
For a long moment, you just lay there, staring at the water-stained ceiling, the adrenaline slowly draining away, leaving behind a bone-deep weariness and a gnawing, icy fear. You were alone. Arthur was gone, consumed, most likely. You had his terrifying legacy scattered in your bag. You'd seen things that shouldn't exist. You were being watched, texted by unknown things, and hunted by clicking abominations.
What the fuck do I do now?
Sleep was impossible. Every creak of the motel, every distant siren, every drip from the leaky faucet sounded amplified, sinister. You closed your eyes and saw fractal patterns blooming behind your eyelids, heard whispers that sounded like Arthur’s voice mixed with the old man’s dry rasp and the harsh static from the archive computer.
Get a grip.
You needed to focus. You sat up, pulled your messenger bag onto the bed, and carefully laid out Arthur’s notebook, the maps, and the photos under the weak glare of the bedside lamp. The air in the room seemed to grow colder as you did.
First, E. Thorne at Miskatonic University. Arthur’s last hope, his Hail Mary pass. Was she even real? Miskatonic… it sounded like something out of a horror novel.
Arthur mentioned encrypted files. Did he leave any clues about how he contacted her? You flipped through the notebook again, scanning the frantic final pages. Nothing obvious. Just the name, the university.
You pulled out your own phone–your work phone, probably compromised, definitely traceable. No way. Your personal phone? Maybe slightly safer, but still connected to your life, your identity. Risky.
A burner phone. That felt like the only semi-safe option. Buy one with cash, use a public Wi-Fi network far from here, maybe try to find a Miskatonic University directory online, look for an E. Thorne in Special Collections or Para-linguistics (if such a department even existed outside Arthur's fractured reality). It was a plan, thin and desperate, but a plan nonetheless.
Next, the Nexus. Arthur’s final, capitalized command. You spread out the maps he’d included. There were three main ones. One was a modern Stillwater Creek zoning map, heavily annotated by Arthur. Strange symbols–triangles, spirals, eye-like icons–clustered around specific locations: the District 7 rail yards, the Canal Quarter library, the Municipal Annex (marked with a particularly dense cluster of symbols), the grounds of Stillwater Creek University, and… Sable Hill, on the city's northern edge, site of the old, decommissioned broadcast towers.
The second map was older, a copy of the 1907 survey map Arthur had emailed you, the one showing those faint red lines suggesting some underlying geometric pattern across the city. Arthur had overlaid his own darker ink lines, reinforcing the connections between the 'hotspots' he'd marked on the modern map. The lines seemed to converge, creating a complex web, but several thick lines pointed insistently towards Sable Hill.
The third map was the strangest. It wasn't a standard city map. It looked more like a schematic, or maybe a network diagram. Lines labelled with things like ‘Cognitive Flow Rate,’ ‘Semantic Density,’ and ‘Psychic Resonance Amplitude’ connected nodes representing the same key locations. Arrows indicated flow, convergence, feedback loops. It looked like Arthur was trying to map the spread of... whatever this influence is, the flow of the Veridian Weft itself, based on his terrifying theory about something he called 'A?e?s?h?t?’?R?h?a?l?’.' And again, multiple arrows, thick and heavy, pointed towards the node labelled ‘Sable Hill Radio Tower Array (Decommissioned) - Primary Signal Relay Point?’.
Sable Hill. The old radio towers. High up, overlooking the city. A place designed for broadcasting, for sending signals out. Or… for receiving them? Was that the Nexus? The point where the influence Arthur described was most concentrated, or where this... this 'Seed of Arrival' thing he wrote about was… anchored? It felt plausible in a terrifying, symbolic way.
But going there… alone? To investigate a potentially reality-warping hotspot based on the maps of a man who’d succumbed to madness? It felt like suicide. Contacting E. Thorne first seemed smarter, safer. Get backup, information, confirmation that you weren't just chasing Arthur's ghosts.
Decision made: Burner phone first. Find Thorne. Then, maybe, investigate Sable Hill.
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You needed supplies. Cash, a burner phone, maybe some basic survival gear if things went further south. That meant venturing out again. You shoved Arthur’s research back into your bag, checked the flimsy lock on the door, and stepped back out into the motel's grimy parking lot.
The night felt… thicker now. The air buzzed with a low-level static that wasn't just in your head. The neon lights of the strip seemed to flicker erratically, casting shadows that writhed and danced in ways that didn’t match the movement of cars or people. You kept your head down, hands jammed in your pockets, one fist clenching and unclenching around the memory of the cold key.
Finding an all-night electronics store that sold cheap burner phones wasn’t hard in this part of town. Buying it with cash felt illicit, furtive. You bought a basic charger and a pre-paid SIM card too. Activation required going online. You needed Wi-Fi.
A 24-hour diner nearby advertised ‘Free Wi-Fi’ with a flickering sign? Perfect. You could get more coffee, try to activate the phone, maybe search for Thorne. You slipped into a booth, ordered coffee as the bill for the Wi-Fi (not so free, huh?), and powered up the cheap plastic burner phone.
The screen flickered to life, displaying a generic, pixelated logo. You navigated the clumsy interface to connect to the diner's public Wi-Fi. The connection was slow, unstable. Figures. You opened the phone's rudimentary web browser.
The moment you tried to search for "Miskatonic University," the screen glitched. Violently. Blocks of distorted colour flashed, lines of garbled text scrolled rapidly, and a burst of harsh white noise erupted from the tiny speaker, loud enough to make you flinch and nearly drop the phone. The other patrons in the diner didn't seem to notice, lost in their own late-night worlds.
The screen went blank. Then, slowly, text appeared. Not search results. Just stark white letters on a black background, mimicking the text message you'd received earlier.
Your blood turned to ice. It wasn't just the city network. They were monitoring wider internet traffic? Targeting specific searches? Identifying you through a brand new, anonymous phone on a public network? How? Was it the search term itself? Miskatonic? Thorne? Or was it you? Had exposure to the Blooms, to Arthur's research, somehow… marked you? Tagged you as an 'unwelcome thought-form'?
The phone screen flickered again, then returned to the normal, cheap-looking home screen as if nothing had happened. But the connection to the Wi-Fi was dead.
You tried reconnecting.
Unable to find network.
You tried searching for anything else–news, weather, cat pictures.
Network error.
The phone’s internet capability was completely fried.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
So much for contacting Thorne easily. They were actively blocking you. Or maybe warning you.
The Garden is closed to pests.
You paid for your untouched coffee and fled the diner, paranoia ratcheted up to eleven. The burner phone felt toxic in your pocket now, a potential tracking device, a beacon signaling your location and intentions to… the gardeners? To the source of this whole nightmare? To whatever Arthur believed 'the Seed of Arrival' was?
You walked quickly back towards the motel, heart pounding. The streetlights seemed to flicker in time with your steps. You glanced into the darkened window of a pawn shop and froze.
Reflected in the glass, standing across the street under a flickering streetlamp, was a figure. Wearing what looked like stained, old-fashioned overalls and a flannel shirt. Long grey beard. Intense eyes.
It is him. The old man. The sketcher from the Canal Quarter lot.
He wasn't looking at you. He was looking up, towards the top of a nearby building, his head tilted as if listening to something you couldn’t hear. Then, slowly, deliberately, he raised one hand and pointed. Not at you. He pointed north. Towards Sable Hill.
As you watched, rooted to the spot, his form seemed to… flicker? Like a bad television signal. For a split second, his familiar shape wavered, replaced by something taller, thinner, paler… something with limbs that bent wrong and a featureless head. Then he solidified back into the old man, still pointing north.
He turned his head then, his pale blue eyes locking onto yours through the reflection in the pawn shop window. He gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. Then, he simply… wasn't there anymore. Vanished between one flicker of the streetlamp and the next.
You stared at the empty space where he'd been, your breath catching in your throat. Was he helping you? Warning you? Was he even real? Or just another manifestation of the city's encroaching madness, another symptom of the Bloom? His appearance right after your failed attempt to contact Thorne, pointing towards the suspected Nexus location Arthur identified… it felt too convenient, too staged.
But what choice did you have? Thorne was seemingly unreachable. Sable Hill was the only concrete lead left from Arthur’s notes, now seemingly corroborated by the spectral, pointing finger of the potentially hallucinated old man.
Going there felt insane. Walking into the heart of the problem based on cryptic clues and vanishing apparitions. But staying put, waiting for the clicking gardeners or the Bloomed remnants of Arthur Penvarnon to find you, felt like a guaranteed death sentence, or worse.
Back in the dubious safety of Room 113, you double-checked the chair wedged under the door, pulled Arthur's annotated map of Sable Hill from your bag, and spread it out on the stained carpet. The old radio towers loomed large, marked with Arthur’s densest cluster of warning symbols and frantic notes
‘???????????? ?????????????????????? ???????????’, ‘?????????????????? ?????????????? ???????????????????’, ‘???????? ?????????????? ??????? - ?????? ???????’.
It looked like the epicenter. The place where the static was loudest.
You had no backup. No reliable way to call for help. Just a bag full of terrifying research, a useless burner phone, and the chilling memory of impossible creatures and cryptic guides.
Sable Hill it was. Time to see what was broadcasting from the heart of Stillwater Creek's blooming nightmare.