??? Prologue: The First Spiral

  The men never made it back above ground.

  Not the soldiers. Not the surveyors. Not the preacher they dragged down with them to bless what should’ve stayed buried.

  This was 1864. Near what folks now call Southside Redwater. Back then? Just pinewoods, bloodmud, and rumor. Confederate engineers came looking for a fallback line — but the real digging was done by the hands they owned.

  Enslaved diggers. Forced deeper than anyone should’ve gone. Some were barely more than boys. Some were fathers, uncles, grandsons. All were expendable. Their breath was seen as cheaper than dynamite.

  One struck stone — a sharp clang that rang through the dark. Another struck something softer — wet, pulsing — and the ground seemed to flinch.

  The preacher screamed scripture until his voice broke. A digger tried to run, but the ground twisted under him like wet cloth. Another was marked — spirals carved into his chest by something that looked like bone and moved like breath. It hissed in a language none of them spoke — but all of them felt, deep in their marrow.

  When they dragged him back up, he was laughing — a sound too sharp, too hollow, like a cracked bell. Tears cut paths down his dirt-caked face. His mouth spilled ancient syllables no one knew but everyone feared. His eyes, blind and burning white, stared through the living like they weren’t even there.

  They shot him. Buried him without a name. Called it yellow fever. Claimed the others ran.

  That same week, the town moved like a hive, desperate and wild. Fires burned evidence by night, and by dawn, blood stained the square. They believed if they buried enough bodies, they could bury the fear too.

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  They rounded up the rest of the diggers — every man who’d been near the site. And they killed them. Men. Women. Some still gripping shovels. Others with nothing but calluses and eyes full of knowing. Children watched from porches. The air smelled like iron and pine.

  One mother — knees raw from prayer — was dragged into the town square at dusk. The lanterns swung on ropes above her, casting giant, twitching shadows on the walls. She had braided a spiral into her daughter’s hair that morning, not knowing it mirrored the mark underground.

  When the captain saw it, he screamed about curses, about devils, about bloodlines that needed burning.

  They tore the child from her arms. The girl screamed once — a thin, piercing sound that barely made it past the thick night air. Her small hands clawed at her mother's dress, leaving ragged tears in the fabric. The mother fought to hold on, nails digging into flesh, but the rifle butts came down hard, breaking them apart like splitting wood.

  The shot cracked the night open — a sharp, burning sound that echoed off the walls like a bell struck wrong, rattling the lanterns, making even the shadows flinch. The child's body hit the dirt with a soft, terrible finality, her braid unraveling into the dust like a broken spiral.

  The mother was forced to dig a hole by hand, nails breaking, skin tearing on stone and root. They threw her in. Shoveled dirt over her body while she fought and screamed. Boots stomped down the earth until it muffled everything.

  They salted the ground after, thinking it would kill the memory.

  They said it was a fever. A riot. An accident. But the river turned red.

  And the town that grew around it? Cursed by memory, wrapped in silence, and waiting — always waiting — for someone else to find that spiral.

  Some say you can still hear the preacher’s voice when the fog hangs low, whispering warnings in broken tongues. Some say the marked man never really died — just sank into the roots. Some say the spiral never left.

  It just waits. Beneath. Watching.

  Waiting for the next hand to bleed.

  And if you walk the riverbank on certain nights, you might see it: a hand breaking the soil, twitching, spiraled and reaching.