The dig site, usually buzzing with quiet focus, was deserted now. Beyond the ridge, the warm glow of lanterns from the mess tent lit up the dark. I could hear laughter and the clinking of enamel mugs drifting through the air. These familiar sounds used to include Dad but now they just reminded me that he was gone, and I was out here alone.

I stood at the trench’s edge, Dad’s field journal pressed tight against my chest, its worn cover a fragile shield against the encroaching chill. The mist, thick and alive, coiled around my boots like smoke, whispering ancient secrets against my ankles. I could not leave it. Not now. Not when the air thrummed with a silent anticipation that resonated deep within my bones.

With trembling hands, I pulled back the heavy tarp. The stone glinted beneath the sliver of a crescent moon. Its intricate spirals shimmered, no longer mud-dulled, but wet with some inner illumination.

I dropped to my knees, the moist earth seeping through my trousers, but I barely noticed. The journal, swollen from years of damp air, fell open to a familiar page. A sketch, loose but remarkably precise, depicted the very spiral before me, its axis subtly tilted, just as I had observed. Below it, Dad’s familiar, sprawling handwriting, scrawled in black ink, seemed to leap from the page: "Temporal anomaly? Possible focal point. Threshold marker. Ancient ritual purpose?"

My hands trembled, a tremor that started in my fingertips and spread through my entire body. Had he seen this? Dreamed of it? Come so achingly close to understanding its true nature? Now, here I was, kneeling exactly where he might have, holding the very questions he had posed.

“Is this what you were looking for, Da?” I whispered, the words thin and fragile against the vast silence of the bog.

The wind did not answer, but something shifted in the air around me. I placed my palm gently on the cool, smooth surface of the stone.

It pulsed beneath my skin. A faint, rhythmic beat that synchronized with my own thudding heart. The pressure in the air changed, growing denser, heavier. My ears popped, a sudden release of internal pressure, as if I had ascended to a great height, or plunged to an unimaginable depth. The wind picked up. It was sharper now, no longer merely cold but cutting, carrying a strange, almost metallic scent. It smelled like ash and rain on ancient, standing stones. Like old things woken from a long, deep slumber.

Something was wrong, my instincts whispered, a cold dread snaking through me.

Or maybe… something was right.

The stars overhead, once pinpricks of light, began to blur, elongating into shimmering streaks of white and silver. The crescent moon brightened unnaturally, expanding, casting an ethereal, silver fire across the trench, illuminating every granule of peat and every ripple of stagnant water. The stone glowed. Not metaphorically, not in the romanticized way I might have imagined, but literally. A luminous, almost phosphorescent green light bled from the heart of the spirals, crawling along the carved lines like a living thing, flowing through the ancient glyphs. My breath caught in my throat, trapped there. I could not move, could not look away. My gaze was riveted and utterly captivated by the impossible glow.

The wind roared suddenly. A primal, tearing sound, so loud it rattled the very canvas of the distant mess tent. A high-pitched, screeching howl tore across the heavens, a sound that was both ancient and utterly alien. The gnarled trees along the horizon bent backward, their skeletal branches bowing violently, as if in terrified respect to something unseen, something immensely powerful that had just arrived.

The earth shifted. Not the violent jolt of an earthquake, but a slow, deliberate bending, a warping of the very ground beneath me. I stumbled backward, my boots sliding in the thick muck, and my balance utterly lost. The journal slipped from my numb fingers, falling silently into the mud.

Then, impossibly, the spiral cracked open.

A thin seam of brilliant white light split the stone’s very centre, spreading slowly, like the unzipping of a world, revealing a radiant core. The low hum in the air intensified, turning into a deep, guttural vibration that rattled my teeth, reverberating through my entire skull. The mist, previously sluggish, surged upward in violent, twisting curls, illuminated from within by the stone’s unearthly radiance.

“What the hell—” The words, or what was left of them, died on my lips.

The world tilted sideways. Not a subtle shift, but a dizzying, sickening lurch that disoriented me completely. There was a blinding flash, a supernova of pure, searing white light that swallowed everything. Me included.

For a moment, I was falling. Or floating. Time itself did not move; instead, time was movement, an immense, swirling vortex. I saw shapes that made no logical sense. Ruins not yet built, towering structures of a future that had not happened. Stars arranged in constellations long forgotten, or perhaps constellations yet to be named. A hand, wrapped in intricately woven chainmail, reaching towards me through the swirling light. A fleeting image of a kiss, stolen by the flickering light of a candlelit altar. Then, terrifyingly, the orange-red flicker of flames licking up a wooden stake.

A voice. Dad’s voice, clear as a bell through the chaos, and resonating within the very core of my being, said, “Spirals mean life, time, and the soul’s journey. No beginning. No end.”

The trench was gone.

The stone.

The swirling mist.

The biting cold.

All of it.

Gone.

The fall was not a physical descent through space, but a dizzying plunge through time itself. It was not cold, or hot, or even airless. It was a kaleidoscope of impressions, a torrent of sensory input that defied labelling. Colours I had never seen before, sounds that vibrated directly in my bones, scents of earth and rain and something ancient that spoke of forgotten forests and oceans. My body felt stretched, pulled thin across a vast, invisible canvas, then compressed, folding in on itself like a paper doll. The spirals of the stone, now burned into my mind’s eye, seemed to unwind and rewind, mirroring the unspooling of history.

Then, just as suddenly as it began, it stopped.

The violent churning ceased. The blinding light softened, fading into a gentle, diffused glow. I became aware of solid ground beneath me, firm and unyielding. The air was cool, fresh, carrying the unmistakable scent of damp earth and something sweet, like blossoming heather.

I lay still for a moment, disoriented, my heart hammering against my ribs, convinced I was still trapped in some impossible dream. I opened my eyes cautiously. Above me, stars, countless and impossibly bright, glittered like spilled diamonds on black velvet, forming constellations I did not immediately recognize. A massive, radiant moon, far larger and more luminous than any I had ever seen, hung low in the sky, casting long, stark shadows across the landscape.

I pushed myself up, my muscles aching as if I had run a marathon. I was no longer in the peat bog. That was instantly clear. The familiar, low-lying, desolate expanse was gone, replaced by something wilder, grander. I was on a gentle rise, overlooking a valley. Below, a dense, ancient forest stretched for miles, its trees towering, dark silhouettes against the starlit sky. In the distance, I could discern the faint murmur of a river. The air itself felt… cleaner.

A surge of panic slammed into my chest. Where was I? When was I? The questions tumbled through my mind at a mile a minute. Had I travelled back in time? Forward? Was this even Earth as I knew it?

CONTINUE READING