Chapter 1251
One by one, they descended.
The air inside was cold. Damp. The stone walls were close, the tunnel barely wide enough for them to walk shoulder to shoulder. Old carvings lined the walls - faint, worn symbols etched in spirals and angular patterns that hurt to look at for too long.
"Prayers," Sophie murmured, running her fingers over them.
"Or warnings," Zoey replied.
They walked for what felt like hours. The path twisted, sloped downward, sometimes narrowing so tightly they had to move sideways to squeeze through. Water dripped from the ceiling in irregular patterns. Once, they found bones - small, delicate, human. Arranged in a circle. No one said a word.
Eventually, the tunnel opened into a wide chamber.
The walls were covered in symbols. Hundreds of them. Scrawled in blood, scratched with stone, burned into wood. In the center of the room stood a massive totem - root and bone and stone fused into a towering structure that stretched up into darkness.
Sophie approached it. "It’s a map."
Jude frowned. "A map of what?"
"The island."
She pointed to the spiral at its base - the beach. Then upward, through twisted paths marked by teeth and eyes. Toward a circle at the top. "The center. The source."