Spirals in Ash

By S. Borne

In the shadowed halls of the Hill House, Emily keeps watch over a door that should never open. Each night, the pounding begins; steady, patient, eternal. Behind the splintering wood waits a voice older than the stars, whispering promises sweet as poison. Bound by rituals and a bloodline of sacrifice, Emily clings to her talisman and her mantra, knowing her will is the last lock. But as the house itself begins to betray her, silence becomes the sharpest weapon, and the hunger behind the door grows restless. And the door is cracking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S. Borne
• Release date: Dec 24, 2025
• ISBN: 9798215588505

S. Borne

S. Borne is the author of dark, mythological fiction that explores inheritance, sacrifice, and the fragile line between devotion and dread. Spirals in Ash, his debut novella, grew from a deep fascination with ritual, atmosphere, and the enduring weight of legacy.

Book preview

Chapter One: The Door

Chapter Two: The Harvest

Chapter Three: The Agony

Chapter Four: The Spiral of Ash

Chapter Five: Blood and Defiance

Chapter Six: The Splintering Roots

Chapter Seven: The Echoes of Hunger

Chapter Eight: The Ascension of Aelthar

Chapter Nine: The Clash of Gods

Epilogue: The World Remade

Author's Note

Chapter One: The Door

The pounding began again. It always waited for nightfall, for the moment the house exhaled and the shadows pooled thick along the walls.

Emily sat rigid in the hallway, breath thin, eyes locked on the door at the far end. The blows came steady: fists hammering wood, rattling the frame, shaking dust from the beams overhead. Each strike thudded through her ribs. She had braced the door with chains, locks, boards, layer after desperate layer, but wood gives, and iron remembers how to bend.

The girl behind it was patient. Eternal.

Emily was not.

At thirty, she looked closer to fifty. Her hair had thinned, her skin had taken on a sickly pallor, and the lines around her eyes had deepened into permanent etchings. The years hadn't aged her; the girl behind the door had. Every night stole something small: a strand of color, a breath of strength, a piece of who she used to be.

She pressed her palm to the wall. The wood shivered under her touch, a faint tremor compared to the quakes the girl once unleashed. It should have eased her nerves. Instead, it hollowed her. Weak pounding meant the girl was conserving herself. Weak pounding meant Emily was the one breaking.

The girl sensed it. She always did. Emily's will was the last lock, and the hunger behind the door gnawed at it with patient, deliberate precision.

The girl's voice slithered through the cracks, soft and sweet, like honey poured over poison. Let me out, it crooned. You're tired. You're lonely. I can help you. I can give you everything you've ever wanted.

Emily covered her ears, but the words seeped through skin and bone. The girl was not a girl. She was older than the stars, older than the soil beneath Emily's feet. Once, she had fed on cities, drank oceans, and danced in the screams of humanity. Now she was trapped in this house, bound by rituals Emily barely understood, and it was Emily's burden to keep her here.

The pounding stopped. Silence bloomed, heavy and suffocating. Emily knew better than to trust it. Silence was the girl's sharpest weapon.

She sat in the hallway, back against the wall, staring at the door. Her body ached from sleepless nights, her mind frayed at the edges. Every hour she remained the jailer, she lost a piece of herself.

Her world had shrunk to rituals. Each morning she checked the locks, whispering the old words: syllables older than her bloodline, older than the house itself. She redrew the chalk spirals on the walls, tracing the same patterns her ancestors carved into oak when they first stood against the hunger. She swept the floors until her palms split, as if scouring the house clean could scour the girl from its bones. Her food and groceries delivered from outside, never stepping past the threshold; even a moment outside felt like an invitation for the girl to slip free.

The oak talisman hung heavy against her chest, its spirals and knots worn smooth by generations of desperate hands. It wasn't jewelry. It was a shackle disguised as inheritance, a relic of druids who had bound the girl long before Emily was born. She clutched it anyway, though the wood felt small and helpless against something that predated gods and men alike.

Her fingers traced the grooves, and memory rose like a bruise. Her mother's voice, stern and exhausted, teaching her the words, the rituals, the burden. Keepers were raised quickly, childhood traded for duty. They were shaped for sacrifice, not for joy.

Emily was eight the first time her mother placed the oak talisman around her neck. It was too heavy for her small frame, the carved spirals pressing into her collarbone until she winced. Her mother did not soften. Pain is part of the bond, she said, her voice flat, exhausted. If you cannot carry it now, you will not carry it later.

The ritual room smelled of chalk and smoke. Spirals covered the walls, drawn in ash and salt, their edges smudged by years of trembling hands. Emily's fingers itched to trace them, but her mother slapped her hand away. Never touch without the words. The symbols are not decoration. They are locks.

Her mother's eyes were hollow, ringed with sleepless shadows. Emily wanted to ask why they lived this way, why the house was always cold, why the door at the end of the hall was never opened. But questions were forbidden. Instead, she repeated the syllables her mother drilled into her, words older than the town, older than the soil. Her tongue stumbled, but her mother's glare sharpened until she forced the sounds into shape.

Later, when the lesson ended, Emily sat alone in her room, the talisman heavy against her chest. She pressed her face into the pillow and whispered the forbidden question anyway: Why me? The walls did not answer, but the silence felt alive, listening.

That night, she dreamed of the door. She was too small to reach the lock, but she heard the pounding, steady and patient. And beneath it, a voice, soft and sweet, promising freedom. She woke with the talisman burning against her skin, her mother's mantra echoing in her ears: You are the jailer. You are the sacrifice.

And then the lesson she had hated most: the mating. One union, always forced. A man enthralled by spell, his will stolen to ensure the bloodline continued. The child is always a girl. Always another jailer. Emily had despised it, the theft of choice, the cruelty of inheritance. She knew too well what it meant to live without freedom, and the thought of condemning another child to this life filled her with a quiet, simmering rage.

Now, as her body weakened, she felt time closing in. She was nearly past the age of bearing, nearly past the chance to raise another keeper. And though the child would not remain a child for long, the thought of bringing her into this endless prison felt like cruelty disguised as tradition.

The wood creaked. A hairline crack snaked across the frame. The prison was weakening. Emily was weakening.

Her lips moved, whispering her mantra: To the girl who keeps pounding on my door at night. I'm not letting you out.

But the words sounded thinner now.

And in the silence that followed, she heard laughter, soft, triumphant, and terrifying.

The house breathed, and with each breath it drew Greymoor closer. Dust curled into spirals on the floor, shapes identical to the ones children scratched into the dirt outside. Emily swept them away, but they reformed instantly, as if the town's unease had seeped through the walls to settle at her feet.

Her rituals began to fail. Spirals smudged themselves, knots loosened, nails rusted into brittle flakes. At night, voices threaded through the plaster: neighbors whispering about the woods, prayers muttered over salted doors, children's laughter warping into thin, frightened sobs. The house replayed them in a warped chorus, until Emily could no longer tell whether she was hearing the girl or the town that feared her.

The girl's voice spread through the rooms, braided with Greymoor's dread. Hearth smoke clung to the walls, thickening the air with the weight of a hundred anxious breaths.

The floorboards shifted with purpose, groaning under the memory of generations. Shadows stretched into familiar silhouettes: Mrs. Callahan's stooped frame, the butcher's broad shoulders, children crouched in play. They dissolved when she blinked, but the message lingered. Greymoor was no longer outside. It was here, inside the house, watching with her.

Emily pressed her ear to the wall and heard it clearly now. Not just the girl's name, but a chorus rising from Greymoor itself. The house had become a vessel, not for her protection, but for the town's fear.

She staggered back, broom clutched tight. The realization struck with cold clarity: the house was no longer hers. It was Greymoor's memory, Greymoor's hunger, Greymoor's complicity. And she was trapped inside it.

The house no longer whispered. It chanted.

At first it was the girl's voice, stretched thin across the walls. Then came others, layered beneath it: neighbors muttering prayers, children reciting spirals, the butcher's rasp, the widow's lament. The voices rose and fell together, weaving into a rhythm that was not speech but invocation.

Emily pressed her palms to the plaster. It throbbed like a drumskin, vibrating with the cadence of Greymoor's dread. The locks rattled in time, nails tapping against wood as though struck by unseen hammers. Floorboards groaned in unison, a chorus of timber and iron.

The air thickened, carrying the tang of smoke and salt. She smelled hearths burning across the town, doors marked with iron, the faint sweetness of rot from the forest's edge. All of it pressed inward, condensed, until the house itself became a shrine.

Shadows gathered in the corners, shaped into familiar outlines: neighbors bent in prayer, children crouched in play, figures hammering nails into doors. They swayed with the rhythm, dissolving and reforming, as if the town's rituals had been absorbed and replayed by the house.

Emily staggered back, broom clutched like a staff. The chanting rose, her name braided into it, syllables stretched until they became indistinguishable from the town's own.

The realization struck with brutal clarity: Greymoor was inside. The house was not resisting the girl. It was amplifying her, binding her to the town's fear, performing a ritual through its walls.

And as the voices rose in unison, Emily understood. The town had already chosen. The house was their altar, their mouthpiece, their prison. And she was the offering.

The pounding ceased. Silence settled, thick and alive, pressing against her skin as though the house itself breathed. Emily held her breath, waiting for the next strike, but none came. Instead, something softer seeped into the room: fragments, impressions, not words exactly but the suggestion of them.

...release... hunger waits... freedom...

They dissolved as soon as they formed, curling away like smoke. She could not tell if they came from beyond the door or from within her own mind. The chalk symbols on the floor shimmered faintly, their edges blurring as if the dust itself whispered.

Her eyes burned. She blinked, and the lines wavered, smudged by moisture that had not been there before. The air tasted of stone and old dust, each breath thick with the remnants of her ancestors' defenses. The symbols no longer felt like protection. They were brittle bones, reminders of a lineage that had carried this burden too long.

The silence deepened, and with it came a rhythm, an almost-cadence, like a heartbeat muffled through walls. She thought she heard a voice, but it was not a voice. It was hunger given shape, a shadow cast by absence.

Her thoughts began to fracture. Perhaps the bargain had already been struck, long before she was born. Perhaps the hunger was not outside at all, but inside, waiting for silence to speak.

She pressed her palm against the nearest symbol, smearing it slightly. The dust clung to her skin, warm as blood. For a moment she thought she felt the walls lean closer, as if the house itself listened.

The fragments returned, sharper now, though still incomplete: ...you carry... too long... let go...

Her pulse quickened. The words were not whole, yet they carried a strange comfort. She had carried this burden for years, and her body was failing. Perhaps the voice was