Chapter Text
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
H. P. Lovecraft
***
Trees whipped past in dark blurs as Isaac raced through the forest, weaving between the trunks haphazardly as he chased the smaller form ahead of him. Running on all fours had been such an odd concept at first, he remembered with a grin, but now he reveled in the freedom it provided. The fluid movement of his limbs, the burning in his muscles as his entire body coiled and uncoiled with each stride, the adrenaline pumping through his veins, it was all almost cathartic. He moved on instinct, following the twisting trail Erica was taking among the trees surrounding them. Not far from him he could hear Boyd tearing through the underbrush, his long strides carrying him smoothly over the forest floor.
Isaac bared his teeth in a wolfish grin as Boyd and he followed Erica up a slight rise. The trees stood further apart here, and in the center gave way to a clearing littered with dead leaves and branches and sparse forest grass. Erica stood up in the center of it, turning to greet the men with a fanged smile. Boyd laughed as he reached her, and Isaac paused a few steps into the clearing to watch them. His pack. He was part of this, part of the shared empathy, the wolf piles and the platonic cuddling. Sometimes, and especially so in moments like these where the connection between them was almost tangible, he wondered if Scott understood what he was missing. He wondered if the lone wolf would ever understand, or if he would continue to shy away from his inner nature, keep scuttling back to humanity with his ears laid flat and tail tucked so no one could notice the difference.
It was a shame, really. Isaac wondered if it had something to do with the fact that Scott had a mother who loved him and a best friend who was there for him, wondered if it had something to do with the fact that while Scott hadn’t been popular in school he’d had somewhere he belonged. Conversely, wondered if it was because of that that Scott didn’t feel the need to join the pack, to become a part of remembering what it meant to be family. Isaac knew what family was, or he had at one point in time…
A double-whimper reached him, and he found both Erica and Boyd giving him puzzled looks, heads cocked to the same side as they eyed him. He’d been projecting without realizing it, again. With a casual grin and a comforting half-grumble-half-yip he began to head their way, and they smiled again. The grin he had put on turned impish, and before they could react he dashed the rest of the way, jumping at Boyd with a playful growl. Boyd knew him too well, however, and easily caught him in a bear-hug, raising the thinner man off the ground and swinging him around with a laughing growl. Isaac clawed at his friend playfully, trying to kick him, and Boyd tossed him back to the ground, growling. The two jumped at each other again, grabbing at each other’s arms and snapping between growls and pants. There was a series of playful yips, and then with a loud growl Erica jumped at the two of them, bringing both of the men down to the ground. Rolling around on the ground the trio exchanged scratches and bites and ended up piled around each other, panting and nearly breathless and happy.
Isaac could have stayed like that forever, to be truthful. Surrounded by the warmth of his packmates, listening to the steady thud of their hearts, he was absolutely drunk on pack-love and he wondered if the others felt that way too. Erica wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned over him to lick at a scratch on his face, and he chuckled and growled and pushed at her and she rewarded him with a sharp bite to his ear. Boyd laughed, rolling over and rubbing his back against the ground. The smell of crushed grass was thick on the air, and Isaac inhaled deeply, relaxing and letting Erica get back to licking at the quickly healing scratches on his cheek and neck.
They had been sitting together and staring up at the starry night sky above when the first strike came. Ozone suddenly filled the air when the bolt hit with a flash so bright Isaac thought his eyes had been burned out of his sockets. He howled, recoiling from the concussive blast that followed. Chunks of dirt hit him as he threw himself at the ground, and the stench of scorched earth was stifling him. He felt more than heard Erica and Boyd howling in surprise and pain, and the shock they felt shot through the bond between them. His ears rang horribly, and he could feel a sharp stabbing pain deep within them. Something warm was flowing down the sides of his head, and he clasped his hands to his ears and whimpered piteously as he curled up on the ground. It was blood, he realized with a shock once his nose was able to distinguish scents other than that horrid ozone and charred earth. He rubbed at his ears, willing them to heal, and stayed whimpering on the ground.
Strong hands suddenly gripped his shoulders, beginning to drag him across the ground. He growled and whimpered, twisting along the ground, but relaxed when he scented that it was Boyd. Isaac opened his eyes, attempting to blink away the residual blank spots in his sight, to find that Boyd had dragged him to the edge of the clearing. Erica was on the ground next to him, curled up and staring at the two men with wide eyes. Boyd crouched down before the others, watching the clearing warily, and wiped at the long trail of blood that glistened at his neck. Isaac’s ears were slowly beginning to hear again, and the pain had receded to a much more tolerable level. He didn’t know how soon they would heal completely, and continued to rub at them anxiously as he stared out past the trees.
In the middle of the clearing, mere feet away from where they had been lounging, was a smoking hole in the ground. Isaac couldn’t gauge its size well from the tree line, however. Cautiously, he leaned over and looked up, past the branches of the trees above them. The night sky was crystal clear, dotted with sparkling points of light, and though he couldn’t see the moon he could feel it in his bones.
The second strike caught them off guard as well, and they fell back with terrified yelps as the lightning flashed and the thunder burst over them with an almost physical force. The third and fourth strikes came in quick succession, and by the time the thunder had rolled over them and the flash had faded from their eyes the three young werewolves found themselves huddled around each other at the base of one of the trees. With wide eyes they looked towards the clearing.
Smoke rose steadily from the center hole, drifting lazily in the cool night air. Isaac frowned, shaking his head to clear his ringing ears. Detaching himself from his packmates he stepped forward slowly. Erica grabbed at his leg, and Boyd growled low, but Isaac huffed at them both and pulled out of Erica’s grasp. He stepped into the clearing, the stench of ozone and burned ground thick in his nose. Grimacing, he looked up at the sky warily and made his slow way towards the smoking hole. He could hear that Boyd and Erica were moving, following not far behind him. He could hear their worried whimpers and knew they were exchanging looks, but he was not going to stop. There was something odd, now that his senses were clearing of the shock of the blasts. There was something strange. If he focused, he could almost scent something, something briny. If he breathed in with open mouth, he could almost taste salt on his tongue. He frowned, and bolstered by the lack of further bolts of lightning, hurried forwards towards the hole. A sound reached him as he neared, a low almost gargled sound that he couldn’t place at first, not until he stood at the edge of the smoldering crater and looked down into its depths.
Five feet below him, past the charred walls of blown earth, was a tiny hole in the ground, and from that hole bubbled a dark liquid. He crouched down, watching it closely. The liquid continued to bubble and gurgle up out of the ground in a steady rhythm. A tickle began at the back of his neck, setting his hair on end and raising goosebumps on his arms. He breathed in, slow and deep, and then he placed his legs into the hold and braced them against the side. Boyd growled, loud and harsh and commanding, and Isaac felt it like a lash on his back. Gritting his teeth, his sharp canines digging into his bottom lip, he fought against instinct and ignored Boyd, letting himself slide down into the crater. The liquid at the bottom of the crater glistened oddly, and merely looking at it sent tremors through his body. Having reached the bottom, he balked, sudden fear freezing him in his tracks. Whatever the liquid was, it was slowly filling the base of the crater, coating it in an almost oil-slick layer. Swallowing thickly, Isaac forced his leaden limbs to move, forced himself to crouch down, to lean over, to reach out a hand towards that gurgling spring. Erica and Boyd growled again, and he could hear someone else scrambling down the crater side. Grimacing, almost whimpering, almost crying, his shaking hand poked at the liquid. Ice coated his fingers, or something like ice. It was so cold he actually did cry out, pulling his hand back as if it were burned. His fingers flared in pain from the chill that covered them, and before he could think he’d placed those fingers in his mouth to warm them from the cold.
The taste of salt was thick, so thick, that he recoiled, the chill on his finger forgotten as he spat out the offending taste onto the crater bottom. A dark hand gripped his own, and Boyd pulled him to his feet and dragged him back to the side of the hole where Erica waited above.
“It tastes like the ocean,” Isaac said, as Boyd pushed him and Erica pulled him up. With puzzled eyes, the tall man looked back into the dark hole, and the sight of the liquid sent another series of tremors through him. He swallowed thickly, scurrying from the edge as strange dark feelings began swirling through his head. Erica and Boyd looked at him in concern, and he shook his head, almost ashamed of the whimper which broke its way past his lips. With a last look at the crater, Boyd and Erica pulled Isaac back up to his feet, and the three bounded back towards home.
***
Bright sun had led their way to the ocean shore, and continued far into the day. It was under that burning hot sun that he was playing in the surf, chasing receding waves and shrieking as they turned back on him, frothy white nipping at his heels as he dashed his way back up the sand. Seagulls floated high above his head, black against the clear blue sky, and he raised his hands high above his head, waving them at the winging shapes and bouncing on down the shoreline.
A voice called out to him over the crash of the waves, and he laughed and ran faster, unwilling to leave the water behind. Someone was running next to him then, and he looked up to see his mother dashing along with him, smiling and laughing. He held out his hand to her, and she took hold, and they ran into the waves together, water swirling around their ankles.
Something dark was in the water near them, and he pulled at his mother’s hand, tugged her along to take a closer look. It was an amorphous form, something long and thin but almost without any true shape. He giggled and poked at it, surprised to find that his finger met little resistance. The form was almost a jelly, darkly clouded and drifting in the waves.
His mother tugged at his arm, admonishing him lightly but grinning all the same. He grinned back up at her, and pulled her onwards towards where he saw seagulls congregating on the sand. She gasped suddenly, as if in pain, and when he turned back he saw her looking at the water around her feet where that dark form still drifted. He frowned, and tugged her hand, and she looked at him and smiled and together they dashed on towards the shore.
Stiles didn’t wake with a start. That dream didn’t shock him awake anymore, really. His return to consciousness was laborious, actually, as he dragged himself away from the sun and the shore and the warm hand holding his. The sky outside his window was lightening, casting pale light against his bedroom door. He rolled over in his bed, rubbed his face against his comforter and simply breathed for a moment. Then he got up, dragging his covers off of the bed with him as he rose, and left his room. Once downstairs he curled up on the armchair in front of the TV, turned on the morning news, and stared at the images on the screen until his mind was filled with white noise.
“Morning.”
He jumped, jolted by the voice, and looked over to see his father standing next to the couch, dressed for work and holding a steaming cup of coffee.
“Hey,” Stiles responded, squinting and clearing his throat and running a hand through his hair. He’d been letting it grow out since that spring and it was beginning to get thick and unruly and he wasn’t sure if he liked it or not.
“You okay?” His father asked, taking a sip of his coffee. Stiles shrugged and put on a mask of utter nonchalance.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” He said, stretching. His father didn’t look convinced.
“You sure?” His father asked after a moment, and he fixed Stiles with a calculating look. “You look a bit off…”
“Late night,” Stiles responded quickly, and followed that with a loud yawn. Shaking his head he looked back at his father. “My guild ran a few raids I didn’t want to miss out on.”
“Ah.” His father nodded in understanding. “All right then.”
He didn’t ask what his son was doing up at six in the morning after a late night, and Stiles wasn’t in a mood to supply the information on his own.
“Well, I’m probably going to be back late tonight.” His father said, finishing the rest of his coffee. “You… Well, I was going to say stay out of trouble, but…”
“I’ll try,” Stiles said with a grin, and his father shook his head and laughed.
“That’s good enough I guess.” His father grinned and headed out the back. Stiles listened to the sound of his car fade into the distance as the news flashed to scenes from recent riots in the Middle East. With school out for the summer he was finding it more and more difficult to fill up the empty hours of the day. Honestly, he’d held out some hope that Scott would have been around more often, but his best friend had rekindled the sputtering romance he’d started with Allison a year ago, and was spending most of his time sneaking around the notice of Mr. Argent. Stiles couldn’t blame him, really. He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair again, scowling. He wondered how the hell he’d thought he could handle the empty hours of summer on top of nursing a post-breakup heart, and groaned melodramatically, flopping in the armchair with limbs splayed in all directions. The news was getting annoying and he was starting to get antsy. He really needed to stop getting up so early but he didn’t know how to stop it. Lately it was all he could do to get to sleep at all; maybe he was developing stress-induced insomnia. It would have been a possible if not for the fact that the only stress he had, really, was the boredom of summer. And the breakup.
Stiles rubbed his eyes and curled back up on the armchair, ignoring the weatherman and trying to keep his thoughts on something that wasn’t liable to worsen his mood. It was a bad day for that, it seemed, and he really wasn’t all that surprised when the prickling of the hair at the back of his neck told him he wasn’t alone anymore. With a dramatic sigh and heaven-raised eyes he rolled his head to look at Derek, standing almost in the same spot his father had stood not long before. The man looked back at him impassively, almost guardedly.
“Why yes, of course you can come in,” Stiles said, waving his hand. “Go right ahead and make yourself at home.”
Derek heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes, and sat heavily down on the far end of the couch. Stiles tried to ignore how the older man looked at him, in that intent way that could only mean he was trying to scent him, sense him, feel him. Instead he flipped the channel to an early morning talk show and turned down the volume.
“Are you all right?” Derek asked, and Stiles laughed shortly.
“I’m fine. Peachy keen. Abso-fucking-lutely fantastic,” Stiles replied. There were puppies playing in piles of toilet paper on the TV, and Stiles wasn’t sure how that was supposed to sell anything. Who wanted to associate piddling puppies with something they were going to wipe their ass with, really?
“Did you have the dream again?” Derek’s voice was low. It reeked of concern so thick Stiles wouldn’t have been able to ignore it even if he had been trying. It was nice, in a way. Comforting, to think Derek still worried about him like that. Sometimes he wanted something more than just comforting tone, though; sometimes he wanted comforting arms holding him and comforting words whispered to him under the bed covers at two in the morning.
But that was only sometimes.
“What do you want, Derek?” Stiles said. He gave up on paying attention to the TV and turned a bit in the chair to be facing the werewolf. Derek looked guarded again, as if he’d realized he’d trod somewhere he wasn’t welcome. He stiffened his shoulders and took a breath.
“I need your help,” Derek said. He watched Stiles expectantly, eyebrows raised slightly.
“My help?” Stiles said, and nodded his head. “Usually you just send a howl to Scott and have him drag me along.”
Not usually, his brain said, only lately. He told it to be quiet.
“Well this time I came straight to you,” Derek said.
“At six in the morning.” Stiles said. He stared up at the ceiling, tracing the line of a spiderweb stretching from the light fixture towards the far wall and wondered if he felt like cleaning.
“It’s almost seven,” Derek said.
“Seven in the morning. Because that is so much better than six in the morning,” Stiles replied with more snark than even he had expected. He scratched at his temple and attempted to ignore the uncomfortable silence that stretched between them. “So what do you need my help with at seven in the morning?”
“Boyd and Erica and Isaac were in the woods last night,” Derek started slowly. Stiles turned his head a bit to find the other man looking down into his hands, eyebrows furrowed slightly. After a moment’s pause Derek raised his eyes to look at Stiles. “They reached a clearing they visit occasionally, and were nearly hit by a lightning strike.”
“Lightning?” Stiles asked, puzzled. Derek nodded, and Stiles laughed. “Dude, it wasn’t storming last night. Or even cloudy.”
“Exactly,” Derek said, still fixing him with that intense look. Stiles fidgeted, twisted in his seat and frowned. Derek took that as a sign to continue, and did so with an eagerness that wasn’t entirely like him. “There were four strikes, actually, all in the same spot. They made a hole about seven feet wide and five feet deep, with a hole at the bottom that seemed to be bubbling up a liquid that Isaac said tasted like ocean water.”
“Salt water,” Stiles supplied, or possibly corrected, but Derek frowned, and his eyebrows furrowed even more.
“No,” The man said, shaking his head slowly. “Isaac was pretty specific about that – ocean water.”
“Okay, is there seriously a difference between the two?” Stiles sighed in exasperation and rubbed his forehead. He continued before Derek decided to answer a rhetorical question, “How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know.” Derek shrugged, and placed his hands together. “You’ve been doing all that research into the weird lately; I thought maybe you might have heard about something like this.”
Stiles bit his lip and ran his hand through his hair, tugging at it and trying to remember. He’d read a lot about a lot of stuff over the past months, but springs of ocean water being pulled out of the earth by lightning strikes on cloudless nights wasn’t one of them. He shrugged and spread his hands.
“No clue,” He said, and the older man gave a long-suffering sigh and let his eyes roam the room.
“Can you come down to see it?” Derek asked roughly, his eyes returning to rest on Stiles. “Later. Bring Scott.”
“Wow, okay was that a question or a demand?” Stiles sneered, shaking his head. He could see the set of Derek’s jaw as the older man gritted his teeth.
“You don’t have to come out if you don’t want to,” Derek said, and his tone was cold in a way that Stiles had rarely heard it. Getting up from the couch he began heading for the doorway.
For one wild, crazy moment Stiles wanted to call out, call Derek back Baby I’m sorry come back I didn’t mean to be a bitch like that seriously come back but he bit his lip instead, stared at the TV until he heard the front door close. He rubbed his hands through his hair, maybe a little too roughly, and changed his position on the armchair fitfully.
Ocean water and lightning strikes under a clear night sky, and it didn’t make sense but it made him feel odd all the same. As if he was missing something, by thinking too hard about it, moving too fast in his thinking so that he was too far ahead to notice the red flags as they raised behind him. He turned the TV off and stared back up at the ceiling at that thin line of spider web, and wondered how it all connected together. The dream was still crystal clear in his mind’s eye and Isaac’s insistence on ‘ocean water’ sent trickles of cold down his spine. There was something there and he was missing it, and he wondered if he actually had read something about occurrences like this, somewhere.
With a loud groan he pulled himself off of the armchair and into the kitchen. He ate without really thinking about it, trying to figure out the importance of underground springs in the cycle of things. After poking at the soggy remains of his cereal and finding no answers among them, he dragged himself back upstairs to find his phone and get dressed.
Three hours later he was climbing over a large fallen tree as he followed Isaac and Boyd back to where the young werewolves said the clearing was. Scott was not far behind, and Erica and Derek followed close behind him. Peter brought up the rear, having looked utterly unconcerned by the younger werewolves’s story of the night before and treating the entire outing as an effort to placate them.
“So, no werewolf-strength hallucinogens involved, right?” Stiles said as he paused to catch his breath. Isaac and Boyd turned back to give him twin dirty looks.
“No,” Isaac said, and though he grinned it was only to reveal the sharp points of his canines. Stiles raised his hands in surrender and shook his head.
“Just making sure, don’t need to get fangy on me.”
“It’s kind of exactly the kind of weird that would happen here, though,” Scott mused as he came up next to his friend. “Isn’t it?”
“Uh, I guess?” Stiles gave him a curious look. They started on after Isaac and Boyd again. The trees were beginning to thin, and up ahead the shine of sunlight was getting stronger.
“We’re almost there,” Erica said suddenly, and brushed past them to run up ahead of Boyd and Isaac. The two men sped up as she passed them, and their figures were soon dwindling in the distance.
“Aw, come on,” Stiles groaned, but hurried after them as Scott sped up. Behind them Derek and Peter were hurrying as well, and Stiles hoped they wouldn’t wolf out and leave him in their dust. Again.
The clearing came up almost suddenly, or maybe he hadn’t really been paying attention in his haste to keep up with a pack of super-humans, but he stumbled in the sudden shine of bright sunlight. The smell of brine was thick in the air, almost instantly coating his mouth with salt as he breathed in. Blinking the spots out of his eyes, he found himself suddenly crawling with an odd feeling, goose bumps raising on his skin. He wouldn’t be able to place it, explain it, but something was not right. Maybe it was the way the sunlight seemed focused on the very edges of the clearing, as if something was directing it away from the middle. Maybe it was the loud gurgling sound, as if some kind of liquid was being forced out of a much too small hole.
Maybe, he considered as his eyes finally lost the bright spots and focused, it was the ten foot tall structure of stone and weeds that was standing, slightly lopsided, in the clearing ahead of them.
“What is that?” Scott asked, and Stiles was comforted by the fact that his friend, his best friend in the whole world, had chosen to stay by his side.
“That wasn’t here last night,” Boyd said slowly, and backed away just slightly towards the tree line.
“There was just the hole,” Erica said with a shaking voice, “And the water…”
Whatever had happened last night, the idea that it could have been a freak accident was quickly shot out of everyone’s minds. What the structure could be was almost impossible to discern. There was a large, flat slab across the top of it, with vertical stone posts holding it aloft. Large irregular stones filled the spaces between the posts on three sides, with the side facing them opening into a dark doorway. Stones were arranged in a line of four steps on all four sides, dark gray leading down into the ground, almost as if the structure was erupting up out of it. The entire structure glistened wetly, although in what ambient light it wasn’t apparent, as the sunlight seemed to be avoiding it. The effect of darkness surrounding it was so strong that Stiles looked up into the sky, to see if there was anything above them that could explain the odd lighting effect. The sun shone freely in a clear sky, and below it the structure stood dark and foreboding.
“Okay,” Stiles said, and nodded at no one, really. Scott looked nervous and the other werewolves were either standing stock-still, or pacing along the tree line. Stiles waved a hand at the structure before them. “That is really weird.”
“Yeah,” Scott agreed. What would he do without Scott, really?
“I have no idea what the hell that is,” Stiles continued, still waving his hands at the structure, only in a slightly different variation of movement than before.
“Does anyone?” Peter asked, exchanging glances with every person whose eyes he could meet. There was only silence, and the strange sound of gurgling water. Even as they watched, a bubble of liquid burst out of the doorway facing them, and flowed darkly over the steps to the ground below.
“I’ll, uh…” Stiles swallowed thickly, shuddering at the disgusting taste of salt. “I’ll take pictures. To help research.”
He looked around at the werewolves for some sort of sign, but they all looked horribly uncomfortable. Derek and Scott were close to him, almost flanking him, and possibly looked the least disturbed, but Peter was grimacing and sidling one way or the other, and Boyd and Erica were gripping each other’s arms and breathing out in low hisses. Isaac… it took Stiles a moment to locate the tall werewolf, and when he did the chill on his spine only grew; Isaac sat huddled against one of the tree trunks, rubbing the fingers of his right hand almost obsessively and staring at the stone structure with eyes wide, his face pale. Swallowing thickly, Stiles turned back to the odd stone structure and pulled his phone out of his pocket.
The first step should have been the hardest, but the second turned out to be harder, and the third even more so. The closer he stepped the stronger the scent of brine grew, the more his lungs strained, the more his entire body seemed to ache. Scott and Derek were following him, he could hear that much at least, but it was little consolation in the face of something so utterly strange as what stood before him. The gray stones were larger than he’d thought, he realized as he neared, and though they gleamed oddly they were not smooth. All across their surfaces ran lines of… of hieroglyphs, or pictograms or some sort of odd code, row upon row upon row, some craved so small they were almost incomprehensible.
The gurgle came again, and liquid flowed through the doorway down the stone steps, oozing into the grass surrounding it. Stiles was five feet from the structure when he could feel the ground go soft beneath his shoes. He jerked as he stepped on something hard, pulled his foot back to see that it was a small conch shell. That chill on his spine was growing into an overwhelming coldness, suffusing the muscles and the bones and he was shuddering in the face of the magnitude of unknown that faced him. Raising his phone in shaking hands he focused it on the doorway facing him and took a picture. Then another, just in case. He moved around the structure in a daze, Scott and Derek following behind, as he took picture after picture of every angle of the structure. His fingers were cold and unfeeling and his breath either came in short gasps or didn’t come at all. He couldn’t feel his feet or his legs but he was glad they were able to hold him upright all on their own.
“I think that’s enough.” He said finally, having returned to the front of the structure. “I think…”
The presence of Scott and Derek at his back should have been comforting, but he could feel the cold from them, the chill in them that had extended from those strange and humid dark stones, and it was giving rise to the swirling deep in his gut. Instead of saying what he thought, he flipped through the pictures, allowing Scott to drag him back off of that swampy ground, away from the miniature conch shells and odd carvings. He even allowed Scott to drag him all the way back to that large fallen tree, unaware that the younger werewolves had taken off as soon as they’d left the clearing, unaware that it was only him and Scott with Derek and Peter following further behind, growling softly and looking over their shoulders.
Stiles only allowed Scott to drag him back to the large fallen tree, and no further, because at that point his mind had processed what his eyes were seeing as he tapped through the photos, and he needed to physically stop in order to try to make his brain physically pause. He needed to close his eyes and breathe, and open them again, and look. He needed to make himself accept that sometimes weird things did happen in Beacon Hills, and that this was just another one of those weird things, and that he’d faced weird things before and found the answers behind them, and this would be no different. It wouldn’t be different at all.
“Stiles, what’s wrong?” Scott asked, almost whimpered.
“Nothing,” Stiles answered, too quickly. He turned his phone off and shook his head, and pulled Scott along. “Nothing.”
His phone was off, and the photos were hidden, but his mind replayed them in his mind at every step. Scott was whimpering and tugging at his hoodie sleeve and Stiles knew it was because his friend could hear his heart was racing a million miles per second and feel that his body was shaking, but the more he tried to stop, to calm down, the clearer those images became in his mind, and all he could see before him was impossible vertices, extensions of humid gray stone on axes that couldn’t possible exist, of ocean water in and above and within and without and of stone steps leading to dank caverns where alien geometry enclosed a secret too dark for even the ocean depths to accept without a shudder.