FIELD LOG 02 — THE SYMBOL IN THE MOUNTAIN

Expedition Archive // Restricted Access
Recovered Documents Dated: October 7th, 1911
Author: Elias Voss

I was eleven years old the first time my father took me beyond the Ashmoor cliffs.

The journey lasted three days through frozen rain and broken woodland where even the birds refused to sing. He barely spoke during the entire expedition. Every hour he would stop to check the strange brass compass hanging from his neck — though the needle no longer pointed north.

It needle span erratically instead of settling.

At the time, I thought it was another one of his obsessions.

Another myth.

Another dead end.

But I remember the moment everything changed.

We reached the mountain shortly before nightfall.

The locals refused to go near it. They called it Hollow Peak. Shepherds claimed strange sounds echoed beneath the rock after sunset. Entire caravans had reportedly vanished on the northern pass. My father dismissed none of it.

In fact, he seemed encouraged.

He spent hours studying the cliffside with sketches pulled from his journals — symbols copied from forgotten tombs, temple walls and ancient manuscripts gathered over decades. Most of them made no sense to me then.

But one symbol appeared more than any other.

A black circle surrounded by radiating fractures.

The Black Sun.

I remember the lantern light flickering across the stone as my father suddenly froze.

His hands began shaking.

There, hidden beneath centuries of collapsed rock and ash, was the symbol carved directly into the mountain itself.

Massive.

Perfectly symmetrical.

Far older than the surrounding stone.

No tool marks.

No weathering.

As though the mountain had formed around it.

I asked him what it meant.

He stared at the carving for a long time before answering.

“It means someone found the gate before us.”

That night we camped beside the cliffs.

Neither of us slept.

The sounds began shortly after midnight.

Deep metallic groans beneath the earth.

Not natural.

Not shifting rock.

Something rhythmic.

Like enormous machinery turning somewhere far below the mountain.

My father spent the rest of the night writing frantically into his journal while the compass spun endlessly on the table beside him.

At dawn, he showed me something he had uncovered near the symbol.

A piece of black metal buried inside the stone itself.

Cold to the touch.

Covered in impossible markings that seemed to move whenever I looked away.

I wanted to leave immediately.

My father refused.

Because carved beneath the Black Sun symbol, almost invisible beneath centuries of erosion, were three words written in a language neither of us should have understood.

Yet somehow…

we both read them perfectly.

“THE DOOR REMAINS SEALED.”