FIELD LOG 12 — THE STUDY DOOR
Expedition Archive // Restricted Access
Recovered Documents Dated: November 25th, 1911
Author: Alias Voss
Neither of us moved after the whisper came from upstairs.
The house became completely silent.
Even the storm outside seemed to pause.
I remember staring toward the staircase while the dying fire beside us cast long shadows across the sitting room walls. My mother sat frozen in the chair opposite me, one trembling hand gripping the edge of the blanket around her shoulders so tightly her knuckles had turned white.
Then the voice came again.
“Alias.”
Soft.
Almost gentle.
My father’s voice.
The sound drifted faintly through the ceiling above us from the direction of his study.
Every instinct inside me knew it was wrong.
Corvin was gone.
I had watched the Gate consume him beneath Hollow Peak. I had seen the Black Sun world with my own eyes. Whatever remained of my father now existed somewhere beyond the threshold beneath the mountain.
And yet…
the voice upstairs sounded exactly like him.
My mother slowly shook her head.
“No…”
Terror spread across her face as tears filled her eyes.
“That’s not him.”
The whisper returned immediately.
Closer this time.
“Please…”
The fire dimmed violently.
Cold flooded through the room so suddenly that frost began creeping slowly across the edges of the windows overlooking the valley outside. The lantern hanging beside the staircase flickered weakly while the shadows stretching across the hallway darkened unnaturally around the study door above.
I forced myself to stand despite every part of me wanting to run.
“Alias,” my mother whispered sharply.
“Don’t.”
But I already knew I had to go upstairs.
Not because I believed my father had somehow returned.
Because part of me feared something else had.
The staircase groaned softly beneath my boots as I climbed toward the upper hallway. Every sound inside the house felt amplified by the silence surrounding us. The storm outside had almost completely faded now, leaving only faint wind moving through the valley beyond the frozen windows.
Halfway up the stairs, I noticed something that stopped me cold.
Light beneath the study door.
Faint crimson light.
The same colour as the threshold beneath Hollow Peak.
My heart began hammering so hard I could barely breathe.
The closer I moved toward the study, the colder the hallway became. Frost covered the wooden walls in spreading patterns while thin black ash drifted slowly through the air despite every window remaining shut.
The whisper came again from the other side of the door.
“Alias… help me…”
My father’s voice sounded weak now.
Painfully weak.
And for one horrifying moment…
I almost believed it really was him.
I reached the door slowly while my mother remained frozen at the bottom of the staircase below unable to follow me further.
The handle felt ice cold beneath my hand.
Then something moved behind the door.
Not footsteps.
Scratching.
Slow.
Rhythmic.
Like fingernails dragging across wood.
Every memory of Hollow Peak surged violently back into my thoughts — the whispers beneath the mountain, the chains tightening across the abyss, the Black Sun hanging above endless ash plains.
And my father screaming while the Gate consumed him.
The scratching stopped instantly.
Silence filled the hallway again.
Then softly…
a single knock came from inside the study.
Three slow impacts.
My blood turned cold.
The same rhythm from Hollow Peak.
The same impacts we had heard beneath the mountain.
My mother began crying quietly downstairs.
I think part of her already understood what I was about to discover.
The whisper returned one final time.
“Open the door.”
The voice no longer sounded fully human.
Something deeper moved beneath the words now. Multiple tones speaking slightly out of sync beneath my father’s voice itself.
Like other voices were learning how to wear it.
I stepped backward instinctively.
The crimson light beneath the study door intensified suddenly, spilling across the hallway floor while the walls around me began vibrating faintly beneath another distant impact somewhere impossibly deep below the earth.
Then the study door moved.
Not opening.
Breathing.
The wood bent inward slowly like something enormous was pressing against it from the other side. Thin fractures spread across the surface while black ash poured from beneath the frame in slow drifting clouds.
And through the cracks…
I saw crimson light moving inside the room.
Not fire.
An eye.
Watching me.
My father’s journals suddenly exploded from beneath the door as though caught in violent wind from inside the study. Pages filled with symbols and frantic calculations scattered across the hallway around my feet while whispers flooded through the house from every direction at once.
Not one voice.
Hundreds.
“THE GATE REMEMBERS.”
The door slammed violently outward.
The study beyond was completely dark except for crimson fractures spreading across the walls and ceiling like veins beneath flesh. Papers spiralled through the room in impossible wind while shadows moved unnaturally against the far corners beyond the desk.
And at the centre of the study…
something stood beside the window.
Tall.
Motionless.
Wrapped in darkness.
For one terrible second I thought it was my father.
Then the thing tilted its head too far sideways.
Its outline twisted unnaturally beneath the crimson light pulsing through the room while faint fractures glowed beneath the surface of its skin exactly like the fragment beneath Hollow Peak.
The thing smiled.
Not with relief.
Recognition.
And every whisper inside the house suddenly spoke together in my father’s voice.
“YOU OPENED THE GATE.”