MAN/MONSTER || CHAPTER TWELVE (ONLY ASH REMAINS)

[Enigma]

YURIEVICH RESIDENCE || ROCK HILL, NY

JUNE 17, 2025

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    The TV was still on when the candle went out. Muted. Some inane and overly dramatic police drama on the screen—neither one of them were watching it. Elle didn’t notice at first. She was absently rocking the baby. The rhythm was older than memory, meant to soothe. The living room had taken on that middle-of-the-night hush, the kind where the house itself felt like it was falling asleep. But Elle couldn’t. Not anymore.
    Outside, the woods were silent. Gizmo was curled up with one of their cats, fast asleep. She could see the light on the alarm system blinking. Her phone was dark on the coffee table. The baby had been dozing, warm against her chest. She closed her eyes, breathing in that sweetly-sour scent of baby powder and breastmilk. “Wyatt,” she whispered, kissing his soft little forehead.
    They’d made it official, finally filing the paperwork.
    Wyatt Poe Yurievich—the middle name had been their first pick, the one chosen the moment she’d learned she was pregnant, after their mutual favorite author and to match Lenore. Now it felt more weighted, almost ominous but she knew in her heart of hearts that his name needed to be after her lost brother. Even now, fragments of those memories came to her. They played out like an old family movie on a worn out reel. Stuttering. Stopping. Replaying in the wrong sequence. Torturing her endlessly.
    The baby’s breathing brought her back from her reverie and her eyes snapped open to find the TV had gone blue, counting down the moments until it would shut itself off. His breath had gone shallow—not choking, not exactly. Just strange. She pulled him slightly away from her body, just enough to see his mouth.
    There was ash on his tongue. Again.
    She didn’t gasp. Didn’t scream. Just wiped the soot from his lips with the edge of her sleeve. Her fingers trembled as she did, more from repetition than fear. This was the third night she’d seen it.
    The third night since coming home from her impromptu trip to the Vale with more questions than answers.
    Sev was snoring faintly, slumped in the recliner with the remote still in hand. Exhausted didn’t even begin to cover it. He’d wrestled for SCW on Friday, appeared in Detroit on Sunday for a PWC meet and greet and then fought again Monday for XWF’s Warfare. And now—Tuesday morning—his body had finally given out. His chest rose and fell in slow, pained rhythm, bare save for the faint glow of the spiral on his skin and she wondered if she was the only one who saw the reality when it wasn’t scrawled in body paint for theatrical effect during her husband’s matches. It pulsed like a heartbeat. Mocking her. Taunting.
    She couldn’t bring herself to wake him. He needed this sleep. He’d been working too hard, taking on more and more bookings as if he was trying to run from the inevitable retirement that waited in the wings.
    She couldn’t tell him. Not yet. Not about Maræth. Not about Florida. Not about the answers she hadn’t been ready for or the thousands of questions that she’d been too timid to speak aloud.
    Instead, Elle stood. Gently shifted the baby to her shoulder. Walked through the quiet without even noticing how dark it had become because she could hear something now. Scratching. Furtive, almost frantic—she thought maybe one of the cats had gotten itself stuck but the doors were all open. She kept going. Down the hallway. She set Wyatt down in his crib, picking up the baby monitor from its charging cradle before continuing on down the hall, past the nursery to the end.
    She stopped in front of Lenore’s door.
    The sound was coming from inside. The door was closed almost all the way, open enough to let in the warm glow of the mushroom-shaped night light that was exactly the same as the one she’d had as a child. It felt warmer here. She didn’t understand it at first. It wasn’t real heat—no temperature change. Just an odd pressure. Like something was burning just beyond perception. Like a house wrapped in smoke without flames. Like an eerie calm before the storm.
    Elle opened the door.
    Lenore was asleep, one arm flopped over the edge of the bed. Her fingers were dusted with crayon wax. On the wall, just above the headboard, three crude symbols had been drawn:
    A red spiral.
        A golden crown.
            A purple flame.
    Each one smeared, jagged, childlike, as if they'd been drawn in a hurry. Or a trance. Broken crayons lay scattered on the floor beside the bed, the Crayola box tipped on its side.
    Below the symbols was a sentence, scribbled in red:
        The one who laughs never wakes up.
    Elle didn’t breathe. Her ragged nails dug into her palms—she could feel that just fine. This wasn’t a dream. She stared at her daughter’s sleeping face, at the broken red crayon on the floor and the dust on Lenore’s fingers. She hadn’t learned to write letters yet. She hadn’t even started learning to read and yet that sentence was perfectly written.
Lenore mumbled something. Then: “Mommy?”
    She stirred but didn’t wake up.
    Elle stepped back into the hallway and shut the door behind her with the quietest click she could manage. She walked back to the living room, sat down slowly and placed the baby monitor on the table, staring at it warily as if she expected it to start tormenting her with that damned lullaby from hell again. She didn’t remember putting that book there next to the candle.     Didn’t even remember seeing it before but its cover was stained and worn, thick leather that looked like it was decades old. She flipped it open, saw faded ink covering the pages—Sev’s handwriting in a mix of Cyrillic and English—The Ash Codex. She kept flipping pages, faster now, her heart in her throat because she could feel it calling to her. She’d thought the Codex was just some mythical, metaphorical thing her husband had started referencing to make his promos scarier. Apparently not. This was scripture. A gospel of madness that made her heart ache.
    It was here. Solid. Real. Full of sigils and doodles and things she didn’t want to think about. The book flopped to the last page. Fresh ink. The words Fragment 77 scrawled at the top.
    She hadn’t written it. Not consciously. But the handwriting on this page was undeniably hers:

Three came bearing names they gave themselves.

But none bore the mark. None bore the weight.

And the flame made no distinction between myth and meat.

But I had seen this before.

The one who wins can’t walk.

The one who survives isn’t spared.

And the one who laughs…never wakes up.

The spiral turns, devouring all meaning.

Devouring EVERYTHING.

Only ash remains.

---

    The spiral glowed faint against Sev’s chest. His fingers twitched. His breath caught in his throat, the snore stuttering before evening out.
    He was dreaming.
    The first thing he felt was the heat.
        Not warmth. Not fire.
        Pressure.
            Like the sky collapsed. Like he was caught in a vacuum.
    He was in a ring that wasn’t a ring—ropes made of hair, canvas stitched with names he’d bled for, turnbuckles draped with those championships that he’d coveted so hard. The mat beneath his boots pulsed like something alive, heaving and breathing through the ash.
    Three figures stood across from him.
        Not men. Not anymore.
    One wore a crown, cracked and rusted, the tips bent inward like thorns.
        Another was wrapped in flames—writhing, hungry, but never burning out.
            The third had no face. Just a painted smile and hollow sockets leaking black.
    They moved in stutters. Stop-motion and jagged, like memory fragments trying to pull themselves back together.
        Like names that forgot who they belonged to.
    ENIGMA didn’t move. He didn’t need to because the ring began to tilt.
    Not left. Not right. But inward—spiraling down.
    The masked one spoke first, voice like a scratched VHS tape:
        “I never tapped. I never begged. I never bled.”
    The spiral didn’t care. His mask melted, dripping to the mat in pink and red streaks. Underneath, there was no mouth. Just a laugh that shouldn’t be heard, cutting off into an inhuman scream.
    The fireborn shouted:
        “You don’t know what I’ve endured!”
    Then collapsed into smoke.
    The crowned one raised his hand like a preacher mid-sermon, a Bible clutched within—
        “I came to save them—”
    His crown split with a sound like cracking bone. Blood poured from the rivets in his skull. He dropped to his knees as the Bible burst into flames, incinerating him before he dropped into the abyss.
    And Sev—
        Sev looked down.
    The spiral was etched into the canvas now, glowing. Turning. Feeding. A black hole gaping like an infinite maw at its centre.
    The crowd was screaming but there were no faces, no fans, no features. Only masks.
        Dozens of them. Melting.
        All chanting:
            “Only ash remains.”
    He stepped forward. The ring dissolved into a doorway made of fire, the lintel lined with crayon marks.
        A spiral.
            A crown.
                A flame.
    On the other side, he saw Elle, her hand on the Codex. Her lips were moving and he heard her voice like it came over a great distance, echoing, saying:
        “The one who laughs never wakes up.”
    Then the floor dropped.
    Sev jerked awake with a choking gasp, eyes wide. The candle was gone, a pool of melted wax there instead. Elle sat on the couch and slowly she turned her head to look at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Haunted. The Codex was open in her lap.
    Neither of them spoke. She simply handed him the book, let him see the words that had appeared on the page opposite hers, in his handwriting:

Fragment 78

Three came crawling, drunk on myth,

wearing scars like scripture.

Each dreamed of godhood—

but none were whole.

None were ready.

None were marked.

The spiral does not bargain.

It does not wait.

It does not kneel.

They came seeking thrones.

They left with nothing but

cracked crowns

and smoke in their lungs.

The devourer does not share its name.