The Thirteenth Step

The first distant crinkle of thunder made itself heard.

Drake had just set his kettle back on the stovetop.

He poured steaming water over a bag of black tea and began steeping as he hurried back to his case files, uncaring of the hot liquid sloshing over the lip of the cup and plopping onto the floorboards.

Around him, the hostel kept pretending to be ordinary.

A German couple argued softly near the window. Two women at the far table leaned into each other and whispered, their eyes flashing in Drake’s direction. In Europe, dressed like he was, and staying in a hostel, it was possible those weren’t stares of contempt or disgust.

Maybe curiosity.

Maybe something else.

Ash wanted to come. He knew she did. But she couldn’t go on as many adventures as Drake, not anymore. Not with her father needing care back at the tavern, and not with the scaur still teaching her what it meant to be marked.

Drake had tracked down another coven.

An ancient one.

A sigil once lost.

He was getting closer.

He was staying near Tunkinskiy National Park and would soon be venturing toward the area around the volcano.

“Always with the demonic spirit summoning,” he thought.

He opened the next file.

Incident Report
Time: 03:17 local
Filed by: Ranger Nikolai “Kolya” Sokolov
Location: Cherskiy Volcano perimeter

Drake’s eyes scanned the lines.

“...no bodies recovered. One shoe found forty-seven yards east from center.”

He stopped there.

Forty-seven yards east from center.

He knew that language.

Hunters, rangers, cops, soldiers, and priests all developed their own way of lying to themselves. Center was not a word you used unless there was something in the woods that had no business being called a center.

All over the world, for centuries, cults formed in the forgotten places. They usually began with small crimes. Trespassing. Animal mutilation. Missing supplies. A local boy who wouldn’t speak after walking home through the trees.

Then the crimes escalated.

The covens tended toward old names. Medusa. Inanna. The Zorya. Hecate. Lilith. Lamashtu. Kali. Chinnamasta.

And most terrifying of all, the one Drake had once called Satan’s wife.

The Lamia.

But they never ended. Regional demons. Vamps. Cults. Covens. Something always came out of the black timber with a new mask and an old hunger.

“Job security,” Drake could hear Morgan say.

The memory came in warm and sarcastic, and it hurt more because it was fading.

Drake shuffled through the banker’s box and pulled out the CCTV tape.

“This is why I’m here,” he thought.

National forests.

National parks.

The old green places people treated like vacation postcards until the trees stopped behaving like trees.

There were stories that floated between rangers, hunters, and search-and-rescue teams. Stories about children vanishing three steps ahead of their parents. Campsites found abandoned with food still warm. Voices calling from the wrong direction. Staircases standing alone in the deep woods with no house, no foundation, no road, no explanation.

He reached for the next file.

Stamped across the top in Russian were three words he had already translated twice, hoping he had gotten them wrong.

The Cinder-Wives of Morena.

Below it, in Kolya Sokolov’s careful handwriting:

Attempted summoning of Mokoš.

The internet had made jokes of the staircases.

r/nosleep had made legends of them.

But Drake had learned a long time ago that folklore did not become folklore because it was false. It became folklore because people needed a safer shape for the truth.

The stairs were not stairs.

That was the first mistake.

A staircase in the woods was only what the mind chose to see when the Laminae folded against itself. Two realities crossing, the staircase itself bearing some characteristics of the reality it’s pressing in from. Human beings understood steps. They understood up and down. They understood ascent and descent because the soul had been dreaming in those directions since before language.

But the stairs did not go up.

They went through.

Drake had seen doorways like that before. Not many. Enough to know that every culture gave them a different name. Gates. Ladders. Bridges. Mouths. Wells. Roads of the dead. Jacob’s ladder. The world tree. The silver cord. The narrow path.

All metaphors.

All apologies.

The truth was worse.

The Laminae were not stacked like floors in a building. They were layered like wet skin, pressed together in places by grief, worship, blood, memory, and old violence. When one layer grew thin enough, something from above could descend.

Or something from below could be invited up. Scars and scabs of old wounds, both physical and emotional, ripped up and spliced.

That was where the Eidolons came from.

Not ghosts. Not demons. Not gods, though men had called them all three and built temples around the misunderstanding. Eidolons were things that had ascended through the higher skins of the world and learned how to reach back down.

To them, a human being was not a soul.

It was an opening.

Drake paused the tape.

On the screen, just beyond the birch trunks, the staircase stood in the snow.

Thirteen steps.

He counted them twice.

His stomach tightened.

Most reports only mentioned twelve.

The thirteenth was new.

Morgan had once told him that ascent and descent were the oldest lies in creation.

“People think higher means better,” Morgan had said. “That’s the trap. Some things climb because they’re holy. Some things climb because they’re hungry.”

Drake leaned closer to the screen.

The top step did not end in the air.

It ended in a blur, a slight distortion above the snow line, like heat shimmer in winter.

A door with no frame.

A mouth with no face.

A wound pretending to be architecture.

He reached for Ranger Sokolov’s notes.

Kolya had underlined one phrase three times.

Do not answer her.

Below that, in smaller script:

Do not climb.

And below that:

If the thirteenth step appears, the gate has already opened.

Drake sat back.

The Cinder-Wives of Morena were not trying to summon Mokoš in the old sense. They were not kneeling around candles begging some dead goddess to appear in the smoke.

They were building a descent.

Morena for death.

Mokoš for the thread.

Winter and weaving.

Grave and womb.

They were trying to stitch one Lamina to another.

And the missing bodies were not victims.

They were knots.