Chapter 9: Threads of Power

Chapter 9: Threads of Power

The second bell tolled at ten o’clock, a deep, mournful sound that was not a summons but a dismissal. It was the signal for the people of Solenvol to lock their doors, extinguish their main lights, and retreat into the shallow safety of their homes. It was the curfew that marked the end of another day survived. As the last vibration faded into the oppressive quiet, the town became a ghost of itself, a collection of dark houses where families huddled, praying not to dream.

For Tamara and Rory, it was the starting bell.

They moved through the darkened back alleys, a pair of specters in a town of sleeping prisoners. The factory loomed ahead, a jagged black wound against the perpetual twilight of the sky. Its broken windows were like vacant eye sockets in a colossal skull, and the rust-streaked walls, visible even in the dim light, resembled old, dried blood. The fear that radiated from it was a palpable force, a cold pressure against the skin.

“The main gates are a death trap,” Rory whispered, his breath pluming in the chill air. “Watched.”

He didn’t specify by what, and Tamara didn’t ask. She followed him along the crumbling perimeter wall to a place where the foundation had given way, opening into a dark, gaping hole that led into the factory’s underbelly. “Old drainage culvert,” he explained, pulling aside a sheet of corrugated metal. “Used to dump dye runoff into the river. Now it’s just our front door.”

The air that wafted out was thick with the metallic tang of rust and the cloying sweetness of decay, layered over something else—a faint, static hum that vibrated in Tamara’s bones. It was the lingering energy of a catastrophe, the psychic residue of a scream that had never ended.

Inside, the scale of the place was overwhelming. Vast, cavernous chambers were filled with the silent, hulking shapes of rusted machinery. Moonlight, filtered through the grimy upper windows, cast long, distorted shadows that made the looms look like skeletal beasts poised to spring. Every surface was coated in a thick blanket of dust that muffled their footsteps, the silence so profound that Tamara could hear the frantic beat of her own heart.

They moved deeper, their small flashlight beams cutting sharp, nervous paths through the gloom. Faded Soviet-era posters still clung to the walls, depicting smiling, robust workers exceeding their quotas. Glory to the Dedicated Worker! one proclaimed above a drawing of a woman holding up a pair of perfectly uniform grey socks. The juxtaposition with the ruin around them was grotesque.

“This is just the weaving floor,” Rory murmured, his voice a low thrum that was quickly swallowed by the immense space. “The real work happened below.”

He led her toward a massive spiral staircase in the center of the room, which descended into even deeper blackness. As they went down, the air grew colder, and the strange, humming energy intensified. This level was different. The machinery was more complex, more centralized. And on the walls, Tamara saw the first signs of true wrongness.

Scratched crudely into the brickwork, half-hidden behind rusted pipes, were symbols. They weren’t the Cyrillic letters of the propaganda posters. They were a bizarre, unholy fusion of ideologies. A hammer and sickle was intertwined with a spiraling, thorny vine. A five-pointed Soviet star had been re-carved, its points connected by lines to form a sigil that pulsed with a faint, malevolent energy. In the very center of the floor, a circle had been etched into the concrete, filled with this blasphemous script—a party official’s attempt at a summoning circle.

“This is it,” Tamara breathed, her academic curiosity warring with a primal sense of dread. “This is where they did it.”

At the heart of the circle stood a machine unlike any other on the floor. It was a loom, but it had been grotesquely modified. Thick, armored cables snaked from its base, burrowing into the concrete floor like metallic roots. The central shuttle and heddles were stained with a dark, permanent discoloration that was not rust. It looked less like a tool for manufacturing and more like an altar for a sacrifice. This was where the forest spirit had been tortured into a god-parasite.

“They tried to plug it in,” Rory said, his voice hollow with a kind of ancestral horror. “They thought they could wire a god into their five-year plan.”

They found the foreman’s office overlooking the desecrated production floor. The glass was shattered, but the room itself was strangely preserved, a pocket of the past sealed by dust and fear. A single metal filing cabinet stood against the far wall. Its drawers were rusted shut, but Rory produced a crowbar from his pack and, with a series of sharp, protesting screeches of metal, wrenched one open.

Inside, beneath files of mundane production logs and worker assignments, was a slim leather-bound folio. The paper inside was brittle, covered in frantic handwriting—a mix of precise Russian technical notes and terrified, scrawled observations.

Tamara smoothed a page open under the flashlight beam. It was a blueprint, but not for a textile loom. It was a schematic for a conduit.

“My God,” she whispered, tracing the lines with a trembling finger. “Rory, look.”

The drawing showed the monstrous loom at the center of the factory. But it also showed what was happening beneath it. The thick cables didn't connect to a power grid; they connected to a series of pipes labeled Botanical Matter Feed. The notes in the margins were chillingly clear. They had been grinding up the local plants—the begonias—and weaving the pulverized, psychically-charged material directly into the wool.

“‘Each thread a conduit,’” Tamara read aloud, her voice shaking. “‘Each garment an anchor to the worker’s bio-signature.’ They weren’t just making socks, Rory. They were making shackles. They engineered a way to physically tether every single person to the entity’s will.”

It all crashed down on her with the force of a physical blow. The socks weren’t just a symbol of loyalty or a mark of ownership. They were a delivery system. A direct, physical line from the Merry Man’s consciousness into the very cells of every resident of Solenvol. Their forced gratitude, their terror, their joy—it was all being siphoned through these woolen threads, feeding the parasite and reinforcing its control. The ritual wasn't just psychological; it was a daily biological recommitment to their own enslavement.

Rory stared at the schematic, his face a mask of dawning, sickening comprehension. “So every morning…”

“Every morning,” Tamara finished for him, “the entire town plugs itself back into the machine.”

This was the truth behind the accident. Not a failed ritual of control, but a horrifically successful ritual of symbiosis, where the town had become the parasite’s unwilling body. The factory hadn't just amplified the Merry Man’s power; it had industrialized it, turning a local fear into a perfectly efficient, self-sustaining engine of torment.

As the full weight of their discovery settled on them, Tamara’s eyes fell to a detail at the bottom of the schematic. All the lines, all the botanical feeds, converged on a single point deep beneath the factory’s foundation. It was labeled simply: Центральный Узел. The Central Node. The drawing didn't show a vat or a processing tank. It showed a single, massive, tangled root structure, a knot of impossible biology from which everything else stemmed.

Before she could point it out to Rory, a sound echoed up from the floor below them. It wasn't the wind or the settling of old metal. It was a low, scraping groan. The sound of immense weight shifting on the concrete floor.

Rory instantly clicked off the flashlight, plunging them into absolute darkness. He grabbed Tamara’s arm, his grip like steel.

“Something’s down there,” he breathed, his mouth close to her ear.

The sound came again, closer this time. A heavy, rhythmic thump… drag… thump… drag… It was the sound of something impossibly large and misshapen, pulling itself across the factory floor in the darkness below. The tomb was not as empty as they had thought.