"BONE WEAVER" - Redwood Bureau Phenomenon #7066_2

Summary

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Redwood Bureau – “BONE WEAVER” (RBP#7066_2)

Podcast: Redwood Bureau
Date: July 4, 2026
Host/Lead Voice: Agent Conroy (voiced by Josh Tomar)
Produced by: Eeriecast Network

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Episode Overview

In this chilling installment, Agent Conroy leaks the Redwood Bureau’s file on "BONE WEAVER" (RBP#7066), a supernatural entity born from a blend of rogue science and dark rituals. The episode unveils the entity's origins, its horrific powers, and its catastrophic rampage through a small town. Through first-hand testimonies—survivors, officers, and response teams—the episode reconstructs the day BONE WEAVER brought about an apocalyptic breach between realities, all while exposing the Bureau’s failures and the monumental risks of tampering with the unnatural.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of the Bone Weaver

(Agent Conroy’s Narrative, 01:04–04:55)

• Background: The BONE WEAVER was the result of Dr. Calvin Leeds’ “Nexus Initiative," an ambitious, amoral project to build superior operatives by splicing spider DNA into human embryos and, later, delving into the occult.
• Process: After failed genetic experiments, Leeds recruited orphaned children and eventually procured bodies from the criminal underworld.
• Turning to the Occult: When science failed, Leeds invoked powers from “the far side of the veil.” His last ritual was a success—horribly so.
• Birth of the Entity:
  • “His last ritual… It worked. It gave him exactly what he’d been chasing. And the thing he made climbed out of its tank. Killed him. Killed everyone else sealed in that lab…” (03:21–03:22, Agent Conroy)
• Abilities: The entity consumes not just lives but “life energy, your soul… Taking it is what gives it power over your bones.”
• Aftermath: Initially wounded during its escape, it went underground for three years, growing stronger by feeding.

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2. The Attack: Survivor Testimony #1 — The Husband’s Search

(First-person account, 04:55–17:59)

• A longtime resident recounts a regular evening with his wife Quinn—until the forest falls unnaturally silent and a fetid, chilling scent permeates the air.
• Dog’s Unusual Behavior: Boone, their dog, refuses to follow his owner—a sign that precedes horror.
• Search & Encounter:
  • Tracking his wife through disturbed earth and signs of dragging, he finds her hat and eventually a monstrous mass of “ribbed and pale and long… crawling, moving everywhere at once, like the whole of it was alive.”
  • The entity lures him, imitating Quinn’s voice but failing her cadence, confirming something inhuman has control.
  • Attempts to kill the creature are futile: “I brought a rifle up and put a round into the thickest part… It didn’t even react.” (around 12:35)
  • He is hunted by the creature, dragged through the woods, and finds himself face to face with a grotesque amalgamation of bones, including his wife’s still-living head used as a lure.
  • Memorable Moment:
    • “Her jaw started snapping like a wild animal, tearing the fingers off my hand and then chewing up my arm… they tore through me like a wood chipper.” (17:35)

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3. Town-wide Catastrophe: Police Officer’s Perspective

(Officer’s account, 21:08–35:20)

• Routine Morning Disrupted: The officer describes a slow morning that rapidly unravels as dispatches report “animal attacks” across the small town.
• Escalating Chaos:
  • Multiple calls, confusing locations, and gunfire over comms signal something beyond any animal attack.
  • Upon arrival, he witnesses devastation:
    • “Two blocks down, the middle of my town was gone… There was smoke coming up off them. Cars stopped and flipped every which way… this deep, grinding groan that didn’t belong to anything I’d ever heard.” (26:00)
  • The BONE WEAVER is now a colossal entity, dragging people into itself, grinding them into gore, leaving a crimson trail down Main Street.
• Futility & Despair:
  • Officers’ weapons are meaningless: “Rounds going in… didn’t do anything. One of those arms came out… and plucked one of them right out from behind the car.” (~28:45)
  • The officer flees, only to be stopped by mysterious, heavily armed men at a roadblock—clearly aware of the entity and intent on containing witnesses, not the creature.
• Notable Quote:
  • "Standing there in the road. They weren’t not hearing me. They’d heard me fine. They already knew what was downtown. They were there to keep everybody else from getting out." (32:19)
  • After protesting, he is shot and left dying in the road as more cars approach, sealing the fate of those inside the town.

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4. Redwood Bureau Response: The Operatives’ Last Stand

(Operative’s account, 35:20–46:58)

• Massive Response Mobilization: A large-scale paramilitary response, with “everyone who can carry a rifle,” descends on the town to exterminate RBP7066.
• Supernatural Battle: The Bureau employs arcane-imbued weaponry. Each hit lights up runes/marks in the creature, which only seem to empower it.
• The True Purpose Revealed:
  • The BONE WEAVER begins constructing a towering bone structure in the heart of town—“It was folding itself into what I can only describe as a structure.” (~41:00)
• Escalation:
  • A massive, reality-bending strike is called in—“the sky fell on it”—but it only fuels the phenomenon. The runes grow brighter and the entity pulls energy, light and matter into itself.
  • Opening the Door:
    • “And for one second the middle of it went so dark it was like the opposite of light… It tore right through the center of the structure, a seam splitting in existence…” (~43:46)
    • The breach becomes a passage to a hostile, alien world. Through it emerge further abominations, “nothing… had ever lived on this earth.”
• Hopelessness:
  • “Every one of them turned toward the door, crawling over each other, fighting to get through.” (46:22)

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5. Analysis & Fallout — Agent Conroy's Final Assessment

(Agent Conroy, 46:58–49:26)

• The Real Threat: The Bone Weaver wasn't just a flesh-eating monster—its true purpose was to open a gateway between worlds, using the bureau’s own arcane weaponry as the final fuel.
• Blame and Warning:
  • “The Boneweaver was never just a monster that eats… It was always planning an opening—a door. And the Bureau… helped it. They fed it…” (47:42)
• Unanswered Questions: Conroy admits uncertainty: “I don’t know what’s coming, coming through, and I don’t know if they will be able to stop it. I don’t know how many. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know if there’s a single thing left that can stop them.”
• Final Words to Listeners:
  • “Watch the news this week. Watch who does the lie, and how hard they work to make it sound like nothing at all. This is Cypher. Keep your loved ones close, stay alert, and stay alive.” (49:20)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “The thing he made climbed out of its tank. Killed him. Killed everyone else...” – Agent Conroy (03:22)
• “It pulls the skeleton right out of the dead and fuses it into itself and it grows.” – Agent Conroy (03:35)
• “Her jaw started snapping like a wild animal, tearing the fingers off my hand…” – Survivor/Husband (~17:35)
• “There was so much noise—screaming and glass and this other sound way down low that I felt in my chest…” – Police Officer (26:13)
• “Standing there in the road… they were there to keep everybody else from getting out.” – Police Officer (32:19)
• “The bone was arranging into something with edges and columns rising… folding itself into what I can only describe as a structure.” – Operative (41:02)
• “Then there was another side to it I could see through the damn thing. A horizon leaning the wrong way, a sky some color that doesn’t have a name and made me sick to try to look at…” – Operative (43:54)
• “The Boneweaver was never just a monster that eats… it was always planning an opening—a door. And the Bureau… helped it.” – Agent Conroy (47:46)
• “Stay alert, and stay alive.” – Agent Conroy (49:24)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [01:04–04:55]: Origins of Bone Weaver and Dr. Leeds' abominable experiments
• [04:55–17:59]: Survivor's woodland encounter and firsthand account of the creature’s horror
• [21:08–35:20]: Officer’s perspective on the town's attack and government cover-up
• [35:20–46:58]: Paramilitary response, supernatural battle, portal opening
• [46:58–49:26]: Agent Conroy's analysis, warning, and closing remarks

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Episode Tone

The language and delivery are methodical, journalistic, and haunted—Conroy offers facts, but with an undertone of urgent disbelief and regret. First-person segments are raw with fear and trauma, building a palpable sense of mounting dread and inexorable doom.

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Summary

This “Redwood Bureau” episode exposes a clandestine horror unleashed by scientific and occult hubris. The BONE WEAVER, assembled from human and animal suffering and empowered by Bureau missteps, triggers a breach between worlds, opening the floodgates to unthinkable entities. Through fragments of brave, doomed testimony, Agent Conroy lays out a story of failure, horror, and cosmic consequences, warning that the true disaster may only be beginning.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[C]

Beware the Redwood Bureau. A secret organization which captures and researches creatures and objects that defy explanation. Their reckless procedures have led to countless innocent lives lost. I am Agent Conroy. I worked for the Redwood Bureau. But I have escaped them to leak their reports to the unsuspecting public. You have the right to know. This is Cipher. Some of you were here a few years back for a file we put out on something terrible the Bureau made. If you weren't, listen closely because this is important. There was a researcher, Dr. Calvin Leeds. He ran a program called the Nexus Initiative. The pitch he sold the BIRO was that human agents were weak, fallible, disposable. And that he could build them something better. A purpose grown operative. He started by splicing spider genes into human embryos. And when that produced nothing but dead women and dead monstrosities, he kept going. Comatose. Test subjects. Then infants and children from Bureau orphanages. Then when even the Bureau's stomach turned and they cut off his supply. Bodies bought from the criminal underworld because Leeds had decided a long time ago that other people were just material. And when the science alone wouldn't give him what he wanted, he turned to the other thing he taught himself. The occult. He summoned and bound entities from somewhere on the far side of the veil and put them to work on his hybrids. And he practiced tearing open the space between worlds until he could do it on command. His last ritual.

[D]

It worked.

[C]

It gave him exactly what he'd been chasing. And the thing he made climbed out of its tank. Killed him. Killed everyone else sealed in that lab with him and did it by taking more than their lives. That thing doesn't just kill you. It takes your life energy, your soul, whatever word you want to use. And taking it is what gives it power over your bones. It pulls the skeleton right out of the dead and fuses it into itself and it grows. Human, animal. It doesn't care. The Bureau archived it as RBP7066 boneweaver. It got out of that lab, but in the process, the Bureau's security teams tore a huge amount of mass off it on the way, hurting it badly enough that it had to go underground and recover. For the last three years, it was out there somewhere, licking its wounds, and the Bureau swore they'd have it before it got its full strength back. They didn't. In one I've pieced together since is that it used this time intelligently. It fed, it grew. And yesterday it did something the Bureau never saw coming.

[D]

The fire was being stubborn, but I didn't mind. I'd split that wood too green, and it never dried right in the shed. So I had it going in stages, coaxing the flame and feeding it and letting it sulk and coaxing it back. 40 years on an excavator teaches you that most things give if you stay on them and keep your temper. I had a cigar Quinn bought me back in town, and I was content, fire or no fire. She was inside lacing her boots for her walk. Most nights up there she takes a loop past the property line and back a little over half an hour, and I make the fire while she does the walk's her time, making the fire and having a cigar as mine. We've split it that way for close to 20 years. Boone usually goes with her. That dog loves the walk almost more than he loves eating. But when she slapped her leg and called him, he stayed put in the corner of the porch and looked at her. She called again and he didn't budge. She laughed and told him he was getting old and lazy and leaned down and kissed me and said she'd be back before dark, and she went down the steps and up the path. The trees took her, and I sat back down. Boone stayed in this corner, watching where she'd gone. I told him to quit being a baby. He didn't put his ears up. Out of character, certainly, but the only one who knows what a dog is thinking is the dog and I had a fire to build. The quiet got my attention soon enough. The woods up there are loud at dusk Birds settling, the bugs coming out, things shifting in the brush, and all of it was just gone. The whole hillside dropped into a hush, like somebody closed a door on it. I sat there with a cigar halfway to my mouth and listening to the nothing. Then a smell came down the hill on the air, and I've been around every dead thing the woods can make, and this wasn't one of them. Something cold underneath it. Wet stone, the inside of a cave with something gone bad in the back of it. I didn't know what to make of it. Up the hill, off where the walk goes, something heavy moved, a long drag and scrape against the ground there and then gone. I waited, listening for another sound, but all I could hear was my dying fire. I checked my watch. 40 minutes, the high end of her loop. I gave her the time and smoked the cigar down, telling myself I was making mountains out of anthills. At 50 minutes I stood up and went to the tree line and called for her. My voice went out into the trees and nothing came back. I called again, louder, and still nothing. I went into the cabin and got the radio off the counter. We carry handhelds because the phones don't work past the last turnoff. I keyed it and said her name and got nothing back. My neck had gone tight. I made myself stand there and think it through. Rolled ankle. Radio in the creek. There were a dozen ordinary reasons and I went down the list, and not one of them included the dog or the smell or the sinking feeling in my gut. I took the.30 06 off the pegs, fed it, and chambered around before dropping a handful of shells in my pocket. I whistled for Boone. He wouldn't come. I crouched and called him softly, and he pulled away from me, showing me the whites of his eyes. Nine years I've had him. He's never once not come to me. I left him there and took the rifle and the big light and went up the trail. It was full dark under the trees by then. My light made a tunnel, and there was nothing outside that tunnel. I went up the path, calling her name, and still nothing answered back. I was watching the trail, looking for signs, and sure enough it started telling me things. The ground was disturbed in a wide band drawn over lengthwise by something with weight. Past that, a tree stood with its bark stripped in long lines up above my head, four or five of them side by side. I put the light on them and stood there for a second. Then I kept going because Quinn was out there somewhere. The light caught her hat in the middle of the trail, the wool one I had bought her. No blood, no tears, sitting there like it had just come off her head. I picked it up and called for her again with everything I had, and the trees swallowed it whole. A few steps further and the drag started, that flat band from before, smooth at the bottom, running off the trail into the trees on the right. Something heavy had gone through here. I stood at the edge with her hat and flashlight in one hand and the rifle in the other and looked at where it went. Everything in me said don't, and I ignored it because she was up that trail somewhere and there was no version of me to turn back without her. The drag ran maybe 50 yards into a stand of old trees with a brush thinned out. The trunks in there were bare and scarred up high, worn and battered. Then the light found something pale ahead, off behind one of the trunks. Standing up, I stopped and held the light on it. I called her name, soft, heart pounding. Something was wrong. The pale thing straightened and went rigid. Then she answered me, asking where I was, telling me she was hurt. I understood, and the seconds it took to hear it, that it wasn't her. It had her voice, but I knew my wife. She'd never once spoken in that cadence. The shape shifted and the light caught more of was bigger than the tree. What I could see was the top edge of something coiled around itself, back in the dark, ribbed and pale and long, the surface of it crawling, moving everywhere at once, like the whole of it was alive in a way no thing has ever been. It trailed off into the black on both sides, further than the light would reach. Her voice came again, calling me baby, the way she only does with me in private. I brought a rifle up and put a round into the thickest part of it I could see. That's a big cartridge. I've dropped elk with it. I heard it hit. I saw a chip of something pale spin off into the dark, and the thing didn't even react. I worked the bolt and fired again. I cycled and fired a third time, and on that one the mass behind the tree moved slow, and I knew I could put every round that I had into it and it wouldn't change what came next. I ran. I got 20 yards before I heard it coming after me. It sounded like a harvester tearing through the forest, like the whole earth was coming apart at the seams. I could feel it under my feet, and the quiet woods filled up with the thunder of splintering trees and pounding mass. The trail was right there ahead of me, open ground where I could run without branches clawing at my face, and I ran for it, like getting to open ground was going to save me. I had maybe 10ft before something swept my legs out from under me. I went down hard, my face driving into the dirt and the rifle jumping out of my hand and the light spinning off into the trees, and then it hauled me back the way I'd come, with a strength I've got no comparison for, dragging me over the ground on my belly, and every root and rock came up into my ribs and my chin, and I was clawing at the dirt with both hands and pulling up nothing but handfuls of leaves. I could hear my coat tearing apart down the back. I got a hand on a sapling as I went by it and it ripped right out of the ground and came with me. I was screaming, kicking at whatever had me with my free leg and hitting nothing, and the whole time that thing was hauling me back toward the trees like I didn't weigh anything at all. Then it stopped and turned me over like a child flipping a bug, and I was looking up. My light was far off in the leaves shining sideways, and in that dim light I saw the shape of what had me. It hung over me, so close and so big I couldn't take it all in, only pieces of it and the faraway beam. It was made of skulls and bones, thousands of bodies, probably human and animal, both fused into each other and packed together, all of them shifting and grinding against one another. It lowered itself down over me and the cold came off it, along with that smell, the wet stone en rot. And from within it, something rose out to meet me. It wasn't bone. It had skin and hair. It was Quinn, just her head attached to a long shaft rising from within that horrible thing. I couldn't stop the hot tears streaming down my face as her mouth gulped the air like a suffocating fish. I reached out to her, choking out her name through a throat so tight I could hardly breathe as her cheek reached my fingertips. Her eyes closed and I caressed her. She went still. I told her that I was sorry, that everything was going to be okay, that her eyes flipped open, dead and dull. Her jaw started snapping like a wild animal, tearing the fingers off my hand and then chewing up my arm. It opened wider and wider, her skin tearing to allow the bigger portions of me inside her as they tore through me like a wood chipper. WARNING SIGNAL INTERRUPTION DETECTED

[E]

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[A]

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[B]

There's a gas station on Elm with a wide lot, and if you park your cruiser at the corner of it facing the boulevard, everybody coming down the hill can see you from about a quarter mile off. That's where I sat most mornings. People would spot the car and tap the brakes and roll past me nice and legal. And I'd sip my coffee and let them go on their way. And everybody had a good morning. I know some guys who'd call that lazy. The whole point of sitting there is so I don't have to pull anybody over. I never liked it, the pulling over part. You walk up to somebody's window and they've already got that look like you ruined their whole day. And most of the time they're right. You kinda did. Some lady just lay for work, some kid who wasn't paying attention. I'd rather they see the car and slow down and then nobody has to have that conversation. The street's safer that way anyhow. My numbers are low and my sergeant used to give me grief about it, and I'd tell him people were slowing down. Wasn't that the idea? And eventually he quit bringing it up. That morning I had my coffee going and the window cracked and I was on day 22 without a cigarette. I had been counting every one of them. The coffee was standing in for the smoke, which is why I was on my second big one before nine. I decided not to buy any more of that gum because it's $4 a pack and it didn't really help anyways. All things considered. It was just a real nice regular morning. Dispatch came on around a quarter after 8. Collapsed road out on Route 4, out by the county line. Maybe a sinkhole. She sent Chen to go throw some cones out and sit on it till the road crew showed. That was the east side, not my area. So I just kept sipping my coffee. I felt a little bad for Chen because standing next to a hole in the road for hours is nobody's idea of a good shift. And the county road department has been down two guys since spring, so he was probably going to be out there a while. Cars kept coming down the hill and slowing down, and I kept waving as they went by. A guy in a work truck gave me a little salute. I gave him one back. Everything was the way it's supposed to be. Then she came back on and her voice was Different. She was talking faster and there was a stress underneath it. Multiple calls, she said. The east side and downtown. Both reports of an animal attack. She asked for units to respond and she gave three locations. And that's what got me to sit up straight, because three locations spread out like that doesn't make sense. For one thing, she started calling out cars and asking them to confirm. She kept going and the calls kept stacking up. You could hear it. She'd answer one and there'd be two more, and her voice was climbing and she was reading them off as fast as she could, and none of them were making sense. She just kept saying the same phrase, animal attack. But there were details she was clearly leaving out. I keyed up and said 22 was in route. I put the coffee in the cup holder, hit my lights and pulled out. Downtown was maybe five minutes, the way I was driving. The whole way there, the radio didn't stop. She was calling cars by number, and some answered and some didn't. And I was going through it in my head, trying to guess what this was. A rabid bear? Or maybe some kind of escaped exotic pet. But how were there so many calls? There have never been, as far as I know, this many calls for an animal attack. Then somebody's mic opened up somewhere and I heard shooting. Rifle. Not a handgun. Three fast, and then a couple more, and then a long string of it, like somebody dumped a whole magazine, and under it, people screaming. Then the mic clicked shut. I put my foot the rest of the way down on the accelerator. She called me by number 22.

[A]

Confirm your response.

[B]

I keyed up and told her I was almost there and heard her say, copy. I came around onto Maine and slammed the brakes. Two blocks down, the middle of my town was gone, not missing. I could see the buildings, the bank, the shops, the old theater, but there was smoke coming up off of them. Cars stopped and flew, flipped every which way in the street, some with doors hanging open. And the noise, there was so much noise, screaming and glass and this other sound way down low that I felt on my chest before my ears even caught up to it. This deep, grinding groan that didn't belong to anything I'd ever heard. And there was something moving through the buildings. It was long, a hundred feet of it at least. I couldn't tell for sure because it kept disappearing and coming back. It was a pale, worn white, and it was ribbed all down its length, like the inside of something. It was moving between the buildings, and when it couldn't fit between them, it went through them, right through the walls. It had punched through the front of a shop and come out the other side a second later and keep going. Like the building was tall grass and it was just parting it. And all the while, these arms would come out of it. They'd unfold from the side of that long body. I watched one of them reach down and take a man. He was running down the sidewalk, and the arm just came out and folded around his middle and pulled him back. And there was a part of that thing's side that opened up a gap in the ribs. And he went into it. And then the gap closed over him. Then the grinding started up. That's what that deep, wet sound was. Louder now that I was close. And then I saw a deep red slop come out of the underside in a wet spill and drop onto the road. The thing was laying a trail down behind itself as it went. A long red streak down the middle of Main Street. There were two officers up ahead. I couldn't quite tell who they were behind a patrol car with rifles. And they were shooting steady aiming. And I saw their rounds going in. And I saw that it didn't do anything. One of those arms came out of the body, slow, almost lazily. And plucked one of them right out from behind the car. Then he went into that thing, and the grinding started again. I had my gun out. I didn't remember pulling it. I was standing just outside my car, the door still open, with my sidearm in my hand. I looked down at it, this little pistol, and looked up at that thing destroying my town, grinding people up. I looked over at those two carbines lying there on the ground where my fellow officers were fighting back. Just a few seconds ago. I put my gun back in the holster. I got back in the car and turned around. My hands were shaking so bad I couldn't find reverse for a second. And then I backed away from the intersection, hauled the wheel around in the middle of the road, and I drove west, away from it, out toward where the boulevard runs into the highway and the highway runs out to the interstate. I had the car doing 70 through town. The radio was still going. She was still calling units. She was calling Chen. She was calling those two officers I had just watched die. She was going down the whole list of the sector. Car after car, and half of them weren't answering, and she just kept calling them. I listened to her for about a minute before I reached over and turned the radio off. And then it was just quiet. The road was going by and the wind at the window I'd cracked back at the gas station, a different lifetime ago. I looked up in the mirror and there was nothing back there, nothing chasing me. The thing was still downtown with all the people, and I was driving away. I just had to keep driving, get to the interstate, let the people whose actual job this was come in and handle it. The National Guard or the army or whoever handles something like this. It wasn't on me. It couldn't be. I'd never once driven away from a call, not in almost 20 years. But there was not one single thing I could have done back there except get ground up in that thing with everybody else. I came up over a rise, and there was a roadblock at the bottom. Armored trucks, two of them, turned sideways to block the whole road. Men standing in front of them in black gear. And even from up the hill, I could tell they weren't police. My first thought was, thank God, they're already here. They're already on it. I slowed down and pulled up to the trucks and put it in park and got out with my hands where they could see them and my bags right there on my chest. And I started talking before I'd even gotten all the way out of the car, telling them everything downtown, the thing, how big it was, what it did to people, that they needed to get everything they had down there right now. One of them put a hand up and stopped me.

[C]

Sir, return to your vehicle.

[B]

I stopped. He hadn't heard me right, so I said it again, slower. There was a thing, a monster killing everybody downtown. They had to.

[C]

Sir, return to your vehicle, turn around and head back to the city.

[B]

I just looked at him. Back into the city. I tried to explain I was still being nice about it, still trying to be reasonable. The guy just trying to do his job was something I could understand. I told them I couldn't go back there, that there was nothing I could do back there but die. That whatever that thing was, it was past anything I could handle, that they should let me through so I could help route other responders coming in, so I could do anything at all except go back into that. They said it again, louder. And that's when I finally got it. Standing there in the road. They weren't not hearing me. They'd heard me fine. They already knew what was downtown. They knew all of it. They were there to keep everybody else from getting out. I started yelling, telling them they couldn't do this, that I was a police officer, that I'd seen what was back there and they could not send people back into it, and they weren't answering me anymore. They'd spread out into a little half circle in front of the trucks and their rifles were still pointed down, but their hands had moved on them. My hand went to my gun. I wasn't going to shoot anybody. I was just going to make them let me through. That's all that was in my head. That I'd point it and it have to move and I'd get out in the half second it took me to reach for it. They opened up before I had it even halfway up. I'm on my back on the road. I don't remember going down. I have the gun coming up and that I'm looking at the sky. My chest doesn't hurt the way you'd think. It doesn't feel much like anything. The sky is real blue. It's a nice one, one of those clean fall skies. Couple of clouds off in the distance with the sun behind them. I can hear the men up above me somewhere talking, and they sound calm and far away. One of them's asking if they should call a medic, and the one in charge answers him.

[C]

We'd have to deal with him anyway. Don't bother.

[B]

Someone's boot comes down and knocks my gun away from my hand. I hear it scrape off across the road and stop against something. Then they're walking away and one of them is on the radio and another one's saying something about another car coming up the hill. The sky stays blue. It's a real nice sky. I keep looking at it until it isn't there anymore.

[F]

The brief came over our headsets on the way in. Rushed, I could tell. Hit the fan because none of this was being done right. RBP7066. Designation Bone Weaver. I'd heard of it. A biological that escaped containment a few years back and slipped every recovery attempt since. It had been growing the whole time. The mass estimate they gave us didn't sound real. They told us it showed signs of extreme intelligence. The objective was extermination, which meant it had become too much of a problem to contain. I wasn't sure how many other teams had been dispatched on this one, but looking out the window and seeing all the other birds, it was a lot. Everybody in that cabin was having similar thoughts. No man on our team was a rookie, and none of us had ever been sent in on an op like this. Nobody said a word about it. There was nothing to say. Whatever was going on with 7,066, they were throwing the entire neighborhood at it. We landed in an area someone on the ground had already designated as safe and moved in on foot. I got my first look at it while we were still closing the distance. The reports did not do it justice. It filled the street ahead of us, end to end, a pale ribbed mass, longer than a city block, threading through the buildings and coming out the far sides of the them. And it was covered in arms. They unfolded and refolded into its body from everywhere, constantly. Each one was working independently, long segmented and searching. They pulled people out of doorways, they pulled people off the street, they dug into rubble and came out with limp bodies. All were fed into some central chamber within itself that was constantly grinding and spewing gore behind it. We opened up on it, joining the dozens of men already fighting it. And dozens more were on their way. Our ordnance was imbued with some sort of arcana. The rounds flared when they hit, a hard flash against the body. The thing looked like it was on fire from all the deep blue flashes exploding across it. We shifted up the block for better lanes and kept firing, and it kept attacking and consuming everything it could reach. Mercer was on my right, laying into it, and one of those arms came out of the mass and had him before he could react. In the blink of an eye, he was gone, folded back into the body, into the grinder. There wasn't time to do anything but keep shooting. The comms were chaos. The general channel was exploding, calling positions, calling for support. Nobody could give, calling casualties. I heard our team leader, a man I have never once heard, raise his voice, screaming coordinates into the comms. The whole front was the same. All units were hitting it with everything, and none of it was having the effect we expected. Then the marks appeared. They came up along its body while we fired into it, glowing lines and shapes, like something was being written on it from within. They pulsed and they got brighter, and more of them spread down its length the longer we hammered it. The comms were full of the same thing, from multiple teams reporting the marks. The light spread, spreading the thing lighting up brighter the harder we hit it. The entity took a nearby building down, moving through it. The whole face of the structure came down on our position, and I lost sight of my squad in the same second. Then I was firing next to men I didn't know, from a team that wasn't mine. Chaos and failure had disrupted the entire operation. The order to fall back came from a voice I didn't recognize higher up the chain, and it wasn't even close to a tactical pullback. All teams to the secondary perimeter. Prepare for ordnance deployment. A phrase I'd never heard, and the way it was said told me that whatever they were about to drop was going to be fucking big. Everyone else seemed to have the same thought because every agent I could see was hauling ass in the same direction. The call didn't mean they were waiting for us. It meant they were giving us a window. Anyone within the primary perimeter, when they did whatever they were going to do was shit out of luck. I could see it behind me and it had stopped chasing. It had pulled into the middle of the plaza and coiled down on itself. It didn't look like it was hunting anymore. It was doing something else entirely, something I didn't understand. I didn't give a either. I was just thankful that I was going to reach the fallback point. The coils were lifting, sections of it standing up off the ground, and the bone was arranging into something with edges and columns rising, and I did not have the first idea what I was looking at. A hundred feet of bone was folding itself into what I can only describe as a structure. I kept running to the fallback point, and every time I glanced back over my shoulder it was taller and more finished, the marks all over it burning bright enough now to throw light on the smoke. I made it to the secondary perimeter. Command was running the countdown over the comms. I got behind cover and watched. The countdown felt like it was running in slow motion and every man on the line seemed to hold their breath after a solid hour of noise. The quiet was an unsettling change now that there was no gunfire or screaming. I could hear the thing. The marks all over it were putting out a sound, a low electrical hum that came up through the the ground, and it climbed in pitch as the lit ruins grew brighter. Then the sky fell on it. There was a sound before the sound, a shove in the air that pushed the smoke flat against the pavement. Then the column of white came straight down out of nothing and landed on the structure and the whole world went blind. No shape left in any of it. It the shock came through the earth and up through my chest and slammed me into the COVID I was tucked behind, and the heat came over the top of it like an open oven and the only smell was burning. The ground under my hands was ringing like a struck bell that wouldn't stop. When my eyes came back, the plaza was all smoke and drifting ash and away white scar burned across the middle of everything I could see. Within the strike zone the structure was still standing. The bone was still there. Not burned, not cracked. Bigger and brighter. It ate that strike the same way it ate every round we'd put into it since we landed. The marks weren't flickering anymore. They were solid now, burning so bright you had to squint just to keep looking, and the hum coming off them had climbed into something that pressed into me like gravity. Then the whole structure pulled light, energy, and matter into itself. The smoke, the fires burning in the buildings, the glow off the marks, all of it bent inward toward the center of that bone structure, like it would consume everything that existed, and for one second the middle of it went so dark it was like the opposite of light, a black with no bottom to it, and that dark started to come apart. It tore right through the center of the structure, a seam splitting in existence, and the edges of it peeled away. The air around the split bent and warped, slow and cold, and a temperature dropped so hard and so fast that I felt it wash over me like an answer to the heat wave from the explosion we'd dropped on it. And then there was another side to it I could see through the damn thing. A horizon leaning the wrong way, a sky, some color that doesn't have a name and made me sick to try to look at, a landscape my brain kept fumbling over because it was shapes arranged in patterns that didn't exist on this planet. It wasn't a room on the other side of that tear. It was a whole world, and every part of it was wrong. It was the far side of somewhere that was never, ever supposed to be able to reach in and touch us. For a second it was just that light and the hum in my skull and that dead wrong world hanging open in the middle of the city. Then something on the other side moved and it came through. It walked on countless legs, not one of them matching the next. It was tall, almost taller than the buildings had been, and it was built out of pieces the way the Boneweaver was built out of pieces, except nothing it was made of had ever lived on this earth. The bottom of it was some wrecked animal shape, joints folding and stretching in ways that bordered on nonsensical hide and spots, and something like metal in spots and something wet and black bleeding in the seams where they met. All of it meshed into one thing. Out of that came the rest, A body that split going up more than one of it, limbs coming out at uneven locations, one almost a hand, one a helix of bone that ended in something like antlers, one just tapering off into a point and up Top a mass with nothing on it for a. A face, no eyes I could pick out. It turned and looked at us. I felt its attention land on me. Every hair on my body stood up straight. It stepped out of that tear down onto the pavement. Slow, easy, like it had all the time that had ever been made. And back behind it, through that door, there were more. Not one, not a dozen shapes stacked up as far as I could see through the gap. Every one of them turned toward the door, crawling over each other, fighting to get through.

[C]

I'm going to level with you, because the Bureau never will. I put the front of this together before I understood what I was looking at, and I'm still not all the way there. What I've got is coming in fast and in pieces, and none of the pieces are good. And I'd rather give you the truth in dirty fragments than a clean lie. Here's what we have so far. That thing didn't come into the city to feed. Not really. The feeding was the means. You heard what the agent saw. The marks lighting up brighter the harder they hit it. The thing pulling itself into the center of everything and starting to build. I've now got this for more than one direction, and the shape of it is the same no matter how I turn it. The Boneweaver was never just a monster that eats. Leeds made it out of a ritual, out of the same forces he used to tear holes between worlds and every soul. It has taken all those thousands of people. That wasn't just about hunger. That was fueled. It was always planning and opening a door. And the Bureau, in its infinite wisdom, helped it. They fed it with some sort of arcane weaponry one of their idiot scientists assured them would stop it wherever they got the energy they were using. It was the last of what the bone weaver needed. I don't know what's coming, coming through, and I don't know if they will be able to stop it. I've got reports out of that region I can't yet confirm. I don't know how many. I don't know what they are. I don't know if there's a single thing left that can stop them. Anybody who tells you they know is lying to you or to themselves. I'm still digging. When I've got more, you'll have it. Watch the news this week. Watch who does the lie and how hard they work to make it sound like nothing at all. This is Cypher. Keep your loved ones close, stay alert, and stay alive.

[A]

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[B]

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