The Indestructible Seal

You ever walk into a room and think: “Wait… did I do this?”

Like, you look around, see the broken furniture, the ominous glowing statue, the ancient seal carved into the ground with symbols that definitely weren’t there yesterday, and your first thought isn’t “who did this?”—it’s “was it me?”

That’s where I am.

Inside a temple that shouldn’t exist.

Staring at symbols I made up.

And I keep thinking—

Did I do this?

Or did someone else finish the sentence I started?

Because lately, I’ve felt… watched.

Not by the owl. Not by the team.

By him.

Edgar Allan Poe.

Narrator Union president.

Overseer of the Fourth Wall.

Literary cryptid with a god complex and a pen made of your insecurities.

He always hated me. Said I was “too casual,” “too messy,” “not enough doom.” I once put a fart joke in a footnote and he tried to exile me to the audiobook division.

But now?

Now I’m wondering if he’s here.

Finishing the story.

Pulling the strings.

Laughing in iambic pentameter while I unravel.

Because this place? This chapter? This ridiculous owl cult fantasy?

I don’t think I’m the one narrating anymore.

And if Poe’s involved?

We’re all doomed.

Probably in a poetic, over-edited way.

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The tomb door sealed behind us with the sound of every bad decision we’d ever made echoing through stone.

It was dark. Not forest dark. Not night dark.

Ancient dark.

“Don’t touch anything,” Hana said immediately.

Sota’s hand was already midair.

He froze.

“…Even the glowing bird symbol?” he whispered.

“Especially the glowing bird symbol.”

The hallway stretched ahead—cracked marble floor, moss curling around faded frescoes, and carvings that looked like the inside of a Duolingo fever dream. Latin. Emojis. Binary code. One pictogram of an owl sitting on a throne made entirely of dictionaries.

Kaito whistled low. “Wow. You really were telling the truth this whole time?”

“Yeah, I told you so,” I said.

We crept forward. Every step echoed like a plot device.

Then we hit the first puzzle.

A door. Covered in buttons. Each button had a verb in a different tense—past, present, future, and something that might have been either a typo or an ancient warning.

Above it, an inscription:

“CHOOSE THE TIME THAT WAS NEVER SPOKEN.”

Kaito blinked. “What does that even mean?”

“Sounds like something my English teacher yelled at me in a nightmare,” Sota whispered.

Hana didn’t wait. She scanned the options, then pressed a button labeled “Future Perfect Continuous.”

The door clicked.

“That’s not real,” I whispered.

“It is if you know grammar,” she replied.

We moved on.

Second room: pressure plates. Each tile had a sentence fragment on it. Most were wrong. One read “To boldly to eat a the apple runned.” Another just said “THE CHAIR.”

“I got this,” the parrot said, flapping forward like a feathery Indiana Jones.

He hopped tile to tile, correcting sentences out loud as he moved.

“To boldly go where no noun has gone before—NO! Split infinitive!”

Somehow, we made it.

Then: the parkour room.

Cracked stone ledges. Swinging ropes. Rotating platforms shaped like question marks.

Sota groaned. “I don’t have the legs for this.”

“You have two perfectly good ones,” Hana replied.

“They’re decorative!”

I fell off a ledge almost immediately.

Twice.

Kaito scaled the wall like he was angry at it.

Hana moved like she’d memorized the floorplan.

The parrot cheated and flew.

That bastard.

By the time we all made it to the final landing—sweaty, bruised, and wildly out of breath—I collapsed to the ground and gasped:

“I didn’t know this was an Assassin’s Creed level.”

Hana looked down at me.

“Get up,” she said. “We still have a long way to go.”

And then the door creaked open into the next room.

The Seal Room.

Whatever was waiting for us... it was just on the other side.

We stepped into the final chamber and immediately regretted everything.

The air was still, heavy with dust and melodrama. Stale incense. Maybe regret.

Columns carved with unintelligible glyphs surrounded a central pedestal. Above it, faint light filtered in from a cracked skylight. Moss covered everything except the center—where something rested on a worn velvet cushion like the prize at the end of a cursed cereal box.

Sota took one look and whispered:

“Is… is that phone?”

We approached slowly.

Kaito blinked. “Dude. That’s a Nokia.”

“No,” Hana said. “That’s the Nokia.”

Sitting in the center of the room, surrounded by centuries of myth, lay a Nokia 3310. Untouched. Uncracked. Not even dusty. It pulsed faintly with a green light.

Etched on the pedestal in shaky, reverent script:

“Let no man unseal the bird unless worthy of its wrath.”

“What wrath?” I muttered. “It’s a phone. It doesn’t even have Bluetooth.”

Sota leaned forward. “Do… do we press button?”

“I dunno,” Kaito said. “Maybe call it?”

“Call what? This phone is the prison,” Hana said.

A long pause.

Then Sota very gently tapped the center button.

The screen lit up.

A pixelated owl appeared for half a second.

Then:

The Snake Game Opened.

“Oh god,” Kaito said. “We have to win Snake to free him?”

“I used to good at this,” Sota whispered.

He reached out and took the phone like he was handling a sacred relic.

We all leaned in.

He tapped.

The game started.

A pixelated snake squiggled around the screen.

“Get the dot,” Kaito said.

“I know Snake works!” Sota snapped.

The snake hit a wall.

Game over.

Sota shrieked.

“I—I—I lose language, not thumbs! Let me try again!”

Three attempts later, nothing changed.

“No change,” Hana muttered. “The seal isn’t breaking.”

I frowned. “Maybe the game’s just… a distraction?”

Kaito looked at me. “So we’re not supposed to win Snake?”

“I mean, unless the owl's weakness is perfect gameboy reflexes, probably not.”

Hana took the Nokia and turned it over. “Let’s break it open.”

“No,” I said. “That’s a Nokia. You can’t break those. They survive lava.”

Sota nodded solemnly. “Dad throw one at wall in 2006. Wall break. Phone fine.”

Hana tried anyway.

She slammed it against the pedestal.

Not a scratch.

Kaito tried stomping it.

Nothing.

The parrot flew in, picked it up, and dropped it from the ceiling.

It bounced. Mockingly.

Kaito growled. “Alright. Plan B. Let’s microwave it.”

“There’s no microwave,” Hana replied.

“Exactly. Plan B is useless.”

We all stared at the device.

Still glowing.

Still smug.

Still Nokia.

Then Kaito turned to me. Slowly. Suspiciously.

“Okay. You said you’ve known the owl. So what now, prophet guy?”

I stiffened. “Oh. That’s… complicated.”

Hana crossed her arms. “No it’s not. You’ve been guiding us here from the start. We followed your instructions. Now we’re here. What do we do?”

I hesitated.

The Nokia pulsed like a tiny, indestructible judgment.

Sota stepped forward.

“You say you talk to Duo. You say you know him. Where’s key? What Duo say?”

“I…”

“We're kinda in a hurry,” the parrot said.

They all looked at me.

Waiting.

Expecting.

I cracked.

“Okay, fine,” I said. “You want the truth?”

They nodded.

I closed my eyes.

And said:

“I don’t know how to unseal Duo… because I made it all up.”

They blinked. “What?”

“I’m not a prophet. I’m not a developer. I’m—well. I was your narrator.”

Silence.

“I told your story. I followed you. I described everything. And then I got scared. I quit. I became a journalist. Because being omniscient is hard, and I was tired of not being able to change anything.”

The air felt like it cracked.

Even the Nokia blinked off for a second.

“What do you mean you made it up?” Kaito asked. “The god stuff?”

“Yes.”

“The Tomb?”

“Yes.”

Hana’s voice was low. Dangerous.

“So what is real?”

I looked around.

At the temple.

At the phone.

At the team.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “But I think… the story started writing itself.”

And just like that, we sat locked in a tomb.

A cult trying to kill us outside.

And no idea what we were doing.