"Ha! I knew we'd make it!" Nolan laughed, his voice echoing through the dark tunnels as we ran.
Even now, after barely escaping that death trap, he couldn't wipe that infuriating grin off his face. At any second, we could be recaptured and thrown back to our deaths.
But Nolan just kept smiling.
"So… uh," he said between breaths, flashing her a hopeful look as we rounded a corner. "Was that kiss for real? Like… are we a thing?"
Sandra shot him a look while huffing from exhaustion. "You know I've been giving you hints for some time," she said. "Who would've thought I'd have to be that direct?"
He blinked at her, completely baffled. "When? I don't remember anything like that."
Before she could answer, Sandra suddenly raised a hand.
We froze as we rounded the next corner, only to see nothing but darkness.
Her expression tightened. "Something's odd."
Nolan's grin faded, but not entirely. His posture straightened as he studied the corridor splitting into two directions. Most of the torches along the walls had burned out, leaving long stretches of suffocating darkness.
"That's strange…" I muttered, scanning the shadows.
However, with nothing ahead of us, Sandra motioned for us to keep moving.
Passage after passage blurred by. With every turn, I was sure the next corner would be the one where we ran straight into a legion of guards.
But the halls remained empty as no one came to intercept us.
Slowing at last, I studied the corridors more carefully. They were eerily silent. When I had been trapped in those cells, the wails of prisoners had echoed endlessly through the stone walls, cries of sorrow, pleas for forgiveness, desperate screams that never seemed to fade.
Now there was nothing.
Only the sound of our own footsteps followed us as we moved deeper into the dungeon. We reached the cell blocks, and the silence only grew heavier, the halls utterly devoid of life.
"Where is everyone?" Sandra muttered, peering into the empty cells lining the walls.
I leaned closer to one and noticed the faintest sign of disturbance, as if something had fought back for the briefest moment. A splatter of blood stained the far wall.
I checked another cell.
Then another.
The same signs greeted me each time.
Had the guards cleared the prisoners out? But for what reason?
Before I could dwell on it, Nolan grabbed us and pulled us aside, motioning down a side corridor. "I remember this part," he said quietly. "This way."
We moved quickly and soon reached a familiar staircase that had once carried me to my sentencing, but now it lay in ruins, partially collapsed, as if someone had tried to seal it behind them in a desperate escape.
Fresh blood soaked the floor. Some of it still dripped slowly from the walls.
"Why would they collapse this?" Nolan muttered, clearly unsettled.
I didn't answer as my attention had locked onto something farther down the hall.
Moving closer, my stomach tightened as I made out the young guard who had handled me at the very beginning of all this. His body lay lifeless against the stone bars of my old cell, a massive hole torn straight through his chest.
Beside him lay the shattered remnants of his core, each fragment reduced to a dull gray shard.
What could have done this to him?
Turning toward the opposite cell, I thought I saw the familiar shape of the young man who had lost his mind, cradled in the corner. Remembering his name, I called out softly, as if coaxing him forward.
"Hey… uh. Joshua, can you hear me?"
There was no response.
I stepped closer and reached for the door, only to freeze. The bars were coated in some kind of viscous fluid, oozing down in slow, sticky drips of greenish red.
Swallowing, I turned just as Sandra hurried up beside me, a torch clutched in her hand. "What did you find?" she asked, then stopped short when she saw the guard. "What happened to him? And his core…"
Before I could answer, her torchlight swept into the cell. For a heartbeat, my mind refused to make sense of what it saw.
But when I did, my stomach twisted. If there had been anything left inside me, I would have vomited.
I recoiled, staring at his skeletal frame. His arms and legs were nothing but skin stretched tight over bone, as if every scrap of nourishment had been drained from him.
All coalescing into one place… His stomach.
Once grotesquely swollen, now lay deflated and torn open, split wide as though something had grown inside before forcing its way out. A long trail of viscera led from his burst abdomen to the cell door, where the latch lay broken.
When Nolan finally turned and saw what I was staring at, his breath hitched. He staggered back, nearly tripping over the dead guard.
"No…" he whispered. "It can't be."
He spun and started down the hall toward the shattered stairwell.
"We need to go."
"Nolan!" Sandra hissed. "What are you doing?"
He didn't answer. He clawed at the rubble blocking the stairwell, shoving stones aside with desperate strength, as if sheer will might open a path through.
"Nolan!" Sandra grabbed his arm and yanked him back.
He turned to her, and whatever she saw in his eyes made her falter.
"Don't you understand?" he sputtered. "It's already here. That thing is here."
"What?" she snapped. "A flesh abomination? The three of us can handle one."
He shook his head violently.
"It's not one of those," he said. "It's—"
His words were cut off when a distant wail echoed through the cells.
It rolled through the stone like the call of a beast, yet there was something disturbingly human to it. I turned sharply, staring into the darkness just beyond the reach of the distant torches as a heavy, humid mist began to creep forward, thickening the air and choking the light.
One by one, the torches farther down the hall snuffed out.
Darkness swallowed the corridor until the only light left was the trembling flame in Sandra's hand. Her breath came in shallow, shuddering gasps as we stood frozen, waiting for something to happen.
Then the light began to flicker.
From within the fog, a shape shifted.
A long, unnaturally slender hand reached out of the darkness. Its fingers ended in claw-like points of raw flesh as it gripped the stone wall. The stone crumbled silently beneath its grasp.
And then the torch went out.
I reacted on instinct, summoning a spear and hurling it into the abyss. Somewhere ahead, it shattered against stone, the sound swallowed almost immediately.
To my side, something whispered.
"H… help… me…"
The voice was wrong. Stretched. I twisted and slashed at empty air, my dagger cutting through nothing as the presence dissolved back into the darkness.
"H-help me…" it mimicked again.
This time it was close. So close I could feel something cold brush my skin.
I lashed out again, but this time my arm stopped mid-swing as something grabbed me.
"N… Nolan?" it rasped, the words tasting unfamiliar in its mouth. "W-what… are… y-you doing?"
Sandra rushed in from the side, swinging a stone with all her strength. It struck something solid with a sickening crack, only for the force to rebound as I was hurled aside like I weighed nothing, my body slamming into the cold stone.
My head spun, the world tilting as the sound of Sandra's scream forced me upright. I staggered blindly through the pitch-black hall, boots scraping against stone, arms flailing for balance, until my foot slipped and I went down hard.
I tried to scramble back up, but my hands sank into something sickly warm. The realization came a heartbeat too late. The guard's body. I recoiled instinctively, shifting to move around it, when my hand brushed against a bundle of keys at his side.
Metal jingled softly, the sound echoing far too loudly through the empty halls.
Keys.
The word latched onto my thoughts as I clawed at my collar, thumb tracing its smooth surface, searching desperately for a seam or lock I could use them on. I circled it once, then again, and my heart sank.
There was nothing…
The realization hit like a punch to the gut, and rage surged up before I could stop it. I summoned a blade and slashed at the cold metal wrapped around my neck, again and again, sparks flashing uselessly in the dark as the edge skidded off. The impact rang through my skull, leaving only the echo of steel and my own ragged breathing.
How could it end like this?
After everything. After surviving this long.
Why… Why!
The word lost its edge as it repeated in my head, dulled by exhaustion and something heavier. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was how it always ended.
I clutched at the metal and shoved upward, once, twice, until my arms trembled. It didn't move. Of course it didn't. The thought settled in my chest, like an overwhelming smog. I let my head fall back, a bitter calm creeping in. I was so tired. So tired of fighting, of hoping it would be different this time.
Then a scream tore through the haze.
It sliced straight through the despair, echoing down the hall. I sucked in a sharp breath as the fog in my head shattered, shame and panic flooding in after it. No. There was no time for this. I shoved the thoughts aside and forced my legs to move.
No matter how badly I wanted to be free, there was no way I would let that thing kill them.
Following the sounds of the struggle, I barreled forward, slamming into a wall hard enough to nearly break my nose. I reeled, recovered, and kept going, sprinting toward whatever waited ahead.
"Nolan!" I shouted, trying to pin down his location.
Off to the left, what I assumed was a diverging tunnel, his strangled cry rang out. A heartbeat later came a loud crack of stone on stone, like something heavy being hurled and narrowly missing its target. Expecting a turn, I slowed, but too late.
I slammed into the wall with crushing force, staggered forward, and collided with something warm and fleshy. The impact stunned us both. Before I could recover, it twisted and struck, a brutal blow to my face that sent my vision swimming. I slashed forward instinctively, only to freeze as I realized the strike hadn't sent me flying.
"Nolan?" I sputtered.
"Atlas?!" he answered, only to be tossed like a ragdoll a second later as something hurled him into the darkness.
I caught the faintest silhouette of a massive shape before I drove my dagger into it, but the blade slid uselessly off before the thing vanished again.
"Nolan?!" Sandra screamed, her voice fading into the distance.
"Sandra!" Nolan shouted back as he rushed past me toward the sound.
"Wait—Nolan, don't!" I yelled.
It didn't matter. He was already gone, sprinting blindly after her voice.
With no other choice, I followed, plunging deeper into the twisting tunnels, scrambling through the dark as the dungeon swallowed us whole.
Soon, there was nothing.
I groped along the walls, utterly helpless without light, my strength bleeding away with every step. Then I slammed into metal bars, the impact knocking the wind from me. I sagged forward, wheezing, coughing up a thick glob of blood as my chest burned.
With there being no time to rest, let alone heal, my injuries had only worsened with every passing moment. Each breath came shallower than the last, my lungs refusing to draw in more than ragged gasps.
And then my legs gave out.
My body pitched forward, slamming into cold stone, and this time I couldn't fight it. Cause whatever strength was left in me finally gave out, and my mind slipped into darkness.
I don't know how long I drifted there. Time meant nothing. I remember the scrape of stone against my back, the distant sound of breathing that wasn't my own. Rough hands dragging me across the floor. Then nothing again.
When I surfaced the second time, someone was kneeling over me, muttering under their breath. I tried to move, to speak, but the effort was too much, and I slipped away once more.
It was the third time that it stuck.
My eyes fluttered open to dim light and the smell of dust and old oil. I lay on my side on a cold stone floor, my body aching but no longer numb. I blinked, forcing my vision to focus.
I was in a small room. A storage closet, maybe. Brooms leaned against the wall, buckets and cleaning supplies stacked half-haphazardly in the corners.
Someone sat nearby.
He was an older man, his beard shot through with gray, steel armor dented and smeared dark with blood. A deep wound gaped at the base of his neck, hastily bound but still leaking, each breath a visible effort.
When he noticed my eyes open, his hand tightened around the short blade resting across his lap.
"Easy," he said, voice rough but steady. "No sudden movements. Alright?" He paused to catch his breath.
I let out a weak, humorless chuckle. "Not like I can anyway." My gaze flicked to the weapon. "You've got the blade."
He snorted softly. "Says the one still using powers while bound." He nodded toward my leg, where the void still lingered.
I leaned back against the stone. "Then I guess we're at a stalemate."
His expression darkened. The blade lifted just a little. "What are you?"
I raised an eyebrow, watching the tremor in his grip. "That's a dangerous question to ask someone who can barely sit upright."
"I checked your bindings," he said, ignoring the jab. "They're intact. And yet you're still able to use whatever it is you possess." His eyes narrowed. "So I'll ask again. What are you?"
I stared at the ceiling for a long moment. Maybe I was delirious. Maybe just tired. Either way, lying felt pointless.
"What would you say," I murmured, "if I told you I was from another world?"
His blade twitched closer. "Explain."
So I did.
I told him a tale of distant lands, about Earth. About cities that scraped the sky. About metal birds that crossed oceans. About people who looked to the stars and decided to traverse them. I spoke slowly, stopping whenever his breathing grew too ragged.
He listened to every word.
As time passed, the sharpness in his dark blue eyes dulled, the life slowly draining from them. Yet a faint smile tugged at his lips.
"My boy would've loved that," he said softly. "Always wondered what was beyond the sky. Always dreaming bigger than this place ever allowed."
Silence settled between us, broken only by his labored breathing.
"If you ever find my son," he said after a long moment, his voice barely more than a rasp, "tell him I loved him."
His fingers trembled where they rested against the stone.
"Tell him…" His rasped. "I didn't mean to leave him behind."
My throat tightened. "What's h—"
The question died on my tongue as he coughed, blood spilling past his lips.
Whatever strength had carried him this far was finally leaving him. I could see it in the way his shoulders sagged, in the tremor running through his hands.
Yet before he completely crossed that threshold, he motioned me forward.
I hesitated, then moved and knelt beside him.
His blood-slick fingers closed around the metal collar at my neck. "This thing…" he rasped. "It's a curse. We were never meant to be suppressed from who we are."
His grip fumbled at the clasp. For a terrifying second, I thought he wouldn't manage it.
Then it shifted.
The metal flowed inward, folding back on itself until it reformed into a smooth, circular sphere.
Something deep in my chest stirred.
At first, it was barely there, a faint warmth where there had only been emptiness. Then it spread, seeping into limbs that had felt hollow for far too long. I drew in a careful breath, testing it, as that long-lost strength settled back into place.
He exhaled softly.
The tension in his face eased, just a little, as if the effort had finally caught up with him. His gaze lingered on me for a heartbeat longer before the light in his eyes began to dim, fading quietly until his body went still.
I stayed there for a long moment, the weight of the collar heavy in my hand. But when I was ready, I gently reached out and closed his eyes.
"Thank you," I whispered. "I don't know how I'll ever repay you."
Then I rose to my feet.
Lightning crackled faintly in my wake as I stepped out into the hall.