The illusion of peace shattered beneath Verek's gaze. His eyes glinted with cold intellect as he studied the table, the steam, and the gentle clinking of utensils untouched by mortal hands. "It's not glamor," he murmured, each word laced with guarded calculation. "It's suggestion. A memory made manifest."
Caylen drifted forward like a sleepwalker. His voice was distant, tinged with awe. "No… it's remembrance. It's… beckoning." His boots made no sound on the moss-carpeted floor. "There's music."
And there was. A faint lullaby curled through the chamber like incense, woven with longing and forgotten warmth. Like home, if home were a dream with teeth.
Then the ghosts appeared.
They were seated around the feast, not transparent phantoms, not living, but shaped from the essence of recollection. Caylen's breath hitched as he stared at a woman with his mother's locket, her outstretched hand mirroring a memory carved into the deepest folds of his soul. Dax froze beside a laughing shade, her face tilted toward him with the same mischief she'd worn in life—his fiancée, lost years ago. Ezreal went rigid. The color drained from his face as he took a step back, and when he finally spoke, his voice was little more than a whisper cracked by disbelief.
"That's not possible."
"They don't want to harm us," Verek said, his voice low, reverent. "They want us to rest. To forget. To become part of this place."
Caylen reached for a spoon. His fingers passed through it as though through smoke. Still, the stew steamed, its scent weaponized comfort. His eyes glistened. "It's so peaceful."
Ezreal's hand snapped out, gripping Caylen's wrist. "It's a trap." The words were fierce, his voice raw. "This place wants to remember us so we forget ourselves."
The walls inhaled.
The illusion twisted. The serene false-sky above them roiled, colors bruising into violent reds and shadowed purples. One by one, the figures at the table turned. And their faces—once familiar—were wrong.
Eyes vanished. Mouths stretched until they split the jaw. Features melted like wax left too close to the flame. They did not rise. They simply watched.
A voice unfurled around them, slow and syrupy, as if seeping from the marrow of the walls themselves.
"We keep what rests. We feed what forgets."
From beneath the table, from the cracks in the stone and seams of the walls, vines slithered into being. Pale, mucous-slick tendrils lined with teeth and eyes that blinked in alien rhythms. They reached for ankles and wrists like supplicants craving contact.
Dax's sword whispered from its sheath, and he stepped forward with a snarl.
Caylen began to sing.
Not magic—not quite. A song from his youth hummed beside dying fires. The tune of a father's quiet love and the ache of a night sky deeper than fear. The sound cut through the chamber, striking against the lullaby with the clarity of a bell across the fog.
Verek struck the butt of his staff into the ground. A glyph blazed out in all directions, radiant and crackling. The nearest vines hissed, shriveling into soot. His voice dropped low, a grim edge to every syllable. "The dream," he said, "has teeth."
The chamber convulsed.
Illusions surged like waves, crashing around them—visions of past triumphs, perfect days, unspoken apologies made real. Homes they'd never return to flickered in their peripheral vision. Faces they loved and lost beckoned with open arms.
Ezreal's voice tore through it. "There's a crack! In the wall—there!" He pointed toward a shimmer, a fracture barely wider than a breath, threading through the illusion like lightning through a stormcloud.
The chamber howled.
"Stay. Stay. STAY—" the voice keened, no longer seductive but desperate, fractured.
Caylen's voice rose above it, his song swelling into a defiant crescendo. Vines wrapped around his legs but found no hold in the resolve behind each note. Dax moved like a cleaver through meat—his blade a silver arc tearing memory and tendril alike, every strike filled with purpose, with fury.
Verek's glyph flickered. His palms bled where his own power burned him, but he did not yield.
Ezreal didn't hesitate. He sprinted toward the fissure. Something called behind him, the voice sweet and low, familiar. It whispered his name—not the one he wore, but the one from long ago, the one only she had ever said.
He didn't look back.
One by one, they passed through.
And the dream collapsed.
On the far side: silence.
No sky. No feast. No warmth. Only cold stone, slick with dampness and older than language. Their breaths fogged in the air, uncertain, as even the atmosphere had forgotten them. The torches dimmed as if the light itself feared what lay ahead.
Gone was the illusion.
Only truth remained.
The walls bore no glyphs. No wards. No memory except erosion and the slow, unfeeling passage of time. The tunnel constricted, pressing in around them like the lungs of a beast reluctant to release its prey.
No one spoke.
Then Verek broke the silence, his voice a thread of iron. "That was only the beginning."
They descended again.
The path ahead warped. Geometry dissolved. Angles betrayed perception—walls bent wrong, ceilings curved into themselves. What was up tilted sideways? A step forward felt like a fall.
Verek led with one hand raised, a rune hovering above his palm, pulsing faintly—not illumination, but warning.
Ezreal's voice faltered as he stared at the wall. "They're stitched," he murmured. "Flesh… sewn together."
The seams pulsed, weeping clear fluid that stank of old pennies and bone.
Caylen reached toward the surface. The moment his fingers brushed it, he flinched. "It's warm," he whispered, revulsion mingling with wonder. "Alive."
Dax grunted behind them. "One more revelation and I'm hitting things just to see what bleeds."
They moved on, breath tight in their chests.
The flora down here was alien. Moss curled in impossible fractals. Roots reached upward like pleading hands. Some blinked. Patterns emerged—intentional, deliberate. Messages. Warnings.
But they were already too deep.
Verek halted at the mouth of a familiar corridor. His eyes narrowed. "We've passed this before."
Caylen arched a brow. "You dragging us in circles to confuse the enemy, then? Masterstroke."
Verek's voice hardened. "We're caught. The path's looping. Old magic—temporal spatial distortion. A trap designed to exhaust."
Ezreal leaned on the nearest stone, sweat beading along his brow. "Whatever was kept down here… it never left. Now it wants us."
The light flickered.
A hum began—low and moist, like something massive breathing underwater. The walls shuddered.
Then the flora dimmed.
They fell forward into reality, the breath knocked loose as stone scraped skin and the warmth fled their bones.
At the far end of the corridor, something emerged.
First a shape. Then the texture of limbs—wet and too many. A silhouette that moved without sound, slipping between the folds of dimensions like water through a sieve.
They braced. No words now. Only breath and the promise of violence.
The dream was behind them. But the nightmare—
The nightmare had only just begun.