Narrative monologue (opening):
"Time flows strangely here. Not in moments, not in days or years—but in echoes. The world remembers you before you even remember it. Shadows stretch like whispers, and every hum of metal carries the weight of a million voices long vanished. We, the children of light, have always lived under the gaze of the Door—our sanctuary, our prison, our mother. And yet, curiosity… curiosity always finds a way."
---
The first faint tremor passed unnoticed by most of Homelight's residents. Lullaby did not.
He stood in the corridor where the golden veins of the Door's light met the shadowed walls, his tiny shadowed form dwarfed by the cathedral-scale archways. His visor caught the fractured glow of the mechanical veins, pulsing softly—as if the Door itself were breathing. Around him, the settlement hummed in soft lullabies, the melodic echoes of a thousand stories folded into the walls.
"Something's… wrong," Lullaby whispered to himself, the words barely audible over the hum of the living world.
His yellow orb companion floated beside him, its glow steady but anxious. Soft chimes rang faintly in the heavy air. The orb pulsed, projecting tiny golden symbols in front of him—warnings, questions, something unspoken. Lullaby squinted, trying to interpret the shifting runes.
Then a distant sound reached him—a subtle, dissonant vibration, like the deep resonance of a star grinding against another. Not mechanical. Not alive in any way Lullaby had ever known.
He froze.
The Door… the Door wasn't just humming. It was shivering.
---
The Outer Threshold, the corridor nearest the massive archway, had always been off-limits to children. Stories spoke of the Eldritch Hunter—the shadowed devourer waiting beyond the Door. Lullaby had heard whispers, but they were just that: whispers, meant to frighten, to keep curiosity from wandering too far.
And yet… the tremor had felt too deliberate.
The orb floated closer, bumping gently against Lullaby's exoskeleton, sending a comforting warmth through his shadowed form. Its golden chimes spoke more urgently this time, though Lullaby did not understand all of it. Only that it wanted him to notice. To see.
He pressed a small hand against the cold veins of the Door. The metallic surface thrummed under his fingertips. Memories—faint, ghostly, of voices he never met, of laughter, of sorrow—washed through him. It was brief, disorienting, and then gone.
The tremor came again, stronger this time. A low mechanical groan accompanied it. Somewhere deep in the Door, a crack had begun—so subtle, so impossible to detect, that no adult had noticed yet.
Lullaby's heart beat faster, though his visor hid the pale flash of fear in his yellow eyes. Fear was not unknown to him, but curiosity… curiosity was a flame that could not be extinguished.
"Maybe I should… just look," he whispered. His voice echoed oddly, bouncing back from walls that were never meant to hear the words of a child.
The orb's glow intensified, casting long shadows along the twisted corridors. It pulsed against him like a heartbeat, a tether to hope. And for a single moment, the shadows themselves seemed to lean closer—watching, waiting, whispering in silent echoes of forgotten time.
---
Lullaby took a cautious step forward. And another.
He passed through the threshold, into the corridor where shadows deepened and light trembled. The Door groaned again, this time a sound of pressure, of strain, of inevitability.
He had no way of knowing that this simple act—his small, curious steps into a forbidden corridor—would make him the last witness, the sole bearer of memory, the child who would carry the story of the Galabies into the Beyond.
For behind the Door, the darkness waited. Patient. Immense. And hungry for what they had been told to protect.
The hum of the settlement faded behind him. The chimes of the orb became a quiet song of warning. And the first cracks in the Door glowed faintly, veins of amber light spilling into the shadowed corridors.
Something ancient had stirred. Something relentless had begun to awaken.
And Lullaby—curious, brave, unaware—had taken the first step into a darkness that would not forgive him.And Lullaby—curious, brave, unaware—had taken the first step into a darkness that would not forgive him.