Volume 01 | The Azure Dirge
Deep within the primordial subterranean depths of the Sundarbans, where centuries of darkness had solidified against the stone walls like obsidian, there should have been no air. Yet, Elias Arkham felt a frigid draft seeping out, like the exhale from a pair of gargantuan, unseen lungs. This was no ordinary wind; it carried the pungent, sickly-sweet scent of rotting lotuses and rusted iron—a stench so foul it threatened to turn his insides out.
From the stone fissures, instead of moss, oozed a viscous, midnight-blue fluid. The pale Dragon's Skull was no longer a mere relic of bone; Elias's palm began to sink into its surface. The sensation was inhuman. It felt as though he wasn't touching calcified remains, but the pulsating, thrumming brain of a living titan. The skull acted like a sponge, ravenously siphoning every drop of warmth from his body. His fingertips turned a frostbitten blue, yet he couldn't pull away. A strange fascination, or perhaps an invisible thread, had sewn him to this ancient marrow.
There were no screams. Only a deep, bone-shaking resonance—the kind felt when a massive industrial generator hums deep beneath the earth. Elias felt every nerve in his body transmute into fiber-optic cables. A sharp, rhythmic static erupted at the base of his brain, mimicking the dead white noise of an old analog television losing its signal. But this rasping sound didn't come from his ears; it vibrated from within his bones. A metallic tang coated his gums. The primal terror of standing alone in a dark room as a child clawed its way back into his gut.
All human emotion was being stripped away. Across his retinas, tiny beads of blue light began to flow. When he stared into the temple's gloom, he no longer saw darkness. His brain automatically calculated the density of the shadows and the toxicity of the airborne particulates. It wasn't just sight; it was a curse. He wasn't looking at the world anymore; he was reading it. Every grain of dust was no longer debris but a chaotic cluster of millions of mathematical equations. It felt as though his human eyes had been gouged out and replaced by a pair of grotesque, mechanical lenses.
At the entrance of the stone chamber lay the mangled remains of the four guards. Moments ago, they had annihilated each other in a loop of corrupted logic. But Elias noticed the wreckage wasn't still. The oily blue lubricant leaking from them slithered like serpents, seeking out cracks in the floor. This technology did not die easily; it shattered, but its smallest fragments crawled to find a path toward reunification. Red lights flickered weakly from broken lenses, cursing Elias even in their mechanical death throes. Their metallic hands scratched at the stone, like a dying beast clinging to its last breath.
Suddenly, the massive tangle of wires embedded in the ceiling lurched to life. No new soldiers arrived, but the entire structure of the temple had recognized him.
A rasping voice echoed through the chamber. There were no speakers; the walls themselves seemed to groan, low and mechanical, like a beast of steel and stone.
"Subject Arkham. Your neural signal has exceeded the perimeter. The ancient data hidden in your blood is now active. Do not move. Or your memories will be permanently erased."
Elias tried to speak, but the sound that escaped his throat was not human language. It was a mechanical rattle, like the whistling of a high-pressure vent.
"System... error," he whispered.
The strangest part was that his fear had vanished. The human fragility required to feel terror was being washed out of his blood. He remembered his mother. As a child, when he had a fever, she would lay her hand on his forehead and say, "Everything will be alright, Elu." Today, his forehead wasn't burning with a fever; it was searing with the fire of blue Aether. But today, there was no one to comfort him. He realized he was no longer a common denizen of this earth; he was the new 'Sovereign' of this wretched mechanical reality.
Automated turrets deployed from the temple ceiling, sliding out through the stone. Twelve blue laser sights locked onto Elias's forehead. They didn't want to kill him; they wanted to absorb him.
Elias looked at his laptop lying on the floor. He didn't have to press a single key. A sharp surge of will traveled through invisible wires into the machine. He simply visualized a picture: the skeletal remains of a rusted ship rotting in salt water.
In an instant, a gruesome sight unfolded. Black smoke began to billow from the barrels of the wall-mounted guns. There was no explosion, no sound. Just a slow, cruel rot. The steel of the turrets turned dark in the blink of an eye, as if centuries of rust had bitten into them all at once. From the mechanical joints oozed a foul-smelling fluid like putrid flesh. The cutting-edge technology of 2026 crumbled into prehistoric debris, clattering onto the floor in seconds.
As Elias ascended the stairs toward the temple exit, the stone floor cracked under the weight of his every step. His body now carried a density the earth itself struggled to support. When he stepped outside, he saw the toxic dawn of the Sundarbans. But there was no serenity in the light. The sky was ashen and pale, like the eyes of a corpse. The forest was a vast, decaying canvas. The leaves of the Sundari trees were no longer green; they were a tarnished silver, and from every leaf dripped a thick, black oil. The entire forest seemed to be taking its final breath, riddled with cancer.
In the distance, the lights of Mongla Port had gone out. But in the sky, drones swarmed like hornets. They weren't approaching Elias. They seemed trapped outside an invisible boundary, like predators watching their prey from outside a cage.
Elias pulled his shattered smartphone from his pocket. He stared at the dark screen. Suddenly, a blue dot flickered to life. The dot expanded into a sphere, and from within that orb, a voice whispered. It was a synthesis of a thousand mechanical hums, yet it held the unmistakable cadence of his father's voice.
"Elias... can you hear me?"
His chest tightened. That familiar call reminded him that he was still human. But the voice was laced with a profound, cosmic melancholy.
"They aren't looking for you, Elias. They are looking for the primordial blueprint within you. This world is rotting. If you do not reach the ice-veiled caves of the North, the entire world will become nothing more than a digital graveyard. Do not stop running, Elias."
The phone suddenly grew scalding in his palm. The blue veins in his arms were no longer under his control. They began to burst through his skin, like living parasitic vines seeking to take root in the soil. Elias doubled over in agony. This wasn't the pain of muscle; it was the pain of a soul being torn apart.
Suddenly, the earth of the Sundarbans began to shake. It wasn't an earthquake. It felt as though a gargantuan beast was shifting beneath the crust. Elias watched as the massive towers near Mongla Port suddenly bent. They were no longer iron towers; they moved like the legs of a living colossus.
A new message flashed across his laptop screen. In massive, blood-red letters:
"REALITY IS COLLAPSING. YOU ARE NOW THE TARGET."
Elias looked up at the sky, and what he saw froze the blood in his veins.
The dawn sky was cracking with a splintering sound, like a glass wall under pressure. In the center of the blue clouds, a massive black void had opened. From across that abyss, thousands of slender mechanical tendrils were descending toward the earth, as if someone from beyond the sky was trying to pull the world up by its strings. The sight was so horrific Elias felt his mind would simply melt.
He tried to run, but his feet were fused to the ground. The rotting mud was swallowing his shoes, pulling him down. He felt a cold electricity flowing through his marrow.
At that moment, a faint sound of laughter echoed in his ear. Familiar, yet utterly alien.
Cutting through the horizon's mist, the Mongla Express—which should have been miles away at the station—was no longer on the tracks. It sped toward him across the air, like a titanic serpent. Screams echoed from every carriage—the collective wail of thousands of souls. Blue Aether smoke poured from the engine instead of fire. The train was biting through the very molecules of the air. It wasn't a train; it was a hungry predator of time itself.
Elias realized that the world of 2026 had been a thin veil used to hide a true, unspeakable horror. That veil was now torn down the middle. And what stood on the other side was something no human was ever meant to face.
Suddenly, the ground vanished beneath him. It wasn't a pit; it was as if a living darkness had swallowed him. Elias felt himself falling into an endless abyss. Everything around him began to flake away like falling pixels.
As his consciousness flickered out, he saw it—through that massive crack in the sky, a gargantuan eye was staring down at him. The pupil of that eye was nothing other than our blue Earth. The world was merely a glass marble held in someone's hand.
The fall continued. And before the darkness took him, his father's voice echoed in his ears one last time:
"The war has only just begun, Elias. Do not close your eyes."