The argument began the moment the doorway opened, voices stacking over one another as tension thinned into something sharper. Men edged forward with shoulders hunched and chins lifted in defiance, then checked themselves and shifted again, boots scraping, hands hovering near tools as if proximity might decide it for them.
Eyes flicked and slid away, too quick, too practised—each man measuring the others while refusing to be measured in return. One asked who would go first with a dry mouth and a hard stare; another answered with a tight smile that never reached his eyes, jaw flexing as he spoke.
The exchange might have spiraled if Heimlock had not stepped in.
He stood slightly apart, posture squared, weight planted evenly as if the ground belonged to him. His face was still, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening not with emotion but with control. When he spoke, he did not raise his voice, yet it carried cleanly, cutting through the noise as surely as a blade.
"Three. We send three."
The effect was immediate.
Shoulders dropped by fractions, breaths caught, and the men stilled. Silence settled, heavy and unwilling. No one met anyone else's gaze for long; eyes moved instead to the ground, to the doorway, to anything that wasn't a decision. When they finally lifted, they settled on me—and on two others standing nearby.
One man's lips pressed thin in quiet relief that it wasn't him; another's nostrils flared, masking the same thought. The selection was not random. It never was.
The men chosen beside me were older, their bodies worn down by years of labor underground. Their clothes were patched, their gear mismatched, their faces carved by habit rather than fear. They carried themselves like men who had survived long enough to stop expecting anything good.
Expendable.
The understanding passed between us without words. One of them gave me a crooked grin, teeth uneven and stained. "Stay close, kid," he said, as if that would make a difference. I didn't answer.
We moved toward the doorway, its massive frame growing larger with every step. The surface had split just enough to allow passage, but the light behind us did not follow. It stretched forward, thinned, and stopped at the threshold as though something inside refused it.
Crossing into that space was not a physical sensation so much as a shift in awareness, like stepping into a place that had already noticed you.
The darkness on the other side did not feel like simple absence of light.
It consumed.
The beams from our lamps weakened almost immediately, shrinking and bending, unable to push forward more than a few paces. The walls formed a corridor around us, smooth and deliberate, their shape too precise to be natural. It extended far ahead, wide enough to swallow entire structures, yet uniform in a way that suggested design rather than accident.
The air was different as well—stale, heavy, pressing inward. Each breath felt thicker than the last, as if something unseen resisted it. A dull weight began to build behind my eyes, spreading slowly, steadily, until it became impossible to ignore.
The deeper we walked, the more that pressure grew, not sharp enough to force retreat, but constant enough to unsettle every thought.
We advanced in silence for a while, our footsteps echoing only briefly before being swallowed. Then something shifted ahead of us. It was not a sound or a movement I could clearly identify, but a presence—distant, yet unmistakable.
One of the men stopped and glanced toward me, his voice lowered. "You feel that?" he asked. The other did not answer. Instead, he began to move faster, drawn toward a faint suggestion of something ahead, a distortion that might have been light or reflection or something imitating both.
"Wait," I said.
He didn't.
What followed happened too quickly for the mind to process in sequence. One moment he was walking, his outline still visible in the dim reach of our lamps. The next, something moved from the side—fast enough that it did not register as form, only as interruption. His body split cleanly in two, as if reality itself had been cut through him. There was no struggle, no warning, no time for sound. One instant he existed. The next, he did not.
The second man froze, shock locking his body in place before instinct took over. He turned and ran, heading back toward the doorway, toward the faint boundary where light had once reached. His movements were frantic, uneven, and with each step he seemed to sink deeper into the darkness rather than escape it. The space around him shifted, swallowing distance in a way that made direction meaningless. Within seconds, his form blurred and then vanished entirely from view.
His footsteps faded.
Then came a scream.
It ended abruptly.
Silence returned, heavier than before.
I stood alone, the pressure in my head now constant, pushing inward as though something unseen pressed against my thoughts. I reached out, placing my hand against the wall to orient myself. The surface was smooth and cold, but beneath that coldness there was something else—something that did not belong to stone.
Then something struck me.
The impact came from nowhere, sudden and overwhelming, lifting me off my feet and throwing me backward into the dark. My body hit the ground hard, the force knocking the air from my lungs as my vision fractured into bursts of light and shadow. I tried to move, to regain balance, but my limbs refused to respond.
The darkness closed in around me.
Then everything went still.