Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
“I’m not here to hurt you,” I stammer, backing away slowly.
My weapon illuminates more details I wish I could unsee.
Elongated fingers tipped with yellowed talons that scrape against the stone as it shifts its weight.
Blood caking the base of each nail, where living flesh once connected.
As my weapon’s light slides from its claws up a hideously twisted arm, I notice a scrap of fabric clinging to its shoulder, dark and horribly familiar.
A terrible chill pools in my stomach. Embroidered along the tattered edge is the remnants of a silver sigil, the unmistakable mark of a Resonance Academy uniform.
My gaze snaps to its head. Patches of raw scalp show through matted clumps of long, dark hair. More of it lies tangled on the floor, severed and dirty.
My heart hammers against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat. This is what the eels were trying to tell me.
Falcen. Gods, Falcen.
It opens its mouth, revealing needle-like teeth where human ones should be.
A sound emerges that might have been speech once, but now is just a wet, rattling gurgle that has primal terror seizing behind my ribs, especially when the creature shifts forward.
Its jaws unhinge wider than any human mouth should stretch with its tongue, blackened and forked, flicking out to taste the air between us.
My back hits the bone door, but when I reach behind me to push it open, my fingers meet solid resistance. Horror dawns as I realize the door has sealed itself shut behind me.
“No, no, no,” I whisper, pressing my palm flat against the bone surface. The glyphs remain dark, unresponsive without the token that disappeared into the skull’s maw.
A wet, gurgling growl draws my attention back to the creature. It’s closer now, dragging itself forward with surprising speed despite its mangled form.
“Davrin?” My voice thins with fear. “Is that you?”
The mutated thing tilts its head at the sound, then launches itself toward me with impossible speed. Its skeletal wings unfurl with a sickening crack, stretching to twice its body width.
I raise my weapon defensively, but hesitate to strike.
My reluctance nearly costs me my life.
Talons slash through the air where my throat was a second before.
I duck and roll, then race to an area where the creature can’t reach because of its chained restriction. The iron yanks them back with a lurch when they lunge for me again, and a snarl leaks from its throat.
“I don’t want to hurt you!” I shout even though it’s futile.
Whoever this creature once was, they’re beyond reason now.
Beyond humanity. Its skeletal wings snap open and closed with sickening cracks as it tests the limits of its chain, determined to reach me.
Each movement reveals more horror, bones jutting through torn flesh, muscles exposed like wet rope beneath shredded, grayish skin.
My soul-weapon blazes as my fear intensifies, illuminating more of the chamber.
What I see steals my breath.
Rows of similar monsters chained to the walls, some fully decayed, others caught in various stages between human and ... whatever this is. Most hang limp in their restraints, either dead or dormant, but a few twitch at the sudden light, their scarlet eyes alerting to my movements.
Goddess above, what is this place? A laboratory? A prison?
I’ve seen death before. The peaceful passing of my mother, the violent end of the rogue Soulren, Lira, Heathan. But this is worse.
“Who did this to you?” I rasp, though I know I won’t get an answer.
The mutated Soulren’s chains stretch taut as it lunges again, its sharp toenails grating against the floor just inches from my boots. Its mouth opens in a silent scream, multiple fangs gleaming wetly in my weapon’s cobalt light.
We need to escape.
I suck in a breath at Ember’s voice.
Oh, so NOW is the time you decide to offer advice. Don’t you think the eels should’ve shown us this room?
The eels have no responsibility to protect us.
Releasing my own snarl, I sprint to the other end between a gap of prisoners where I pray, I hope, another door will be.
I bolt between the rows of chained monstrosities, my halberd casting wild arcs of light as I run. Their chains rattle and clang as my passing rouses them, red eyes flaring in the darkness like dying hearths stirred back to life.
Something wet slaps against my shoulder—a tongue? A tentacle?—and I bite back a scream, refusing to slow even as bile rises in my throat.
At the far end of the chamber, a narrow archway appears, barely visible in the gloom. No door, just a dark mouth leading deeper into whatever hell I’ve discovered. My legs burn with the effort of running, but the alternative, being caught and torn apart, drives me forward with tireless speed.
“Davrin!” I call again in a last-ditch attempt. “Where are you?!”
The passage beyond the archway curves sharply, plunging me into near total darkness. My soul-weapon’s glow illuminates only a few paces ahead, forcing me to slow or risk crashing into a wall. The sounds of the creatures fade behind me, replaced by a heavy silence broken only by my uneven breathing.
I force myself onward, knowing that anything behind me would tear me apart before I could finish a single scream.
The sconces are spaced farther apart as the corridor narrows, their flickering blue light fighting a losing battle against the darkness pressed tight around my body.
I walk faster, nearly at a run, desperate to put distance between myself and the chained horrors behind me.
And then, abruptly, the walls shift, a subtle transformation in the architecture. I slow, hand trailing lightly over the wall’s newly polished surface. Not marble, exactly, but close. It’s warm, almost a comfort to my chilled fingers.
My exploration stalls when the sconces flare, illuminating intricate calligraphy creeping across every inch of the hallway. A closer inspection reveals entire treatises of scientific notation and anatomical diagrams, meticulously inscribed so that even a simple village girl can grasp their meaning.
Each step brings new horrors to light. Diagrams of human musculature split open to reveal bundles of blackened nerves, cross-sections of bone infused with sickly cobalt filaments, tables of ratios and equations labeling the optimal points for “infusion” or “rendering.” Next to each, a tally, with some marked with a neat check, while others are scored out or circled with frantic desperation.
I straighten in an attempt to steady my breathing.
Then I spot something worse.
A series of hand-drawn portraits on the opposite wall, rendered in incredible detail.
The faces of young students like myself are redrawn as I follow the sequence, showing progressive stages of distortion: human eyes replaced by black voids, jaws elongating, hair falling out in stringy clumps, until the final drawing is barely recognizable as a living thing at all.
Beneath each one is a name, and a date, and sometimes a note: “Successful.” “Dormant.” “Deceased.”
Ember, are you seeing this?
Yes.
She sounds saddened and resigned.
A fresh chill pushes up the back of my neck.
I catch my own reflection in a segment of polished wall waiting for its next inscription.
Eyes wide, skin pallid, a gleam of sweat on my brow.
I imagine my own name scrawled beneath a picture, my own face transforming panel by panel into monstrous oblivion.
Then my image shifts to Falcen’s face, black veins traveling up his neck, the way he winces when I run my fingers across his skin, and how I’ve never seen him look at himself in a mirror, not even to check his collar or fix his hair … as if he doesn’t want to remind himself of some inevitable loss.
I want to run, to forget every name I ever learned and bolt until the academy is a distant, crumbling memory. But I can’t. I move forward, drawn by the sick gravity of what’s been done, what’s being done, and what I might become if I look away for even a second.
A muffled sound reaches me from farther down the corridor, pulling me from my grim study of the murals. It’s docile, lurking somewhere ahead, and nothing like the bestial chorus I ran from, but softer. A murmur, a cadence, a…
A laugh?
I extinguish my weapon, sticking to the shadows as I move forward.
I freeze, every muscle tensing. It’s so out of place amid the anatomical abattoir that for one wild second, I’m convinced I’ve finally snapped, that this is the mirth of madness itself, the sound you hear right before you become a permanent exhibit in the catacombs.
But it happens again. Laughter, and then the rise and fall of actual conversation. Human. Articulate. The sort of measured tones you hear in a classroom, not a dungeon.
Pacing quietly forward, my boots make no sound, but they do pick up every sticky residue from the floor. I try not to dwell on any of it.
The passage narrows, twisting through a dogleg turn, and the chiseled ink diagrams give way to polished marble, the sort you’d find in the upper levels of the academy.
There’s a door at the end, not bone, but a rich, lacquered wood with gleaming brass banding.
A sliver of golden light halos the threshold.
I press my ear against the wood.
“A perfectly normal reaction, given the circumstances.”
That’s a voice I know. Syllables smooth as glass, patient, venomous. Keeper Malakai.
There’s a gentle scrape of silver on ceramic, the clink of cutlery, and then a deep, youthful chuckle from the other side.
Another sound I recognize.
I risk a glance through the crack.
The scene before me is so incongruous with the atrocities I’ve just witnessed that, for a moment, I wonder if I’ve hallucinated the entire thing and I’m actually in my bed having a night terror.