Dragon
Harbinger of Woe
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[...A trailer for a new concept flashes across your screen...]
Ash drifts in long spirals, weightless as sorrow, settling where flame once sang.
Beyond the bones of the skyline, the world is jagged with monoliths of steel and ruin rising like the ribs of a leviathan slain in ancient wrath. Towers, spines split and hollowed, lean into one another like mourners too proud to kneel. Their windows gape, black, lidless, punched inward by hands titanic and forgotten.
A highway coils through the center like a serpent burned mid-turn, its ribs of rebar exposed, its concrete flesh fused with rust-bound husks of transport long since emptied of purpose. A single sign lies face-down in a shallow basin of brackish stillwater, its words devoured by the weight of silence and time.
The trees have begun their slow encroachment, not as conquerors, but as survivors. Roots pierce ceramic and asphalt alike, distorting streets into ruptured veins. Ivy weaves nooses around lamp-posts, draping them in the rags of remembrance. Each vine climbs not in hope, but inertia, carried forward by a world that has forgotten how to stop.
Overhead, cranes loom mid-gesture, their arms outstretched frozen in warning. Their shadows fall across empty lots where market stalls once bloomed, now charred and swallowed. Power lines sag between skeletal poles, trembling in a wind too thin to stir dust, too faint to name.
The sky above is a pale void, washed of hue, of omen, of fire. Cloud and smoke intermingle without edge, smeared across the firmament like breath on glass. No sun. No direction. Only the endless weight of an age that failed to pass.
Far beneath the crust, something groans. Steel on stone. A slow shift, not of return, but of remembrance. The city exhales through its bones, and then falls still once more.
No bird sings here. No storm dares break. Yet the air hangs dense with presence, as if time itself halts to bow.
Past the remains of the viaduct and beyond the skeletal husk of the municipal dome, its copper skin flaked to green rot, the earth sags unnaturally, as if something vast and formless once knelt here and pressed its weight into the land.
What was road becomes ruin. What was ruin becomes soil.
Cracks run like dry veins through the earth, leading into a basin that resists erosion, defies overgrowth. Even the moss seems hesitant. Sparse. Pale. The wind changes here, blunted, as though muffled by unseen walls.
At the center waits a shape designed not to be seen.
A structure without ambition.
Concrete. Low. Oppressively featureless. Its surface is the color of stale ash, stained with vertical trails of rain-rusted memory. There are no windows. No symbols. No metal gate. Only a collapsed tree limb crushed against an awning of split plastic and flaking steel, bent, warped, forgotten. Beneath it: the mouth.
A stairwell descending into black, narrower than instinct prefers.
There is no door.
Only darkness.
The rails lining the steps are corroded, bent inward as if grasped too tightly in panic or weight. Faint streaks of red-brown trace the edges. Old blood. Paint. Iron oxide. It does not matter.
The air thickens at the threshold, cooler, wetter. Lichen clings to the inner walls like rot that refuses to heal. By the fifth step, all detail is consumed. No lights. No signage. No hum of power.
Just descent.
Just pressure.
No sound rises from below. No mechanical lure or whispering voice beckons. And yet, the compulsion hums at the edge of thought. A gravity not felt, but known. A silence too deliberate.
There is nothing welcoming in the way the dark opens.
And still we descend.
The elevator waits like a forgotten organ of the world, enclosed in brushed steel, its seams dulled by decades of disuse, the glass panels soiled by a century’s worth of dust and memory. The floor hums with the heartbeat of some ancient machine stirring for the first time in ages.
Above: silence.
Below: silence.
Within: motion, impending.
A flicker.
The lights gutter once then stabilize, casting a pale, clinical glow across walls that refuse to reflect.
Descent begins.
There is no music. No voice. No interface. Just the initial shudder, sharp, spinal,and then the slow, smooth fall. Steel beams rise past in solemn cadence, tracked like bones in a throat. The outer walls, behind glass clouded by time, alternate between concrete slabs and steel-reinforced bulkheads. Some are buckled. Others weep water from cracks like open wounds.
Every few floors, a platform blinks past, each identical in structure, indistinct in purpose. Doors welded shut. Ladders snapped midway. Lamps forever off. Nothing marked. Nothing lit.
Still we descend.
Time elongates. Becomes elastic. What begins as a moment becomes many. Minutes blur.
The architecture begins to unravel.
Concrete gives way to raw earth, then carved stone. The transition is imperfect, sudden. The shaft continues, but now the stone is uneven, clawed by machinery not built for precision. Cable nests hang in clusters like abandoned cocoons. Segments of tile, of ceiling, of wall, whole chunks of memory, drift down the shaft beside us, as though peeled from elsewhere and dropped into this void.
We pass debris in slow suspension. A rotary fan spinning idly with no power. A boot caught in a tangle of wire. A section of train track, bent and cut clean through, still slick with oil that hasn’t aged.
Gravity warps.
Pressure mounts, not suffocating, but omnipresent. The kind of pressure that pushes at the teeth and coils in the skull. The ears pop once, twice. Then the sensation stops registering, as though the body has given up trying to measure what it cannot reconcile.
The light overhead does not dim, not exactly. It lessens, fractionally, in some strange negotiation with depth itself, as if brightness cannot survive below a certain threshold.
Signage flashes—Level -191.
Then -241.
Then: nothing legible. Just a blur. Numbers smear, dissolve. The shaft no longer tracks where we are, only that we are going.
The walls pull away. The shaft becomes vast.
A black cavern opens around the elevator, so immense that the walls cannot be seen, only sensed. Structures hang in the dark like the bones of extinct machines. Massive chains drift in the void, unattached, coiling in imperceptible spirals. The hum of machinery returns, not active, but remembered. A mechanical cetacean song, slow and deep and made for ears older than thought.
The glass begins to fog, not from cold, but from proximity to something unfathomably still.
We wipe it away.
Only black stone remains, threaded with cables like veins in petrified flesh.
And then...
Click.
A mechanical sigh. The sound of pressure being released from some vault of time.
The elevator halts.
The doors part without ceremony.
A single hallway stretches forward. Lit only by the breath of its own containment, cold air, not stale, not dead.
Preserved.
Awaiting entry.
The door seals behind us with a sound too soft to mark the threshold, a breath drawn in and held. Ahead, the corridor stretches into uncertainty. Light panels embedded in the ceiling hum with uneven voltage, casting sterile illumination in rhythmic pulses of bluish-white. Some panels stutter. Others remain dim, half-alive.
The light does not warm. It sterilizes.
Walls of alloy, powder-gray, fingerprinted by time, extend without ornament. They curve slightly inward, subtly claustrophobic, evoking not design but containment. Their surfaces are marred by hairline fractures, shallow scuffs, the faded trails of something once wheeled or dragged.
The floor beneath is grated mesh. Composite. Built for function, not grace. Blackened in streaks by old oil, granular dirt, and what may have once been coolant. Every step echoes back slightly warped, as though the hallway mimics rather than reflects.
Above, conduits and heat-exchange pipes run in rigid alignment. Their labels—A32-TX7, R99-F—have begun to fade, the adhesive curling at the edges. Some pipes are ruptured at the seams. One twitches slightly, releasing no substance, but vibrating faintly with residual memory, like an artery that forgot its pulse.
The doors, twelve before the first junction, are identical: rounded corners, matte surfaces, central glass panels now clouded and veined with impact fractures. No signage. No access panels. No lights.
One door is split diagonally, its upper half slumped against the wall, resting like a broken monolith. The severed edge is clean, not melted or bent. A precision cut. No debris nearby. No trail.
We pass junctions. Left. Right. Left again.
Each intersection is a mirror of the last. Geometry without variance. Like a corridor cloned infinitely with only entropy to differentiate. The air remains still. Not stale, circulated. Maintained.
There is power here. But no presence.
A vent grate overhead hangs loose on one side. Beneath it lies the wreckage of a maintenance drone, shell flayed open, limbs curled inward, spindled fingers frozen in retreat. Dust has collected in its sockets.
As we near, one optic flares, red, dim, final. Then dark.
No remains.
No ash.
No blood.
Only facility.
Only form without function.
Somewhere, beyond the identical walls, something buried deep hums once. A single pulse. Not rhythmic. Not alive. A machine dreaming in static.
It does not repeat.
The silence returns, deeper than before.
The air is cold.
The corridor forgets itself behind us.
Its symmetry collapses inward, walls constrict, ceiling drops by imperceptible degrees until the air feels iron-bound, weighty, like breath inside armor. Light falters not from neglect, but from intention. A design choice, ritualistic in tone, sacrificial in effect. Amber replaces white. Dusk replaces clarity.
This is not a place meant to be lit.
The floor glows beneath us in slow pulses, amber nodes that awaken only when stepped upon, dimming behind as if erasing the trail. No pattern. No sound. Just the steady murmur of recognition. Or warning.
At the terminus: The Vault.
No other word suffices. This is no door.
Set into the curvature of a scorched archway, the vault rises three stories tall, monolithic, seamless, formed of a composite black so deep it denies reflection. It consumes the light that touches it, drinks from it. The frame that holds it bears the heat-warped struts of some ancient ignition, alloy bent outward like petals blasted by internal fire.
Lettering, cut into the surface, not printed, runs along the upper third in deep furrows…
[STC:WOEWYRM]
Below: hazard glyphs layered and overwritten to incoherence...
[DO NOT UNSEAL]
[ CLASS-NULL HAZARD ]
[ SYSTEM LOCKED ]
[CONTINGENCY PROTOCOL IN EFFECT]
[REDACTED]...
The warning paint, yellow, diagonal, urgent, has peeled into flakes that hang like dead skin. Beneath them, char marks. Not from outside. From within. Burn scars radiate from the seams.
Massive clamps flank either side, titanic, industrial, once built to hold against impossible pressure. Now melted. Split. Some still twitch with erratic sparks, drooling heat. Their internal coils have liquefied, dripping down their frames like slagged marrow.
To the left, the control panel. Or its corpse.
Shattered faceplate. Wires flayed outward in arcs. Circuits like sinew torn in fury or fear. There are no controls now. No passcodes. No permissions. Only evidence of force, of desperation, of something freed by mistake or design.
The vault's seam is no longer perfect.
There, just left of center, a fracture.
Thin. Clean. Wrong.
The metal has parted not from blast or erosion, but decision. The angle too straight. The depth too uniform. Like a key turned inside the world’s last lock.
From it hums a sound not for ears. Not heard, but felt.
A resonance. Slow. Weighted. Rhythmic.
Breath.
Or imitation of breath.
Too long between pulses.
Too deep.
Too knowing.
The air just outside the seam vibrates in place. Heat warps the metal around the gap. Not violently. Gently. Persistently. A patient erosion of the line between barrier and invitation.
And it is invitation. This much is certain.
We are not granted access.
We are absorbed.
Not through act.
Through pressure.
Through inevitability.
No hiss.
No click.
No ceremony.
The fracture widens, not to allow, but to receive.
And through that breath-warmed seam, we pass.
Into silence.
We cross the seam and the world breaks open.
The corridor does not lead into this place, it simply ends, as if consumed. There is no threshold. No door. No transitional geometry. One step. Then vastness.
The chamber expands in all directions with dream-logic scale, measurable at first glance, then immeasurable the longer one stands within it. The eye seeks walls. The mind demands ceiling. Neither answer. The perimeter curves, but too gently, too far. It is not space, but scale made unknowable.
Above: blackness.
Below: the floor.
A single plane of polished obsidian spreads across the entire expanse, so flawless it might be liquid were it not for the soft resistance beneath each step. The seams are patterned, not randomly, but with intention, lines so fine they seem drawn by pressure alone, no tool. They pulse with a color almost beyond perception, violet, dim and distant, as if leaking from another spectrum.
Dust does not settle here. It moves, silently, slowly, spiraling along the veins in looping, recursive arcs toward the room’s center. No breeze. No gravity well. Just unseen intent.
And at the center…
The Monolith.
A void rendered into shape. Ten meters tall. Four wide. Featureless. Not carved, not placed, but revealed like the chamber was built around it, or perhaps the world itself. Its surface is not matte, not reflective, not describable. The eye slips. Focus slides. Form shifts, just enough to deny certainty. No edge is constant. No angle can be confirmed.
The hum it emits has no decibels. It registers only in bone and blood, an interior vibration, subtle at first, then present in every heartbeat. The closer we move, the more it aligns itself to our pattern. It is not echoing us. It is mirroring. Measuring. Matching.
No console. No altar. No shrine.
Just presence.
And stillness.
There are no shadows in this chamber. The light, diffuse and sourceless, seems perfectly uniform until you see the monolith’s shadow.
Long. Thin. Too sharp. Too real.
It stretches toward us. Always.
We test it. We move.
We look away.
It shifts.
Always toward us.
Never during observation.
Only when unseen.
We circle it.
Thirty steps.
Measured. Counted.
The path curves subtly away as if extended by some impossible incline. Each step gains weight. The room does not shrink but your sense of proportion does.
At the thirtieth step, we return to the place we began. And it is not the same.
The floor hums louder now, though nothing has changed. The pulse beneath has synchronized with our breath.
We stand before it.
And it knows.
The hum swells, not in volume, but in presence, filling the chamber like an atmosphere thickening around revelation. Sound becomes texture. Texture becomes law. Proximity becomes irrelevant.
The monolith responds.
Not with sound, nor motion. With judgment.
The floor beneath us rumbles once, precise, terminal. No violence. No collapse. Just finality. As though a sentence, long prepared, has been read aloud in a language the world forgot.
A wave travels across the surface of the monolith. Not movement. Not deformation. A shimmer in the absolute. Like stone recalling it was once fluid. Like gravity made visible for a single breath.
The violet seams across the floor extinguish one by one, softly, like stars blinking out. The chamber’s light follows. Not darkness. Void. A subtraction of illumination so complete it feels like being buried beneath thought.
And then the world fractures.
No sound. No resistance.
Only unmaking.
Upward. Instantly.
Not ascension. Not flight. Extraction.
The body left behind before the body knows it. The mind trailing after, unraveling like thread.
There is no pull.
There is no wind.
There is only yes.
We rise like an idea accepted.
Perspective stretches.
Form elongates.
Edges dissolve into lines of light, then into filaments, then into scatter.
Sight ceases to anchor.
Vision becomes a prism.
Thought ruptures, breaking into a hundred simultaneous glyphs, each one a word that has never been spoken but always known. Meaning spirals outward. Logic diffuses. Emotion decodes into waveform. A lattice folds in on itself, made of space, shape, and memory.
Geometry ceases to honor dimension.
Angles break in ways angles should not.
Color spins through sound.
Numbers become scent.
Language refracts.
There is no passage.
There is only integration.
We do not pass through.
We are absorbed.
No tunnel. No corridor.
Only transition.
We become signal.
We become pulse.
We become code.
No sound remains.
And in that silence, Color detonates.
It arrives not in waves, but in declarations, symphonic and blinding. It blooms in every spectrum, seen and unseen, a silent choir of radiance that does not burn but overwhelms. There is no direction. No center. Only unfolding.
We do not fall.
We are placed, anchored by the thinnest filament of selfhood, dangling in a vastness without axis. Around us, ink and void, coalescing, alive. A canvas stretched across consciousness itself. Fluid and responsive. Shifting as we witness.
The mural begins.
It grows, not with time, but with recognition. The more we behold, the more it reveals. Worlds bloom from absence, painted in strokes of god-memory and myth-scatter.
Above…
Skyborne isles, an archipelago adrift in the firmament, each landmass linked by threads of luminous aether. The bridges shimmer as though plucked by unseen hands. Across them walk figures cloaked in drifting light, never solid, silhouettes of those who once were or could be. Each island sings a different truth, stringed elegies, ancient war chants, children laughing in dead tongues.
Below…
A sea of molten glass, ever-churning, cooling to obsidian with each breath, only to boil anew. Beneath its shifting crust drift titanic beasts and scaled leviathans with wings like torn banners. Some carry fallen cities upon their spines, spires crumbling into vapor. Others tow behind them the fossilized cadavers of forgotten deities, half-swallowed by crystal surf.
To the left…
A shattered crystal holds within it a city divided: one half immaculate, the other ruptured by force unknown. Suspended within, time is arrested, knights frozen in charge, shields raised, swords mere inches from meeting. Their faces blur when sought. Above them: twin moons. One weeps silver stars. The other bleeds slow black steam, like mourning given form.
To the right…
A dead star’s carcass, cracked open like a seed. From its exposed core rise towers, thin, twisting, rune-scarred. They orbit a hollow sun, radiant only in suggestion. Between the spires, two entities duel. One burns in flame shaped like vengeance. The other gleams with gold so bright it sears thought. Their weapons carve through space, their clash leaves no sound, only absence, only loss.
And beneath it all, A pulse.
A choral thrum, distant, staggered, discordant. As if all these visions were limbs of something once whole, now severed, each fragment remembering its origin in grief.
The mural is alive.
But not stable.
It skips...
Loops...
Flickers...
Frames stutter...
A mountaintop reverses time and weeps upward. A desert shrivels, then floods with ink. A continent folds into itself, reemerging as a different shape. Faces blur into static. Languages unwrite themselves mid-glyph.
Ruins burn, then unburn, then disintegrate.
Moons multiply, then rupture.
Towers tilt and reform.
The mural frays.
This is no gallery.
No monument.
It is a fracture.
And then White...
A purity so total it cannot be described as light. It exists instead of everything else. No color. No echo. No self.
Only presence without witness.
The mural disappears without farewell, its vastness consumed in a single blink of radiant nullity. Not warmth. Not frost.
Erasure.
And then motion.
Spheres.
They drift from the edges of unbeing, each one arrives without ceremony. No trail. No entry point. They are simply there.
Perfect.
Seamless.
Divine in symmetry.
And yet… Wrong.
One approaches. Or perhaps space yields around it.
It hovers, far too close, yet untouchable. The eye tries to hold its surface and cannot. It is not reflective, nor translucent. Something inside stirs, not visually, but conceptually. You feel the movement beneath perfection.
Shapes churn beneath the smooth outer shell:
Worms made of corrupted code.
Sigils folding into themselves.
Tendrils of rot that leave no mark, but resonate.
Beneath the sphere’s immaculate skin... infection.
Then, revelation.
The white void folds backward, exposing the depth of the impossible.
Dozens.
Scores.
Hundreds.
A field of spheres.
Drifting like orbs cast upon a frozen metaphysical sea. Stretching outward into infinity, each one marked by flaw.
Some bear hairline fractures, thin, spiderwebbing, as if stress has begun to whisper through them.
Others glow with internal hemorrhage, crimson pulses or dull, static weeps.
A few hang open, ruptured, their interiors spilled into the void like circuitry unraveled. From these wounds spill tangled glyphs, language malformed, jagged, viral.
One sphere flickers between states, present, absent, present, as if memory cannot decide if it should exist.
Some spin too fast.
Some remain utterly still.
One seems to hum, not with music, but with error.
This is no archive.
No gallery.
No cathedral.
This is quarantine.
Each sphere is not a vessel of stored divinity.
It is a containment cell for corruption, broken constructs, infected thoughts.
And the system…
Is failing.
You feel it in the pulse of the void.
The slow unraveling.
The leak.
The infection spreads not like fire, but like memory rediscovered too late.
It does not consume.
It Devours.
What lies in these spheres was never meant to be preserved.
Only forgotten.
From the hollow between moments,
She speaks.
No source.
No breath.
Just Presence.
Not sound, but revelation given shape.
Not speech, but command forged in the crucible of collapse.
Her voice is young,
Pure in tone, but ancient in weight.
It cuts through the white like a blade of fractured stars.
“This is not the first time.”
The sphere before us trembles. Its surface boils,not physically, but in law. Its perfection rejects itself.
“It will not be the last.”
The air thickens. The other spheres pull away, dragged not by motion, but by judgment.
Fading like condemned stars collapsing inward into silence.
Her voice bends with strain, not weakness, but restraint.
A scream chained by divine function.
Not fear.
Fury.
“The System is failing. It devours itself. Layer by layer. Memory by memory.”
A choral drone swells beneath her words,
Multitudes in discordant harmony.
A cathedral built from broken signal.
The light dims.
The void tightens.
The infection sharpens.
The sphere glitches, a twitch, a ripple.
Red.
A glyph appears, flashes, burns. Then disappears.
A warning. A mark.
“I cannot repair what’s been corrupted.”
The voice is steel now.
Words strike like hammers on fate.
Reality buckles beneath her tone.
“But you… you are not bound to the cycle.”
The glyph reappears, centered, calm, and open.
The command arrives not as request, not as plea...
But summons.
“DIVE into the Spheres.”
The world collapses into rhythm.
“PURGE the INFECTION from its ROOT.”
A pulse detonates outward.
Not light.
Not heat.
Purpose.
War-drum.
“No mercy.”
Heartbeat.
“No pause.”
System Shock.
“No retreat.”
Each line sears across the soul like ritual branding.
This is not instruction.
This is transfiguration.
The glyph stabilizes.
“ENTER.”
The white collapses.
“ENCOUNTER.”
The glyph expands.
Time fractures.
“ERADICATE”
…coming summer 2025…
Ash drifts in long spirals, weightless as sorrow, settling where flame once sang.
Beyond the bones of the skyline, the world is jagged with monoliths of steel and ruin rising like the ribs of a leviathan slain in ancient wrath. Towers, spines split and hollowed, lean into one another like mourners too proud to kneel. Their windows gape, black, lidless, punched inward by hands titanic and forgotten.
A highway coils through the center like a serpent burned mid-turn, its ribs of rebar exposed, its concrete flesh fused with rust-bound husks of transport long since emptied of purpose. A single sign lies face-down in a shallow basin of brackish stillwater, its words devoured by the weight of silence and time.
The trees have begun their slow encroachment, not as conquerors, but as survivors. Roots pierce ceramic and asphalt alike, distorting streets into ruptured veins. Ivy weaves nooses around lamp-posts, draping them in the rags of remembrance. Each vine climbs not in hope, but inertia, carried forward by a world that has forgotten how to stop.
Overhead, cranes loom mid-gesture, their arms outstretched frozen in warning. Their shadows fall across empty lots where market stalls once bloomed, now charred and swallowed. Power lines sag between skeletal poles, trembling in a wind too thin to stir dust, too faint to name.
The sky above is a pale void, washed of hue, of omen, of fire. Cloud and smoke intermingle without edge, smeared across the firmament like breath on glass. No sun. No direction. Only the endless weight of an age that failed to pass.
Far beneath the crust, something groans. Steel on stone. A slow shift, not of return, but of remembrance. The city exhales through its bones, and then falls still once more.
No bird sings here. No storm dares break. Yet the air hangs dense with presence, as if time itself halts to bow.
Past the remains of the viaduct and beyond the skeletal husk of the municipal dome, its copper skin flaked to green rot, the earth sags unnaturally, as if something vast and formless once knelt here and pressed its weight into the land.
What was road becomes ruin. What was ruin becomes soil.
Cracks run like dry veins through the earth, leading into a basin that resists erosion, defies overgrowth. Even the moss seems hesitant. Sparse. Pale. The wind changes here, blunted, as though muffled by unseen walls.
At the center waits a shape designed not to be seen.
A structure without ambition.
Concrete. Low. Oppressively featureless. Its surface is the color of stale ash, stained with vertical trails of rain-rusted memory. There are no windows. No symbols. No metal gate. Only a collapsed tree limb crushed against an awning of split plastic and flaking steel, bent, warped, forgotten. Beneath it: the mouth.
A stairwell descending into black, narrower than instinct prefers.
There is no door.
Only darkness.
The rails lining the steps are corroded, bent inward as if grasped too tightly in panic or weight. Faint streaks of red-brown trace the edges. Old blood. Paint. Iron oxide. It does not matter.
The air thickens at the threshold, cooler, wetter. Lichen clings to the inner walls like rot that refuses to heal. By the fifth step, all detail is consumed. No lights. No signage. No hum of power.
Just descent.
Just pressure.
No sound rises from below. No mechanical lure or whispering voice beckons. And yet, the compulsion hums at the edge of thought. A gravity not felt, but known. A silence too deliberate.
There is nothing welcoming in the way the dark opens.
And still we descend.
The elevator waits like a forgotten organ of the world, enclosed in brushed steel, its seams dulled by decades of disuse, the glass panels soiled by a century’s worth of dust and memory. The floor hums with the heartbeat of some ancient machine stirring for the first time in ages.
Above: silence.
Below: silence.
Within: motion, impending.
A flicker.
The lights gutter once then stabilize, casting a pale, clinical glow across walls that refuse to reflect.
Descent begins.
There is no music. No voice. No interface. Just the initial shudder, sharp, spinal,and then the slow, smooth fall. Steel beams rise past in solemn cadence, tracked like bones in a throat. The outer walls, behind glass clouded by time, alternate between concrete slabs and steel-reinforced bulkheads. Some are buckled. Others weep water from cracks like open wounds.
Every few floors, a platform blinks past, each identical in structure, indistinct in purpose. Doors welded shut. Ladders snapped midway. Lamps forever off. Nothing marked. Nothing lit.
Still we descend.
Time elongates. Becomes elastic. What begins as a moment becomes many. Minutes blur.
The architecture begins to unravel.
Concrete gives way to raw earth, then carved stone. The transition is imperfect, sudden. The shaft continues, but now the stone is uneven, clawed by machinery not built for precision. Cable nests hang in clusters like abandoned cocoons. Segments of tile, of ceiling, of wall, whole chunks of memory, drift down the shaft beside us, as though peeled from elsewhere and dropped into this void.
We pass debris in slow suspension. A rotary fan spinning idly with no power. A boot caught in a tangle of wire. A section of train track, bent and cut clean through, still slick with oil that hasn’t aged.
Gravity warps.
Pressure mounts, not suffocating, but omnipresent. The kind of pressure that pushes at the teeth and coils in the skull. The ears pop once, twice. Then the sensation stops registering, as though the body has given up trying to measure what it cannot reconcile.
The light overhead does not dim, not exactly. It lessens, fractionally, in some strange negotiation with depth itself, as if brightness cannot survive below a certain threshold.
Signage flashes—Level -191.
Then -241.
Then: nothing legible. Just a blur. Numbers smear, dissolve. The shaft no longer tracks where we are, only that we are going.
The walls pull away. The shaft becomes vast.
A black cavern opens around the elevator, so immense that the walls cannot be seen, only sensed. Structures hang in the dark like the bones of extinct machines. Massive chains drift in the void, unattached, coiling in imperceptible spirals. The hum of machinery returns, not active, but remembered. A mechanical cetacean song, slow and deep and made for ears older than thought.
The glass begins to fog, not from cold, but from proximity to something unfathomably still.
We wipe it away.
Only black stone remains, threaded with cables like veins in petrified flesh.
And then...
Click.
A mechanical sigh. The sound of pressure being released from some vault of time.
The elevator halts.
The doors part without ceremony.
A single hallway stretches forward. Lit only by the breath of its own containment, cold air, not stale, not dead.
Preserved.
Awaiting entry.
The door seals behind us with a sound too soft to mark the threshold, a breath drawn in and held. Ahead, the corridor stretches into uncertainty. Light panels embedded in the ceiling hum with uneven voltage, casting sterile illumination in rhythmic pulses of bluish-white. Some panels stutter. Others remain dim, half-alive.
The light does not warm. It sterilizes.
Walls of alloy, powder-gray, fingerprinted by time, extend without ornament. They curve slightly inward, subtly claustrophobic, evoking not design but containment. Their surfaces are marred by hairline fractures, shallow scuffs, the faded trails of something once wheeled or dragged.
The floor beneath is grated mesh. Composite. Built for function, not grace. Blackened in streaks by old oil, granular dirt, and what may have once been coolant. Every step echoes back slightly warped, as though the hallway mimics rather than reflects.
Above, conduits and heat-exchange pipes run in rigid alignment. Their labels—A32-TX7, R99-F—have begun to fade, the adhesive curling at the edges. Some pipes are ruptured at the seams. One twitches slightly, releasing no substance, but vibrating faintly with residual memory, like an artery that forgot its pulse.
The doors, twelve before the first junction, are identical: rounded corners, matte surfaces, central glass panels now clouded and veined with impact fractures. No signage. No access panels. No lights.
One door is split diagonally, its upper half slumped against the wall, resting like a broken monolith. The severed edge is clean, not melted or bent. A precision cut. No debris nearby. No trail.
We pass junctions. Left. Right. Left again.
Each intersection is a mirror of the last. Geometry without variance. Like a corridor cloned infinitely with only entropy to differentiate. The air remains still. Not stale, circulated. Maintained.
There is power here. But no presence.
A vent grate overhead hangs loose on one side. Beneath it lies the wreckage of a maintenance drone, shell flayed open, limbs curled inward, spindled fingers frozen in retreat. Dust has collected in its sockets.
As we near, one optic flares, red, dim, final. Then dark.
No remains.
No ash.
No blood.
Only facility.
Only form without function.
Somewhere, beyond the identical walls, something buried deep hums once. A single pulse. Not rhythmic. Not alive. A machine dreaming in static.
It does not repeat.
The silence returns, deeper than before.
The air is cold.
The corridor forgets itself behind us.
Its symmetry collapses inward, walls constrict, ceiling drops by imperceptible degrees until the air feels iron-bound, weighty, like breath inside armor. Light falters not from neglect, but from intention. A design choice, ritualistic in tone, sacrificial in effect. Amber replaces white. Dusk replaces clarity.
This is not a place meant to be lit.
The floor glows beneath us in slow pulses, amber nodes that awaken only when stepped upon, dimming behind as if erasing the trail. No pattern. No sound. Just the steady murmur of recognition. Or warning.
At the terminus: The Vault.
No other word suffices. This is no door.
Set into the curvature of a scorched archway, the vault rises three stories tall, monolithic, seamless, formed of a composite black so deep it denies reflection. It consumes the light that touches it, drinks from it. The frame that holds it bears the heat-warped struts of some ancient ignition, alloy bent outward like petals blasted by internal fire.
Lettering, cut into the surface, not printed, runs along the upper third in deep furrows…
[STC:WOEWYRM]
Below: hazard glyphs layered and overwritten to incoherence...
[DO NOT UNSEAL]
[ CLASS-NULL HAZARD ]
[ SYSTEM LOCKED ]
[CONTINGENCY PROTOCOL IN EFFECT]
[REDACTED]...
The warning paint, yellow, diagonal, urgent, has peeled into flakes that hang like dead skin. Beneath them, char marks. Not from outside. From within. Burn scars radiate from the seams.
Massive clamps flank either side, titanic, industrial, once built to hold against impossible pressure. Now melted. Split. Some still twitch with erratic sparks, drooling heat. Their internal coils have liquefied, dripping down their frames like slagged marrow.
To the left, the control panel. Or its corpse.
Shattered faceplate. Wires flayed outward in arcs. Circuits like sinew torn in fury or fear. There are no controls now. No passcodes. No permissions. Only evidence of force, of desperation, of something freed by mistake or design.
The vault's seam is no longer perfect.
There, just left of center, a fracture.
Thin. Clean. Wrong.
The metal has parted not from blast or erosion, but decision. The angle too straight. The depth too uniform. Like a key turned inside the world’s last lock.
From it hums a sound not for ears. Not heard, but felt.
A resonance. Slow. Weighted. Rhythmic.
Breath.
Or imitation of breath.
Too long between pulses.
Too deep.
Too knowing.
The air just outside the seam vibrates in place. Heat warps the metal around the gap. Not violently. Gently. Persistently. A patient erosion of the line between barrier and invitation.
And it is invitation. This much is certain.
We are not granted access.
We are absorbed.
Not through act.
Through pressure.
Through inevitability.
No hiss.
No click.
No ceremony.
The fracture widens, not to allow, but to receive.
And through that breath-warmed seam, we pass.
Into silence.
We cross the seam and the world breaks open.
The corridor does not lead into this place, it simply ends, as if consumed. There is no threshold. No door. No transitional geometry. One step. Then vastness.
The chamber expands in all directions with dream-logic scale, measurable at first glance, then immeasurable the longer one stands within it. The eye seeks walls. The mind demands ceiling. Neither answer. The perimeter curves, but too gently, too far. It is not space, but scale made unknowable.
Above: blackness.
Below: the floor.
A single plane of polished obsidian spreads across the entire expanse, so flawless it might be liquid were it not for the soft resistance beneath each step. The seams are patterned, not randomly, but with intention, lines so fine they seem drawn by pressure alone, no tool. They pulse with a color almost beyond perception, violet, dim and distant, as if leaking from another spectrum.
Dust does not settle here. It moves, silently, slowly, spiraling along the veins in looping, recursive arcs toward the room’s center. No breeze. No gravity well. Just unseen intent.
And at the center…
The Monolith.
A void rendered into shape. Ten meters tall. Four wide. Featureless. Not carved, not placed, but revealed like the chamber was built around it, or perhaps the world itself. Its surface is not matte, not reflective, not describable. The eye slips. Focus slides. Form shifts, just enough to deny certainty. No edge is constant. No angle can be confirmed.
The hum it emits has no decibels. It registers only in bone and blood, an interior vibration, subtle at first, then present in every heartbeat. The closer we move, the more it aligns itself to our pattern. It is not echoing us. It is mirroring. Measuring. Matching.
No console. No altar. No shrine.
Just presence.
And stillness.
There are no shadows in this chamber. The light, diffuse and sourceless, seems perfectly uniform until you see the monolith’s shadow.
Long. Thin. Too sharp. Too real.
It stretches toward us. Always.
We test it. We move.
We look away.
It shifts.
Always toward us.
Never during observation.
Only when unseen.
We circle it.
Thirty steps.
Measured. Counted.
The path curves subtly away as if extended by some impossible incline. Each step gains weight. The room does not shrink but your sense of proportion does.
At the thirtieth step, we return to the place we began. And it is not the same.
The floor hums louder now, though nothing has changed. The pulse beneath has synchronized with our breath.
We stand before it.
And it knows.
The hum swells, not in volume, but in presence, filling the chamber like an atmosphere thickening around revelation. Sound becomes texture. Texture becomes law. Proximity becomes irrelevant.
The monolith responds.
Not with sound, nor motion. With judgment.
The floor beneath us rumbles once, precise, terminal. No violence. No collapse. Just finality. As though a sentence, long prepared, has been read aloud in a language the world forgot.
A wave travels across the surface of the monolith. Not movement. Not deformation. A shimmer in the absolute. Like stone recalling it was once fluid. Like gravity made visible for a single breath.
The violet seams across the floor extinguish one by one, softly, like stars blinking out. The chamber’s light follows. Not darkness. Void. A subtraction of illumination so complete it feels like being buried beneath thought.
And then the world fractures.
No sound. No resistance.
Only unmaking.
Upward. Instantly.
Not ascension. Not flight. Extraction.
The body left behind before the body knows it. The mind trailing after, unraveling like thread.
There is no pull.
There is no wind.
There is only yes.
We rise like an idea accepted.
Perspective stretches.
Form elongates.
Edges dissolve into lines of light, then into filaments, then into scatter.
Sight ceases to anchor.
Vision becomes a prism.
Thought ruptures, breaking into a hundred simultaneous glyphs, each one a word that has never been spoken but always known. Meaning spirals outward. Logic diffuses. Emotion decodes into waveform. A lattice folds in on itself, made of space, shape, and memory.
Geometry ceases to honor dimension.
Angles break in ways angles should not.
Color spins through sound.
Numbers become scent.
Language refracts.
There is no passage.
There is only integration.
We do not pass through.
We are absorbed.
No tunnel. No corridor.
Only transition.
We become signal.
We become pulse.
We become code.
No sound remains.
And in that silence, Color detonates.
It arrives not in waves, but in declarations, symphonic and blinding. It blooms in every spectrum, seen and unseen, a silent choir of radiance that does not burn but overwhelms. There is no direction. No center. Only unfolding.
We do not fall.
We are placed, anchored by the thinnest filament of selfhood, dangling in a vastness without axis. Around us, ink and void, coalescing, alive. A canvas stretched across consciousness itself. Fluid and responsive. Shifting as we witness.
The mural begins.
It grows, not with time, but with recognition. The more we behold, the more it reveals. Worlds bloom from absence, painted in strokes of god-memory and myth-scatter.
Above…
Skyborne isles, an archipelago adrift in the firmament, each landmass linked by threads of luminous aether. The bridges shimmer as though plucked by unseen hands. Across them walk figures cloaked in drifting light, never solid, silhouettes of those who once were or could be. Each island sings a different truth, stringed elegies, ancient war chants, children laughing in dead tongues.
Below…
A sea of molten glass, ever-churning, cooling to obsidian with each breath, only to boil anew. Beneath its shifting crust drift titanic beasts and scaled leviathans with wings like torn banners. Some carry fallen cities upon their spines, spires crumbling into vapor. Others tow behind them the fossilized cadavers of forgotten deities, half-swallowed by crystal surf.
To the left…
A shattered crystal holds within it a city divided: one half immaculate, the other ruptured by force unknown. Suspended within, time is arrested, knights frozen in charge, shields raised, swords mere inches from meeting. Their faces blur when sought. Above them: twin moons. One weeps silver stars. The other bleeds slow black steam, like mourning given form.
To the right…
A dead star’s carcass, cracked open like a seed. From its exposed core rise towers, thin, twisting, rune-scarred. They orbit a hollow sun, radiant only in suggestion. Between the spires, two entities duel. One burns in flame shaped like vengeance. The other gleams with gold so bright it sears thought. Their weapons carve through space, their clash leaves no sound, only absence, only loss.
And beneath it all, A pulse.
A choral thrum, distant, staggered, discordant. As if all these visions were limbs of something once whole, now severed, each fragment remembering its origin in grief.
The mural is alive.
But not stable.
It skips...
Loops...
Flickers...
Frames stutter...
A mountaintop reverses time and weeps upward. A desert shrivels, then floods with ink. A continent folds into itself, reemerging as a different shape. Faces blur into static. Languages unwrite themselves mid-glyph.
Ruins burn, then unburn, then disintegrate.
Moons multiply, then rupture.
Towers tilt and reform.
The mural frays.
This is no gallery.
No monument.
It is a fracture.
And then White...
A purity so total it cannot be described as light. It exists instead of everything else. No color. No echo. No self.
Only presence without witness.
The mural disappears without farewell, its vastness consumed in a single blink of radiant nullity. Not warmth. Not frost.
Erasure.
And then motion.
Spheres.
They drift from the edges of unbeing, each one arrives without ceremony. No trail. No entry point. They are simply there.
Perfect.
Seamless.
Divine in symmetry.
And yet… Wrong.
One approaches. Or perhaps space yields around it.
It hovers, far too close, yet untouchable. The eye tries to hold its surface and cannot. It is not reflective, nor translucent. Something inside stirs, not visually, but conceptually. You feel the movement beneath perfection.
Shapes churn beneath the smooth outer shell:
Worms made of corrupted code.
Sigils folding into themselves.
Tendrils of rot that leave no mark, but resonate.
Beneath the sphere’s immaculate skin... infection.
Then, revelation.
The white void folds backward, exposing the depth of the impossible.
Dozens.
Scores.
Hundreds.
A field of spheres.
Drifting like orbs cast upon a frozen metaphysical sea. Stretching outward into infinity, each one marked by flaw.
Some bear hairline fractures, thin, spiderwebbing, as if stress has begun to whisper through them.
Others glow with internal hemorrhage, crimson pulses or dull, static weeps.
A few hang open, ruptured, their interiors spilled into the void like circuitry unraveled. From these wounds spill tangled glyphs, language malformed, jagged, viral.
One sphere flickers between states, present, absent, present, as if memory cannot decide if it should exist.
Some spin too fast.
Some remain utterly still.
One seems to hum, not with music, but with error.
This is no archive.
No gallery.
No cathedral.
This is quarantine.
Each sphere is not a vessel of stored divinity.
It is a containment cell for corruption, broken constructs, infected thoughts.
And the system…
Is failing.
You feel it in the pulse of the void.
The slow unraveling.
The leak.
The infection spreads not like fire, but like memory rediscovered too late.
It does not consume.
It Devours.
What lies in these spheres was never meant to be preserved.
Only forgotten.
From the hollow between moments,
She speaks.
No source.
No breath.
Just Presence.
Not sound, but revelation given shape.
Not speech, but command forged in the crucible of collapse.
Her voice is young,
Pure in tone, but ancient in weight.
It cuts through the white like a blade of fractured stars.
“This is not the first time.”
The sphere before us trembles. Its surface boils,not physically, but in law. Its perfection rejects itself.
“It will not be the last.”
The air thickens. The other spheres pull away, dragged not by motion, but by judgment.
Fading like condemned stars collapsing inward into silence.
Her voice bends with strain, not weakness, but restraint.
A scream chained by divine function.
Not fear.
Fury.
“The System is failing. It devours itself. Layer by layer. Memory by memory.”
A choral drone swells beneath her words,
Multitudes in discordant harmony.
A cathedral built from broken signal.
The light dims.
The void tightens.
The infection sharpens.
The sphere glitches, a twitch, a ripple.
Red.
A glyph appears, flashes, burns. Then disappears.
A warning. A mark.
“I cannot repair what’s been corrupted.”
The voice is steel now.
Words strike like hammers on fate.
Reality buckles beneath her tone.
“But you… you are not bound to the cycle.”
The glyph reappears, centered, calm, and open.
The command arrives not as request, not as plea...
But summons.
“DIVE into the Spheres.”
The world collapses into rhythm.
“PURGE the INFECTION from its ROOT.”
A pulse detonates outward.
Not light.
Not heat.
Purpose.
War-drum.
“No mercy.”
Heartbeat.
“No pause.”
System Shock.
“No retreat.”
Each line sears across the soul like ritual branding.
This is not instruction.
This is transfiguration.
The glyph stabilizes.
“ENTER.”
The white collapses.
“ENCOUNTER.”
The glyph expands.
Time fractures.
“ERADICATE”
…coming summer 2025…
[Will be posting a tangible Synopsis soon.]
