Everything felt so familiar, yet so distant.
He felt like he would remember every crevice, every loose piece of mortar, all of it. He must have walked through these halls at least once, at most hundreds. Every wall, place, and object that has moved, he was stepping on his footprints from all that time ago.
He hated himself for this.
Guilt writhed through his mind and coursed through his veins. This place would be absolute torture, how could he be so blissful? What shaped him to be this way to forget EVERYTHING?! He shouldn't feel this way. Being ignorant would only make him live in a world painted in fear, he needed answers. Anything that could give him any insight, was something to crave for.
I won't fear anymore.
A symphony of gagging voices echoed amidst the darkness behind them. Laurence and the squadrons snapped their heads behind. The enigmatic humming of creaking metal, scraping and bashing against one another violently, the rattling of heavy chains, led a pathway to eighteen spiraling scarlet eyes. From its maw, it billowed a wave of cool breath that rushed against them like snow.
"WHO'S THERE?!" One of the soldiers said, "REVEAL YOURSELF."
It spoke reliquary runes in a deep, waxy voice followed by a noise he couldn't tell if it was childish snickering or screaming. A massive blue claw wrapped around a chain peered out. Between its palm, it held the gored body of a soldier, beaten and gnawed apart until unrecognizable. Another claw emerged and placed two fingers around the soldier's skull, and began to move its jaw like a puppet.
An uncanny, terribly "quiet sentence came from the corpse.
"I ENJOY YOUR IGNORANCE. IGNORANCE MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER."
Its mere presence shook loose their mortal coils. They felt their sanity break balance and begin teetering off the edge. They couldn't tell what was real and what was simply a hallucination. Every second its eyes would spin static and they felt their vision stave into blur. Each time it exhaled another breath as the wind passed through them they felt their skeletons rattle and a sizzling terror crawl across their back. Every time it groaned and spoke another reliquary they felt their guts squelch and melt into ectoplasm.
By the time everyone collapsed on the floor, unconscious, still nothing had affected Ren.
"IT MAKES ME THINK OF A TIME I MET A SMILING MAN. HE DID NOTHING BUT SMILE. I THOUGHT HE WAS HAPPY."
It spoke so calmly, yet exasperated and muffled. The shadows from each end encroached further and further, the specter sat still, near lifeless. Each word was pronounced clearly and spaced apart, as its eyes flickered with perverse treachery.
"What are you..."
"IT IS SAD WHAT MAGIC CAN DO. I WISH I HAD KNOWN LESS. I WONDERED WHAT THAT FELT LIKE. TRAPPED AND CAN'T ESCAPE."
Stray spots of its form were revealed from the shade. Rusted, dilapidating scrap metal, nails, and twisted rebar sticking out. Its tissue squirmed and expanded with each breath like a butterfly squeezing out its chrysalis, ectoplasm gushing out through every crevice. Hellbent faces plastered on its necrotic skin spun in a dizzying dance.
"...What...are you..."
"HE CAN'T FEEL ANYMORE. HE CAN'T THINK ANYMORE. HE CAN'T ESCAPE."
"I CAN'T ESCAPE."
It threw out one of its chained hands and sent it straight at him. He quickly dodged and hit the wall.
"THE KING. I WANT TO MAKE HIM SUFFER. I WANT HIM TO FEEL EVEN A FRACTION OF WHAT WE'VE FELT. DON'T GET IN OUR WAY."
It retracted its arm and disappeared instantly, without a trace.
Lloyd trudged through the muck across the filth-ridden sewer systems.
Pasty, mud-like filth that sealed onto his feet with each hard step and popped with thick bubbles when he tried to pull them out. A mixture of feces, rubbery-synthetic wastes, and decaying corpse biomass bloated up into a waxy tallow. The tunnels were built up on concrete and coated with the same rot, caged entrances pooling out more as he moved along. He had deformed his sense of smell for this mission long before, the stench was too thick for him to smell anyone out anyway, so he absolutely feared how abominable it would be here.
Luckily, the pipes led to an end as he rose on top of a brick deck to another hallway. Prison cells extended from there to what seemed an impossible length. Whispers of the dead echoed from between the bars and could be heard as sobbing. Everything was covered in brownish-orange rust, some parts dirt and soil seasoned over. A lever was placed against the doorframe, which screeched while he pulled it down. A few lights flickered on but most stayed off, broken or shattered as they were.
A large cloud of dust peered from where the light hit. Strings of cobwebs dangled on the ceiling and sprawled across the layers. Silence covered the traces of any life. But Lloyd never feared. He doubted he could replicate basic human nature, it was never perfect. He struggled with their complex expressions, and their rhythmic movements and made an uncanny wreck once he tried. Distinct emotion was a terror of grasp.
He didn't know what to feel at when. Emotion for anything else was imprinted at creation, his were merely simulated. The simplest form of the soul is an unthinking, unfeeling concept, which bears no sentience and remnant of its former self. He was just a collection of those in an amorphous vessel of magic-induced tissue. With no neural system, his entire being was built up on the enchantment of The Great Wall and the tiny scraps of the souls inside him.
No corpses were left in those cells, possibly already necromanced or decayed into nothing. At the end of the prison was a simple brick wall.
right behind this...
He struck a shadowflame beam out his jaws and at the wall, burning a large enough hole right through. It was pretty much empty, with circuits and tubes scattered on the floor like overgrown rooting, climbing up the distant walls and filtering into machinery up top. A row of a dozen or so tubes glew an ominous white light, filled with a cloudy fluid. Stepping closer, a worm-like figure encased in there.
An eidolist, or whatever eidolon creature it was. Much like Laurence, but bluer and mandibles situated correctly, smaller bug-like eyes with no pupils, and a complete wyrm body. Piping and coils connected them to the machinery of the tubes, the more he wandered around the more tubes were revealed in the shadows.
All in permanent stasis, no signs of life...perfect.
"...h-help...u-us..."
You poor things...he snickered.
A migraine.
More and more pieces of his vision were hacked off, his frontal lobe ached like never before. Images of what was real and an illusion mixed together in a slurry of delusion. Was he seeing things? Did his thermal malfunction? Blind as he was, he could only sense heat, yet what he stared right at was completely empty. No heat, no temperature, just entirely pitch black. A nulled space encased in a metal frame, much like a mirror. No ordinary metal either, it glistened in surges of purple and blue.
"...Taph...what the hell is that?"
It sizzled in a grey noise. It howled in a solemn, warping wail. He stepped forward across the bridge. It swung and creaked. Another step, as if it lured him closer, beckoning him. He felt himself lose footing as if gravity warped around the null space, perhaps it did. He couldn't back off. The anomaly had clenched him by the neck and dragged him to its submission. He looked to Taph, she stared at him with confusion. His joints went numb, slowly losing touch with his body and practically dancing with no control towards the anomaly. The suspension bridged rocked rapidly with each step, strips of wood snapping whilst he danced.
"Hey, what do you think you're doing?!"
Taph bolted at him and pulled back his arm. Kade didn't look back or budge. He swung his arm away and slammed her into rope rails. He drifted further and further, the chains rattled faster and faster. The bridge dashed waves as its weight shifted to an incline, and the boards turned their faces to the mirror. He stumbled onto the platform and gazed directly into the void.
Its frame twisted and warped and liquified at the darkness' brink. It broke reality and broke his mind harder. From its darkest center, glimmers of cosmic dust and swirling nebulas sparkled in the otherwise endless black. Mercurial, wafting wisps of energy pulsated out of it and slung across the chains, a stream of dark globs dispersing out arching cosmic lightning.
"Kade...you don't know what you're messing wit-"
He could see everything, it was too much for him. Through the entire labyrinth, gusts of lamenting winds overlapped with the sorrow of all in its confines. The bricks were split in crumbling cracks that stretched from a few feet to across entire districts. The whispers of the damned, the weeping of the dead. The eternal song of the all-seeing amalgam specter. Undead marching mindlessly. Horrors dancing in the dark. Ghosts of the past haunting. He looked to the darkest chasm, a carcass hung of an abhorrent, star-borne behemoth, dreaming for its return.
From the singularity.
From its most minuscule center.
Barely seen, barely existing.
So tiny, yet its prominence could tear a planet asunder.
A voice.
Y҉O҉U҉ ҉H҉A҉V҉E҉ ҉N҉O҉ ҉ I҉D҉E҉A҉ ҉ W҉H҉A҉T҉ ҉ I҉S҉ ҉ U҉P҉O҉N҉ ҉ Y҉O҉U҉R҉ ҉ R҉E҉A҉L҉I҉T҉Y҉
He didn't question.
There was none to be answered.
He heaved himself from the ground.
Loosened his clothes.
Then turned his head and simply walked away.