PreCursive

  Immediately upon stepping out into the hall of the dead with Aveline buried in my shoulder, I could tell that something had changed. The air was…heavier in here, for some reason, hotter and muggier. More of the strobing red lights had died out, casting the room in an even deeper shadow. And most importantly…

  The faint, diffuse awareness I’d felt earlier had sharpened. It very much felt like there were countless eyes upon me now, staring from some oblique angle.

  I froze, momentarily, staring around at my immediate surroundings as if I were a deer, startled by the stalking of a hunter. No movement greeted my eyes, and yet…

  Yet, I was still wary.

  Aveline raised her head just enough to look at me. She must have felt my sudden tension. “Mr. Hart…?”

  I did my best to rex, even in these circumstances. I smiled down at her. “It’s nothing, Aveline. My own shadow just spooked me. You…should keep your head down. In fact…” I reached up with my free hand and tugged the hood of my cloak around her shoulders down over her slight head, hiding from view. “Try and get some rest, yeah? It’s just going to be a bunch of walking for now.”

  Through the darkness of the hood, I could see emerald green eyes blink at me doubtfully. “Okay…but, Mr. Hart?”

  I slowly started out of the doorway and into the hall, eyes roving constantly. “Yes?”

  “You can call me Lina,” The little girl in my arms said, resting her head back on my shoulder. She almost seemed comforted, with her left ear against my chest. “That’s what my friends do.”

  Even though she couldn’t see my face, I still smiled down at her momentarily. “Then you can call me Nathan, okay? Mr. Hart was my father.”

  At her tired assent, I kept up the pace, grateful that…Lina had chosen to keep her head down.

  I didn’t want someone so young to witness so much death, if I could prevent it. I couldn’t imagine what that would do to such a young mind.

  I must have been walking and navigating through the pods for maybe ten minutes when something changed. It was stark to me because of how intensely I was focusing on my surroundings, hypersensitive to even the stagnant air around me.

  A sound echoed out from the hall behind me. It was slight, but in the absolute silence of the hall, it stood out starkly.

  A soft cttering, as if dozens of bones had rubbed against each other in an instant.

  I stopped immediately. Slowly, so as not to startle the drifting child in my arms, I pivoted on one foot to look behind me. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting. In a pce such as this, I’d had a fear lingering in the back of my mind about being overrun by hordes and hordes of the restless dead as I had been in the catacombs beneath Ttec. Perhaps that fear was finally coming true.

  In a sense, I was nearly right.

  Maybe a hundred feet behind me on the path I’d been navigating, I saw a stark yellow form sitting up from one of the ruined stasis pods. Tall and bare, it could be no doubt as to what it was. In the same manner, I’d suspected Dr. Montbnc’s remains had shifted, one of the dead humans in this hall had abruptly sat up from its grave.

  And turned to face Aveline and me.

  Even across the distance, I could tell that it was looking straight at us. Yet…it didn’t move any more than that. It just sat there, staring at the two of us. There was no glow to its eyes to indicate the animation of the wild undead. At the bone-chilling sight, I had tensed, expecting it to come flying our way, leading me need defend Aveline.

  But no.

  Nothing.

  With the odd, dreamlike state of time that seemed to exist in the Netherim bunker, I couldn’t say how long I stood there, locked in a gaze with the eyeless skeleton. Thankfully, Aveline didn’t awake from the child-like nap she’d fallen into on my shoulder.

  I had no idea how she was doing that after potentially millennia of sleep already, but I was grateful nonetheless. Eventually, though, I needed to get back underway. My friends wouldn’t find themselves, after all. I narrowed my eyes at the watcher one st time and turned away from it. However, the moment I took one more step, I heard that same ctter again.

  This time, I spun in pce as quickly and as gently as I dared.

  Two more distant watchers had joined the first. One dwarf, and another human.

  They just stared at me.

  A scowl crossed my face, and I dismissed them. They weren’t doing anything, so I was resolved not to care, no matter how much the sensation of formless eyes on me made my skin crawl. I turned back around and kept walking.

  More rattling behind me.

  I didn’t look, as much as my instincts screamed at me. I knew what I would find.

  I did pick up my pace, though.

  The sound of bone-on-bone became a constant companion to me as I steadfastly marched through the rows and rows of the awakening dead. It was starting to feel like none of the endless victims in this hall had properly moved on and now they were, hopefully, just curious.

  I was just thankful that Aveline was such a heavy sleeper that she never woke up, even though the sound wasn’t exactly small.

  Finally, ahead of me, I watched as one of them stopped caring about moving beyond my line of sight. A bony yellowed hand reached up and csped onto the edge of the pod it was lying in. With a ctter, the desiccated human occupant heaved their way to a sitting position and turned their empty sockets my way. I gradually slowed my pace to the point where I stopped right in front of the watcher's pod. Their head tracked me until I once more stood standing eye to veritable eye with the dead. My scowl grew, and my grip on Aveline tightened.

  I was sick of this.

  And so I voiced my displeasure.

  “Why?” I asked simply.

  I felt no need to expin myself. The question was fairly obvious.

  I don’t know what kind of answer, exactly, that I was expecting. It’s not like any of these unfortunate dead had vocal cords anymore in which to answer me. Perhaps they could have used the odd form of soul speech that I’d experienced a handful of times. I wouldn’t put such a thing past the risen dead.

  That wasn’t what happened.

  As if from a great distance, I heard the grinding of rusted gears as they screeched against each other. I winced, and almost instinctively raised my free hand to cover Aveline’s ear, covered as it was by my cloak. Puzzlingly, I didn’t need to. The little girl held in my arms didn’t stir at all, despite the great cacophony that reached my own ears. When I lifted the hood slightly, I was momentarily confused to see that she seemed to be resting peacefully. That seemed deeply odd to me, considering just how thunderous the noise was.

  I…guess this was meant for me, and me alone.

  From that noise, I slowly started to decipher words, composed from creaks, groans, and the tortured shriek of steel instead of the passage of wind.

  The…girl…

  An almost sneering scowl immediately manifested on my lips, and I tightened my grip on Aveline in my arms, causing her to shift and murmur slightly. Thankfully, she didn’t wake up. “No,” I said bluntly. “This girl does not belong here with you, among the lingering dead. She belongs outside in the world of the living.”

  To my surprise, not only did the skeleton before me incline its head in agreement, but many of the surrounding remains that had risen among us did the same.

  Yes…take her…run…

  My brow furrowed, thrown off. I had thought these restless dead were reluctant to surrender the single spark of life that still survived in these halls. But no.

  They wanted her to escape this damned pce just as much as I did.

  “From what?” I asked quietly. “Can you…tell me what’s going on down here? Who are the Netherim?”

  The dead ignored my second question but still answered me.

  Trapped…endless…punishment…hex…curse…malediction…

  A shiver went down my spine, for multiple reasons. On that st creaked word, the gathered dead had bowed their heads, and yet the sound of their ‘voice’ was far more tortured and sorrowful than it had been previously. It was deeply odd to interpret such anguish in the crashing and gnashing of phantom gears, but it was there.

  And also…strangely accepting.

  But the other reason my skin crawled was that I could feel something else just on the edge of my perception. There was awareness slowly creeping its way among the suddenly wary dead. More than one of them had started to crane their skulls around within their pods, almost as if they were watching for something.

  Unease crept over me, something beyond what I’d already felt.

  “For what? What could you have possibly done to deserve endless punishment?”

  Deserved…arrogance…run…

  A brief flicker of movement, so different from the jerkiness of the skeletons drew my attention. I jerked my head around to see, but I saw nothing. All I caught was a brief fsh of bloody rust red before the source slipped away.

  Alright, enough of this. Time to take the Netherim’s not so subtle warnings to heart and get the hell out of here. My answers weren’t more important than Aveline’s safety.

  Unfortunately…

  It was too te.

  I was startled by the sound of bones crunching behind me, followed by the grinding voices of the dead rising in a wave. Along with that, they suddenly surged out of their pods all around me with a great cacophony of rattling bone and sprinted my way. Even the skeleton I had been speaking to cmbered over the side of its pod and lunged in my direction

  Not a one of them touched me. Instead, they were interested in something behind me.

  I spun in pce and beheld a monster.

  Not a monster merely in the Veredenese sense, an odd amalgamation of condensed Aether that hungered for more of it. No…

  This was a true monster, in every sense of the word.

  Among the pods of the dead who were even now piling upon it was what I initially thought was one of the Wyrmkin, those pseudo-Revenants born of Tatsugans mere presence. It was rger and longer than even the Primes of that species I had fought out in the ranges of Goryuen, rising above the capsules and bone to veritably tower over us all. Every second, dozens and dozens of animated skeletons, their empty eye sockets suddenly glowing a fierce, determined blue, were piling up and climbing the creature to try and restrain it. But they were no match for the might of the beast, and every second more and more of the long-dead Netherim were being dashed to splintered bone every second. I had to duck to avoid a flying shard of razor sharp bone, and when I rose, I could finally see the whole of this…thing in the strobing crimson light.

  This…had once been a man.

  Pale pink flesh smeared in long dried ochre blood stains covered its entire body, from the crown of its skull to the tip of its tail, visible in the distance and tipped with a spear of jagged bone. It still had scales like the rest of the Wyrmkin, and yet these were not the brilliant blue I had seen on the others. They were, instead, made entirely of iron and steel, the same rusted and corroded kind that could be found composing every surface of the bunker. They looked to have been literally nailed into the tortured flesh of the creature, the ends of those nails sometimes poking up through the steel as if they were ft-topped spines. Not every inch of the creature was armored in this manner, however most notably its limbs were.

  It's human limbs.

  Dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of man-like arms protruded from the undercarriage of the beast instead of legs. Each of them possessed gnarled hands, and each grasped at the steel of the floor in much the way a centipede would, when they were not busy grappling with the restless dead assaulting it.

  But it was the head that horrified me the most. Once upon a time, it might have been the skull of a human man, but no longer. It had been elongated in a decidedly painful-looking manner, stretched to resemble the near dog-like features of the Wyrmkin. A long, greasy, wiry bck beard covered that snout, and through it, I could see dozens upon dozens of yellowed, razor-sharp fangs, each nearly as rge as my head. From the crown rose three sets of horns hewn from human bone, each of them growing from the forehead of the monster. They were gnarled, pitted, and yellowed from age and strife, and appeared quite dangerous, from how they scattered dozens of the undead with each toss of it's head

  Underneath those horns y a pair of oh-so-familiar emerald eyes, from which poured an endless stream of bloody tears. They dripped down its tortured cheeks to fall onto the reddened steel below it.

  So great was my horror at the sight of the monster that I almost instinctively threw out an Observe.

  Name:Akhoroth, Maw of the WyrmAge:5,209 yearsSpecies:HumanI don’t know if it was the Observe that drew the thing’s attention, or if I had just caught its attention in some other way. But my eyes met its, in the midst of the struggle with the undead trying to protect me from this horrifying creature.

  To my horror, it spoke.

  “RUUUNNNN!” It bellowed, in a tortured, wailing voice that echoed up and down the halls of the dead.

  As I felt Aveline start awake in terror and try to raise her head, I stopped the movement by cmping one hand protectively down on her free ear, covered by my cloak.

  And took the advice.

  I turned on my heel and sprinted away from the cttering of bone and the wailing of the Maw.

  Deeper into the hall.