They're not ing. The stark truth smmed into Watters, each word a nail hammered into the coffin of his hope. The Order isn't ing. The realization was absolute, final. They have no idea. And now we’re trapped. He stood frozen in the newly revealed passage, nid with shock, but utterly still, as if the very marrow of his bones had turo ice. His hair, heavy with sweat and pstered with grime, g to his skull, a tangible weight pressing down on his despair. His once impeccable suit was no of his ret ordeal, stained with sweat ah, a visible testament to his shattered posure.

  Grimm, in stark trast, was a figure carved from wiself. He stared down the dim stairwell, familiarity, not trepidatioched into the hard lines of his shadowy face. The darkness ahead seemed to hold s from him; it was a ndscape he knew intimately, a realm in which he was not a stranger, but perhaps even a native. It was as if evil, in all its forms, was not aernal eo Grimm, but a stant panion, its presence woven into the very fabric of his being.

  “Watters,” Grimm’s whisper, though barely audible, cut through the suffog silence of the passage. “Are you hurt?” The question was effit, devoid of overt emotio ced with a thread of… something akin to professional .

  “They’re not…” Watters’ voice hitched, each stammer a tremor of his unraveling posure. The chilling echo of the phone call reverberated in his memory. “They’re not ing, Grimm. I… I truly believed, if they khey would respond. That they had to.” He trailed off, the st vestiges of his faith dissolving into the damp passage air.

  Grimm grunted; his gaze unwavering oairwell's shadowy depths. “Alohen.” He paused, the sileretg taut. “Good.” The single word, uated and resolute, hung in the air, suggesting not relief, but a grim acceptance of a more manageable, if more perilous, reality.

  “Good?!” Watters’ voice cracked with disbelief, b on hysteria. “Good?! Are you hearing yourself, Grimm?! We’re being hunted like animals by fug monsters, trapped in a goddamn hole under a dead man’s house, and the Order? They’re nowhere, they don’t give a damn! art of this unmitigated disaster, Grimm, is remotely ‘good’?! So, yes, Grimm, please, do illumihis ‘goodness’ that I, in my utter ignorance, seem to have overlooked, before I clude you’ve finally cracked.”

  Grimm’s head jerked back, his “Shhh” barely a rustle against the oppressive silence of the passage. He didn’t even g Watters, his gaze fixed oairwell.

  “Did you…” Watters breathed, his gaze darting around the passage, seeking firmation of his fear in Grimm’s face. He clutched the letter opeighter, knuckles white. “What is it?”

  Grimm sighed, a barely audible exhation of… somethiween exasperation and amusement. “Auditory halluation, Doctor. Induced, I suspect, by prolonged exposure to… intellectual vacuum.” His lips twitched, a ghost of a smile pyih the bandana.

  “Why you insufferable—" Watters started to fume, but the retort died in his throat, cut short by a sibint shriek that ripped through the lower stairwell. Grimm’s hand, a heavy weight on Watters’ arm, nudged him towards the stairs. “Forward,” Grimm murmured, the single word ced with quiet menace.

  The hiss deepeaking on a guttural resohe vibrations thrumming in the very stone around them. The closer they desded, the more the oppressive weight of the tunnel’s creation pressed upon Watters’ mind. Not mere carving, but a moal uaking. Who had anded such bor? When had this subterranean world been birthed? Was it a legacy from a fotten master of the manor, or a more ret, and far more sinister, projeikkelson’s? The questions were not just of history, but of present and immediate threat.

  The air iuhied with oppressive heat, ging to them like a suffog shroud. A fieam, dense and swirling like ghostly breath, began to billow from the opening at the stairwell's base. Watters’ gsses instantly clouded, obsg his vision in a milky film, f him to peel them off, blinking against the sudden, searing humidity. As they reached the final step, the steam parted, unveiling a se that cwed at the edges of sanity, a grotesque tableau sculpted from nightmare itself. It was not merely shog; it was a visceral viotion of every natural order, a spectacle of atrocity that defied prehension.

  They stepped into a vast, eg hall. Imposiical racks lihe walls, each a station of torture. Bound to these iron frames by cruel restraints were bodies, exposed and i. Their limbs were spindly, ribcages stark beh translut skin, their faunt echoes of living beings. Guttural tubes, thick as pythons, snaked dowhroats, pumping them with a dense, bck ichor. The eyes, strained wide and unblinking, were the only sign of life, refleg a mute, bottomless agony. Grimm’s hand froze on the hilt of his rifle, his typically impassive face tightening almost imperceptibly as he surveyed the silent theater of cruelty. Some of the figures, sensing their preserembled against their restraints, their silent screams trapped behind the rubber tubes. Watters swayed, the air thiing with the stench of siess and something fouler. A retg spasm seized him, aumbled to the side, vomiting silently into the shadows, uo even voice his disgust.

  At the table’s heart, amidst a byrinthine scattering of a books and loose folios, y the remnants of the warlock’s study. This chaotic arra suggested his boratory, yet its purpose eluded immediate grasp. While warlocks typically anded magic with subtle grace, this tableau hi something far more… terrestrial. It appeared a perplexing and uling chimera—a crude grafting of lunatic sto the very fabric of dark magic.

  “Drimm began, his tone low and gravelly, “these texts.” He gestured with a curt nod towards the table’s chaotic surface. “Meaning?”

  Watters pushed himself upright, a shaky ast from his retg position. He scrubbed at his mouth, but the bitter aftertaste of bile lingered, mirr the pervasive stench of the chamber. The collective groans of the tormented, a symphony of despair and forced life, pressed in on him, almost suffog.

  He approached the table with hesitant steps, his gaze flitting across the disordered pages. Lifting a few brittle sheets, he peered at them through the newly cleared lenses of his spectacles. “Transmutation,” he murmured, his voice barely audible above the victims’ chorus. “It’s… everywhere. As you suspected.” He let the papers fall, pig up others with trembling fingers. “This,” he breathed, the word heavy with horror, “this is beyond depraved.”

  “Clearly,” Grimm stated ftly, his gaze fixed on a struggling figure shed to a nearby table, his expression a mask of grim appraisal.

  “It appears,” Watters tinued, his voice gaining a chilling crity as uanding dawned, “Mikkelson… he never mastered transmutation through pure magic. He circumves limitations. He bypassed magic itself, twisting sto its grotesque image.” Watters’ voice dropped to a near whisper. “And he scaled it… monstrously.”

  “More, Drimm’s voice was a low and, his patience fraying at the edges. “text. Meism.”

  Watters, driven by a morbid fasation alongside his revulsion, resumed his desperate survey. “Here… yes.” His voice was strained, almost hushed. “He… he mihe mountain for Ly pos, some kind of… biological ore. Then, subjected it to a process chillingly simir to the Order’s energy refi protocols.” He shuddered again, the implication deeply uling. “This Ly derivative… then, hybridized with parasitiA. A slow burn mutagen, designed for insidious transformation.” Watters’ eyes were drawn to the feeding tubes, to the bck substance c within. “That bck fluid,” he murmured, his face paling further. “The mutagen… in its purest, most virulent state.”

  Watters leaned closer to the papers, his brow furrowed in tration, when a pattern snagged his attention. “Grimm…” Watters murmured, a thread of uering his voice.

  “Yes?” Grimm respourning fully, his usual shadowy impassivity now subtly… altered.

  “Here,” Watters poio the bottom of a page. “And here. And… here.” He traced his finger across several dots. “At the end of each, he’s scribbled… ‘Praise Gorr-ath’.” Watters looked up, his face pale, seeking uanding. “Do yhat name? Gorr-ath?”

  A chilling stillness settled rimm. His eyes widened, not in mere surprise, but with a dawning horror that seemed to leach the very color from them. It was a shift so profound it was almost uling. “Grimm?” Watters asked again, a tremor of fear now in his voice. “Are you alright?”

  Grimm’s hand shed out, a blur of motion, snatg the paper and crumpling it into a tight, unfiving ball. “Fool!” he spat, the word a venomous hiss, smming his fist onto the table with force that made the wooden surface shudder.

  “What is it, Grimm? What is it?!” Watters recoiled, his voice barely a whisper, bag away from the table as if it had bee inated.

  “That warlock,” Grimm snarled, his voice rising, ced with fury and a raw, primal fear. “He’s meddled with something… a. He’s made a pact with an Old God!” The words themselves seemed to carry a weight of dread that settled in the air between them.

  “Old God…?” Watters repeated, the term unfamiliar and terrifying.

  “Yes,” Grimm growled, his eyes fixed intensely on Watters. “itities. Beings of immense, malevolent pods, iruest, most terrible sense of the word. They exist beyond our reality, in realms of… unimaginable scale. Imprisoned… or so we hoped. And Mikkelson,” Grimm’s voice dropped to a dangerous whisper, “your mayor, the warlock… he’s found a way to reach them. To serve them.”

  “But… why?” Watters stammered, his mind reeling. “Why Barrowham? Why… this horror?”

  Grimm’s gaze intensified, the usual shadows around his eyes seeming to deepen, the faint glow within them fring with a cold, uling light. “For the same reason they always do, Doctor,” he rumbled, his voice low and ominous, each word a hammer blow. “They seek… entry.” His gaze locked onto Watters, heavy with grim finality. “Into our world.”

  “These… Old Gods.” Watters repeated the unfamiliar name, his voice ced with skepticism and a hint of genuine curiosity. “I’ve never entered them in any lore. How is it you possess such… specifiowledge?”

  Grimm’s eyes underwent a profound shift, the faint glow within them dimming, repced by a flicker of distant pain. They became windows not to his usual iy, but to a ndscape of buried trauma. “I…” he began, his voice losing its characteristic edge, softening into a low, somber resonance, as if dredging words from a fotten wound.

  Just as the first sylble escaped his lips, a deafening voice erupted, tearing through the stifling silence of the chamber. It bsted from a cealed speaker, high in the shadowy recesses of the er, shattering the fragile moment of revetion.

  “Oh, fair doctor, so delightfully uninformed!” The voice chuckled, a sound like grating stone. “Your panion, Grimm,” the name dripped with amused pt, “is but a CAST-OFF SHADOW of their glorious divinity!” Grimm’s eyes fred, looking up at the speaker.

  “Mikkelson!” Watters ROARED, his fists crashing onto the table with the force of desperation. “What… what have you unleashed?!”

  Mikkelson threw back his head, and a cacophony of ughter ERUPTED, a high-pitched, frantic shriek that cwed at the edges of sanity. The sound saturated the chamber, a wave of pure, unhinged glee that sent a shudder of revulsion through Watters.

  “Oh, dear doctor, so wonderfully blind!” Mikkelson gasped between manic bursts of ughter. “I am but a humble VESSEL for His will! Gorr-ath ASDS! He will RECLAIM this world, and humanity… humanity will BURN for its insolence!”

  “You are a PATHETIC TOOL, Warlock!” Grimm exploded, his voice a seismic bellow that drowned out Mikkelson’s shrieks. His eyes igwin infernos bzing in the gloom, fixed on Mikkelson with murderous i. “Gorr-ath corrupts you, puppet! And I will REAP your soul from your wretched form!”

  Mikkelson’s cag intensified, morphing into a hysterical, eg peal that grated on the very teeth. Fury blinded Grimm. With a roar of pure rage, he smashed his fist down, the wooden table exploding into splinters beh the blow.

  Unfazed, Mikkelson unched into the infernal t, the sylbles a guttural torrent of sound: “sejwlghnanjn, mjnami dmajmhmi, lh eajli njhlgznsnhl!” Instantly, a seismic shudder ripped through the ed victims. Their bodies arced violently, limbs filing in grotesque spasms. “Grimm!” Watters shrieked, pointing a trembling fiowards a heavy, iron-bound door. Veins bulged on the victims’ necks, their chests swelling grotesquely, skin stretched taut, about to violently unseam. “The door! It’s jammed shut!” he wailed, his voice crag with sheer terror.

  Then, age erupted. One by one, with siing rips a, explosive cracks, each chest detonated. Geysers of bck blood erupted outwards, a viscous, horrific rain sh the room in gore. And from the ruined cavities, things unborn, unnatural, pulsating mutations of flesh and bone burst forth, writhing and howling into the fetid air. The nightmare persisted, unbroken, but the warlock's ughter signaled something far worse than they had yet withis was not the culmination of his brutality; it was the prelude.