CLASSIFIED RECORD – PERSONAL LOG OF WOLFGANG VASILE
Rank: Unteroffizier (Corporal)
Affiliation: Wehrmacht – Sonderkommando Niflheim
Recovered from Site-07, Arctic Circle
ENTRY 01
January 4, 1945
Time: 19:27
Location: Arctic Base Blautod – Arrival Day
They called it a reassignment.
"Temporary," they said, with the kind of smile that never reaches the eyes. I wasn't even done unpacking my barracks locker in Berlin when the order came. A black folder, no insignia, just my name scrawled across it in red ink. Not typed. Scrawled.
Next thing I know, I'm being shoved into a rumbling cargo plane, blindfolded for half the flight. The air turned colder every hour. By the time we landed, my eyelashes were stiff with frost. The ground crew didn't speak to me. Just led me through a maze of metal and snow until I reached the facility: Blautod.
I'd trained for infantry, hoped for an officer's track. I was fresh, green, idealistic. Didn't drink, didn't smoke. Barely kissed a girl. I still believed we were the good guys.
ENTRY 02
January 5, 1945
First Full Day
We were told our job was noble. Gatekeepers. Defenders of the Reich's final border. We were the line in the snow.
Kruger liked to say, "Berlin may fall, but nothing gets past Blautod."
Some of the older guards call it 'Der Schwurwall' — the Oath Wall. A bit dramatic? Not even in the slightest.
Blautod isn't a base. It's a fucking tomb that breathes.
This facility stretches forty levels beneath the ice. The top floor's all mess halls and bunks and guards with dead eyes. Past Level 3, things change. Fewer people. Thicker doors. Warnings everywhere. Radiation, pressure, oxygen fluctuation.
They assigned me to Morozov's team. Yes, that Morozov—the Russian defector. The man who supposedly held Stalin's ear before he vanished off the face of the Earth in '41. They told us he died. They lied. He was here the whole time, buried under a glacier, whispering to something behind the wall.
I met him during my orientation. He looked through me, like I wasn't there. Then he smiled, like something in my face reminded him of an old song.
"You'll write it all down," he said. "Every word. It has to know you."
I asked what "it" was.
He laughed. "Oh, you'll see."
ENTRY 03
January 6, 1945
Location: Blautod – Level 12 Briefing Room
When Germany first discovered the Ice Wall, everybody thought it was divine oddity. A natural 500ft border. You couldn't help but see it for yourself to confirm. When the first scout team vanished past the threshold in '39, command panicked — and built Blautod in less than nine months. The first line of defense. A wall of bodies standing before the unthinkable and unknown.
They told us new recruits never to ask about the lower levels.
"Focus on your task, Unteroffizier," said Kruger, the security chief, as he handed me my access badge. "Curiosity is dangerous in a place like this."
My badge only opens doors all the way down to Level 20. I asked him what was beyond that. He didn't speak. Just stared at me for a long moment, and then dropped a scrap of paper into my palm.
One word, written in jittery script:
"Don't push this kid. You wouldn't like the answers."
Morozov says the ice holds memories in its frozen waters. There are things down beneath and on the other side of this 500 ft of an ice wall.
I should know because I've already seen unusual shit on the levels I have access to. Something is down there. Something ancient.
ENTRY 04
January 7, 1945
Location: Blautod – Level 16 Cryogenic Archive
I wish I could tell you that the deeper levels aren't just darker versions of the ones above, but then I'd be lying.
Down here, you don't realize how loud silence can be hunting when you're thirty meters below ground.
The Cryogenic Archive houses what the scientists call.
"Preserved Biological Events."
That's a euphemism. What they really mean is: Things we shouldn't have found, and now have no idea how to kill.
There are rows and rows of frozen chambers. Each with a single occupant.
Some look human at a glance — until you notice the eyes that never thaw, or the way their limbs are jointed wrong, like broken marionettes strung back together by someone who's only read about anatomy.
One of them — chamber C-47 — follows you with its gaze. Not metaphorically. I mean literally. A milky pupil that drifts, lazily, like it's underwater, tracking you as you walk past.
I reported it to Bauljit, tech supervisor. He just laughed. Said it was "an optical illusion caused by gas pockets in the ice."
I don't fucking believe him. I really wish I had listened right there and then
Bauljit was found a day later with a scalpel through his neck and his ID badge stuffed into his mouth. The logbook listed it as a "containment-related self-injury."
That's a bureaucrat's way of saying, "we have no idea what happened."
ENTRY 05
January 8, 1945
Location: Blautod – Level 18, Specimen Containment
There's something they keep chained on Level 18.
Not in a room. Not in a cage.
In a shaft — a vertical pit drilled deep into the glacial core. Thirty meters wide, ringed with steel catwalks and auto-turrets, and covered with a reinforced hatch that's never once been opened while I've been down here.
Until tonight.
I was doing inventory, pretending not to notice the new blood on the guard rail, when the power flickered. The lights cut out. And for a full twenty seconds, I was alone in pitch black.
Then I heard it.
Breathing.
Wet.
Enormous.
Like a lung the size of a barracks bay had just exhaled under my boots.
And in that breath, I heard something else — words, spoken not into the air, but into me.
"Where are your gods, Wolfgang? Who do you pray to?"
I didn't answer or rather, I couldn't.
By the time the emergency power came on, the hatch was sealed again. The guard posted there — some poor Hungarian conscript with more ribs than courage — had pissed himself and was muttering in perfect Aramaic.
He doesn't speak Aramaic.
No one here does.
ENTRY 06
January 9, 1945
Location: Blautod – Level 20 Observation Deck
It happened. It finally fucking happened.
I don't know how many are dead or alive. I don't even know if I'll still be alive after this entry. I'm shaking so hard my pen keeps slipping out of my fingers. This log will be messy.
Doesn't matter. Someone needs to know. Someone needs to understand what we've done down here. What we've woken up.
It all started with a pressure anomaly on Level 23. Routine. Happens all the time, according to the logs. The ice shifts. Temperature spikes. Buried air surges to the surface. Nothing unusual—until this time.
They sent Recon Team Weiss down to take a look.
Six men. All armed. Flamethrowers, magnetic grenades, triple-locked exo-suits with pulse sensors. Every single one of them had seen combat on the Eastern Front. These weren't green boys like me.
I watched the feed from the Observation Deck on Level 20 with Bauman, the shift lead. The cams on 23 are old—grainy, flickering in and out. For the first minute, it was just static and steam. Then we caught glimpses. Just glimpses.
Melted ice. A wall... gone. Just... gone.
And red mist hanging in the air like blood that forgot how to fall.
They'd breached a cocoon chamber. One that wasn't marked on the map.
Someone asked if it could be a glitch in the registry. Morozov, who had appeared without us noticing, whispered:
"That cocoon isn't ours."
Then the screams started.
Not over the radio. On the feed.
You have to understand — their suits shouldn't allow ambient sound to leak in. But somehow, the bloodsuckers' voices — or maybe just one of them — broke protocol. Bypassed all that shielding.
It spoke into the feed like it was talking through the gaps in our skulls.
"We remember. We know your plans. Humans think they smart but you not."
I think it was Brandt… or maybe Hauser. I watched the footage three times, and his name tag kept changing. He stood there, smiling. A wide, open-lipped grin.
Then something moved behind him. Fast. Tall. Slender.
Not human. Not quite. All limbs. And hairless skin that pulsed with red-blue veins, like lightning under milk.
Its mouth opened vertically.
Not wide — long.
A split from the chin to the top of the skull.
And it didn't bite. It drank.
Brandt froze mid-step. His body locked in place as its tendrils wrapped around his chest. He didn't even flinch. He looked... content.
He whispered something like, "She's here. She's come back."
The others opened fire.
Flamethrowers hissed.
And for a moment, I thought maybe we had it. Maybe it could burn.
But then the sprinklers went off.
Not the fire suppression system. The full, automated cleansing protocol. An override none of us had input.
Level 23 drowned in antifreeze foam — extinguishing the only line of defense we had — while the creature began multiplying.
No, not spawning. Not like a hive. Like repeating. Like it was echoing itself, one frame at a time. The screen flickered and suddenly there were two. Then three. But only one moved. The others were watching.
When the cameras cut out, Bauman vomited all over the floor and started praying in Polish. He hasn't spoken since.
Addendum: 10:44 Hours – Level 22 Emergency Hallway
I went down with the containment crew. I shouldn't have. I'm not trained for breach control. But I couldn't sit still.
We found what was left of Recon Team Weiss.
I can't describe what they did to the bodies. Not in detail. I don't have the language for it. But their bones were missing. Not shattered. Not broken. Just absent. As if removed cleanly, surgically, without disturbing the flesh.
Skin sacks full of nothing.
Hollow men.
Still smiling.
One of them blinked.