Cassius didn't remember falling. Only the landing.
Snow. Again.
He gasped and sat up now in a completely different chamber. Lit with cold blue crystals embedded in the walls. The sword was still in his hand, but the torch was gone.
He stood, unsteady. The room was circular, and its center was marked with a massive seal, etched into the floor in ancient runes. The resonance inside him was buzzing, like it was trying to warn him, or maybe to enjoy it.
At the far end of the room stood a monolith.
Cassius approached it slowly.
As he neared, he saw carvings along its base, depictions of portals. Subplanes. Teleportation gates like the one he'd just used. Except these were connected to things that weren't people. Things with too many limbs. Too many eyes.
And at the top was the crown of a man.
The same crown you'd see the king wear, circular, jagged, and showing power.
Cassius stepped back. The rune seal beneath his feet started to glow.
He hadn't activated it.
But someone or something had sensed him.
"You're not supposed to be here," the voice repeated, louder now. Multiple voices layered on top of each other. "But now that you are... stay."
The walls began to shake. Dust rained down from above. From the far end, behind the monolith, a wall cracked, and through it, Cassius saw a figure bound in chains, stitched together by metal and bone, writhing in silence. Its mouth was sewn shut, but its eye was open.
It says to him not by voice by though, "You must be one of his prospects. I can smell his touch upon you."
The voice came from behind him, too close for comfort. What kind of sick place was this?
Cassius turned slowly, eyes narrowing. There was nothing there. But the space behind him shifted, like reality had twitched.
Something watched. It didn't blink. It didn't breathe.
He didn't answer. Just stared into the dark until it spoke again, its voice skipping like a broken record player.
"Try and find your comrades... maybe you'll find their corpses..."
It vanished with a faint, echoing laugh, a sound that bounced off the walls.
Cassius scoffed. "What the hell…"
He kept moving. Every step forward, he expected something to jump out, but nothing did. And that was worse. He had grown up with threats. With tension. With taunts. This wasn't new. He wasn't going to be baited.
But that didn't mean he wasn't being led.
Eventually, he found a door.
It was just standing there. Ordinary. Wooden.
He reached for the handle.
As soon as he crossed the threshold, he felt it: the click of the lock behind him. A shift in the air. Dust filled his nose. He turned..
The door was gone.
The room didn't burn, but it ignited all the same, light pouring in, not fire, but cold. Snow blanketed the floor. Frost crawled up the walls. And above, moonlight spilled in through a ceiling that shouldn't exist.
The room was far too big for any manor or ruin. It stretched like a cathedral, but there were no rafters, no walls. Just endless space and cold.
In the center sat a telescope.
Cassius didn't move at first. His senses flared. He scanned the floor, the ceiling, the shadows, searching for invisible threads, traps, anything.
Nothing.
After a pause, he walked toward it. Slowly. Blade still in hand.
The telescope was old, brass, and bone. A relic.
He hesitated, then looked through it.
Moonlight guided the scope toward the sky. But it wasn't his sky.
The stars spun backward. Constellations rearranged. He heard them whispering. Names he'd never spoken. Places he didn't know. Not in his ears in his bones.
He reached out, tried to adjust the lens.
The whispers stopped.
Just stopped.
His grip tightened on his sword.
The scope turned black.
And then something looked back.
Cassius yanked away. Blinked. Eyes wide.
The room was gone.
Now he stood outside, or what looked like outside. The snow is deeper, colder, deathly still. Around him: corpses. Dozens.
The original expedition team?
Their bodies were twisted, frostbitten, blackened, and wrong. Frozen in death.
Until they moved.
They rose without a sound, eyes empty, faces locked in some endless loop of terror. Time ghosts. Caught between resonance and memory.
Cassius didn't hesitate.
He struck fast and efficiently, killing two in a blur. Their bodies cracked like glass. Easy.
Too easy.
He realized it then: they weren't attacking.
They were replaying.
He backed off, searching for the edge of the trap. He spun to the telescope. Looked through it again.
Nothing.
When he turned back..
They had changed.
Stronger. More solid. Moving differently now. Not stuck. Not mindless.
The puzzle had started.
A logic loop fused with combat. Trial and error through blood and instinct.
One charged, and he dodged. Struck the wrong limb.
It screamed and didn't die.
He had to solve them.
Kill them correctly.
One by one, he broke the pattern.
He froze three in place, not to spare them, but to stop them. Too dangerous to face head-on.
The rest were harder. Some screamed as he severed their limbs, pleading in a dozen voices that weren't theirs anymore.
The last two crawled, broken, dying slowly.
One looked up. A whisper, cracked and dry:
"Don't become like him..."
The other clutched his leg.
"Please... not like him..."
Cassius stepped back. Handshaking. He didn't know why. Not fear.
Recognition.
A chill passed through him that no snow could match.
He turned, just as the door creaked open again, but not back to the entrance.
A new room.
The next door creaked open. Cassius stepped through without hesitation.
It sealed behind him like the last.
Cassius sighed and said, "Oh my fucking god.. I'm starting to regret signing up for this job."
The space ahead wasn't a hallway. It was vast, cold, and quiet. The moonlight poured in again, but the source couldn't be found. Just like before. Snow dusted the stone. Air hung thick with frost. Cassius exhaled, and the breath stayed too long before vanishing.
There was a corpse ahead.
Kneeling.
Cassius stopped walking.
It sat motionless. Draped in a shredded expedition cloak, the robes clinging to a skeleton locked in place. A spear impaled the head cleanly, running straight through the skull and out the spine. No blood. No meat. Bones aged beyond natural decay.
Cassius narrowed his eyes. That was the same uniform listed in the mission dossier. This was the last member.
"Time distortion?" he muttered. "Impossible. Spatial fold?"
He moved forward, slower now. Each step is now measured. Not because of fear but because of certainty.
His knees bent slightly just from walking. Something was wrong here.
The skeleton moved.
Not fast. Just... with purpose.
The hands reached up, slowly, and gripped the shaft of the spear. With an audible crack of bone grinding against the floor, the hollowed thing stood.
Cassius dropped into a stance. German key. The guard locked tight. Blade tilted forward, center-line dominance, full-body control. Defensive but coiled for an immediate reaction.
The corpse wrenched the spear free from its own skull.
Bone dust scattered across the room.
It held the weapon at its side, the shaft now twisted with the remnants of its ribcage, fused into something crude but pointed like a partisan made of memory and regret.
Then it spoke.
"Forgive me, mother. I tried to come home."
Cassius just stared, annoyed and very worried, but more annoyed by the fact of the weird shit he's come across, starting to feel like being an alcoholic for the rest of his days was much better than this.
Cassius side-stepped, clean and technical, redirecting the first thrust with a tight parry. The spear grazed his coat. Cassius countered, pivoted on his back foot, and drove his blade toward the ribs.
The thing rotated unnaturally fast, deflecting with the shaft. The bones didn't creak; they whined, like they were breaking and reforming with each move.
Cassius didn't try a follow-up. He broke distance, sword raised again.
"Resonance?" he asked aloud. "Or is this you?"
The corpse didn't answer. But it walked forward again. No rush. No fury.
Only grief.
Cassius lunged this time full-speed. Blade thrust. Followed by a mid-air feint into a sweep. The corpse blocked it. Too cleanly.
"I can't read its rhythm," Cassius thought, eyes darting. "It doesn't breathe. Doesn't shift weight. How the hell do you predict a body that's already dead?"
It jabbed. Cassius knocked it aside. But the force went through his wrist and up his shoulder.
"Flesh strength? No. That thing's being held together by pressure."
Another attack. This one is faster. The spear arced low, then reversed mid-strike without touching the ground. Cassius parried, but it knocked him off-balance. Forced to backpedal three steps.
He felt it in his bones.
This was a fight he could lose.
The corpse's voice broke through the silence again.
"I remember you," it said, voice scraping like metal dragging concrete. "You were there. In the audience. Weren't you proud, mother?"
Cassius frowned. "He's seeing someone else... This feeling..it's not his. He's being used?"
The air thickened. Cassius felt it first in his scalp. His hair lifted. Not from fear.
From force.
A wave of invisible weight rolled across the chamber. It knocked dust into the air. Ice crystals shattered along the walls.
Cassius grit his teeth. His boots scraped backward across the stone. His blade rattled in his hands.
"Shit—" he tried to say, but the sound was stolen from his mouth. He rebraced. Pressed his shoulder down. Regained his footing.
The Hollowed One stepped forward.
Faster.
This time it didn't speak.
This time, it meant to kill.
Cassius brought the sword up, and the corpse grabbed the blade with its bare hand, uncaring for the steel cutting into bone. It yanked him forward and drove the spear into Cassius' side.
He screamed.
Blood hit the snow. The wound wasn't deep enough to kill, but it was deep enough to hurt. He rolled back, tearing the blade free, then swung upward to force separation.
But it didn't work, it was futile, it just sent him into another counterattack, but that failed too.
Cassius pressed a hand to the wound. The bleeding was slow, but painful. His thoughts didn't slow, though.
"No visible core. No resonance signature. He's being moved like a puppet."
He looked up. "Then what's pulling the strings?"
The corpse twitched.
Cassius almost didn't dodge the next hit.
He bent low, using the German key's lower-body rotation to duck under the spear. Then came the twist blade, slashing for the knee joint. Contact.
But no fall.
The bones re-formed even as they cracked.
Cassius slid backward, panting.
He wasn't scared. He was angry.
"Why me?" he muttered. "Why was I the one sent here?"
The corpse answered.
"I wanted to live. I had a name. A purpose. I tried to be strong. They made me a liar."
Cassius gritted his teeth. "Who?"
"I don't know anymore."
Then it lunged again.
This time, Cassius didn't defend.
He moved forward into the strike, letting the spear scrape his shoulder. Blood spurted, but he was already inside the corpse's range. He dropped low and drove the blade up through its jaw.
The head cracked in half. Still, it moved.
"Stay down," Cassius hissed, twisting the hilt.
Finally, it staggered. Legs trembled. The bones slacked. The spear dropped.
Cassius backed away. Not turning his back. Not blinking. But the blood swept through his hand even more now, as he had opened the wound, he almost threw the blood up, but held himself up with his sword.
The corpse collapsed. Kneeling again.
Before it went still, it muttered one last thing.
"Don't let him write you into the symphony."
Cassius' breath caught.