The corridor swallowed them.
The door to their quarters sealed behind Kain and Yuri with a muted hiss, and for a brief moment the silence felt merciful. Then the Spire exhaled.
The air shifted—not with wind, but with presence. The temperature dropped in uneven waves, cold seeping through cloth and bone alike. The Soulglass veins lining the corridor dimmed from blue to a dull, bruised violet, their light pulsing slowly, irregularly, like a failing heartbeat.
Kain stopped walking.
Yuri nearly collided with him. "What—"
"Listen," Kain said.
At first there was nothing. Then, beneath the silence, something else emerged. A low murmur, too layered to be sound alone. It crawled along the walls, through the floor, into their chests.
Breathing.
Not theirs.
The corridor ahead stretched longer than it should have. Doors lined the walls, sealed tight, each marked with faded sigils and warning glyphs that Yuri didn't recognize but instinctively disliked. The metal beneath their boots felt soft, almost pliable, as though it might give way if stepped on too hard.
Yuri hugged his arms to his sides. "This wasn't here before."
"No," Kain said. "The city is rearranging itself."
They moved forward anyway.
With every step, the whispers grew clearer—not louder, but closer. Words brushed the edges of hearing, incomplete and fractured.
—down
—remember
—too deep
—don't look back
Yuri flinched. "They're arguing."
"Yes," Kain said. "Some of them don't want us to go further."
"That's not comforting."
The first scream came suddenly.
It tore through the corridor like glass shattering inside a skull—high, raw, endless. Yuri cried out and dropped to one knee, hands clamped over his ears. Kain staggered, vision swimming as the scream fractured into dozens, then hundreds, overlapping, colliding.
The walls reacted.
Soulglass veins flared violently, light spilling like blood. Shadows bulged from the metal, forming shapes—arms, faces, torsos—pressed outward as if the dead were trying to tear free. The scream resolved into voices.
"STOP."
"TURN BACK."
"IT BURNS."
Kain forced himself upright. His breathing was shallow, controlled. He focused on the rhythm beneath the noise, the deeper pulse that anchored everything.
"They're reliving it," he said. "Their deaths. All at once."
Yuri looked up at him, eyes wild. "Then why are they letting us hear it?"
Kain didn't answer immediately.
Because they want witnesses.
The corridor ended abruptly at a massive lift platform, its surface carved with concentric rings of Soulglass and blackened metal. The central sigil glowed faintly, pulsing in time with the Heart.
Above it, etched into the wall in worn, deliberate strokes, were words in an ancient script Kain somehow understood without reading:
REMEMBRANCE BELOW.
The lift activated on its own.
The platform shuddered, then began to descend.
As it moved, the Spire above them groaned—a deep, pained sound, like a living thing being opened. The walls of the shaft slid past slowly, layered with crystal growths that became denser the deeper they went. Shapes were trapped within them, some fully formed, others half-erased by the glass.
Yuri couldn't stop staring.
Some of the faces looked peaceful.
Others were twisted in perpetual terror.
"They're not all screaming," he whispered.
"No," Kain said. "Some gave up."
The lift sank deeper, the light dimming until the only illumination came from the crystal itself. The whispers returned, closer now, more coherent.
"We held the sand."
"We fed the city."
"We became the ground."
A pressure built behind Yuri's eyes. He staggered, gripping the railing. He couldn't hear words like Kain—but he felt emotions crash into him in waves. Fear. Rage. Exhaustion. An unbearable, endless longing for rest.
"Kain," he said weakly. "They don't hate us."
"No," Kain replied quietly. "They hate being forgotten."
The lift slowed.
Below them, the shaft opened into something vast.
The Heart chamber.
It was not a room.
It was a wound.
An enormous cavern stretched beneath the city, its walls layered with Soulglass and compacted sand, fused together by heat and time. At its center pulsed the Heart—far larger than Kain had imagined. Not a single mass, but a vast, branching structure, like a crystalized nervous system embedded in the earth.
Thousands of bodies were visible within it.
Some fully formed, others dissolved into partial shapes—hands reaching, faces frozen mid-scream, ribcages fused into the crystal lattice. Light flowed through them like blood through veins, carrying energy upward into the city.
And sound.
The screaming here was constant.
Not loud—but omnipresent.
Yuri fell to his knees.
"I can't—" His voice broke. "They're everywhere."
Kain felt it too—but where Yuri was drowning, Kain was… tuning.
The Heart reacted to him.
The pulse shifted, aligning more closely with his breathing. The screams dulled slightly, resolving into patterns, rhythms. He could hear individual voices now, not all at once, but in sequence.
Stories.
Deaths.
Lives.
A figure emerged from the crystal near the base of the Heart, separating itself from the mass with slow, agonizing effort. It stepped forward—not fully solid, but coherent enough to be seen.
A man.
Older, his features worn smooth by time and crystal. His eyes glowed faintly with Soulglass light, but they were focused. Aware.
"You came," the figure said.
Yuri recoiled. "That one's… talking."
The man inclined his head toward Kain. "You hear us."
"Yes," Kain said. His voice echoed strangely in the cavern. "You're bound to the Heart."
"We are the Heart," the figure corrected. "Or what remains of it."
More shapes stirred within the crystal, watching. Listening.
"We were miners," the man continued. "Builders. Criminals. Children. Sacrifices made clean by words like necessity."
Yuri clenched his fists. "You were murdered."
The figure's expression softened. "Not all deaths are murders. Some are agreements made under lies."
Kain stepped forward, drawn by the pull he could no longer deny. "Why us?"
The man studied him for a long moment. "Because you are not from here. And because you listen."
The Heart pulsed harder.
The screaming surged—but this time it wasn't pleading.
It was warning.
The crystal floor cracked.
From deeper within the cavern, something shifted—something vast, old, and wrong. The pulse distorted, becoming erratic. The dead recoiled within the glass, voices rising in panic.
Yuri felt it immediately—a presence colder than the crystal, heavier than the city itself. "That's not them."
"No," Kain said slowly.
From the depths beneath the Heart, a shadow moved.
Something that fed on remembrance.
Something that had grown in the silence between screams.
The man's expression darkened. "The Heart remembers more than it should."
The shadow surged upward.
And the dead began to scream—not in pain, but in fear.
The descent was over.
The true horror was just beginning.