Seyfe advanced through the sealed passage, fingers trailing briefly along the edge of the doorframe as he slipped into the next corridor. The walls narrowed—tighter, suffocating—and the green glow dimmed, replaced by flickering sconce lights that hummed erratically.
There was no doubt about it now.
This place was ancient, living, and still operating.
As he turned the corner, the air shifted again—heavier, metallic. He stepped through a warped doorway into what appeared to be a prison block.
Rows of cells lined the walls on both sides, two levels high. Iron bars twisted like veins, rusted and malformed, some melted into the floor. The ground was a mess of dried fluid—blood? something worse?—stained into the stone and still glistening in some places.
But it wasn't just the design that stopped Seyfe's breath.
It was what lay inside.
Corpses, dozens—maybe hundreds of them—chained together in heaps or upright against the cell bars. Some were missing limbs. Others had their mouths forcefully sewn shut. Several had their eyes open, but they no longer glowed with any essence. Their skin sagged in death, but something about their presence clung to the room like mold. Like memory.
He moved forward, slow and quiet.
Each step echoed like a sin.
He crouched next to one cell and stared through the bars at a particularly contorted mass of bodies. Three corpses were fused together at the shoulders, heads drooping in opposite directions, their hands extended outward as if in permanent reach for escape.
But what caught Seyfe's attention wasn't the grotesque fusion—it was the uniform one of them wore.
Torn, blood-soaked, but still legible.
A Veiler cadet jacket.
His eyes narrowed. The insignia was old, from a division that no longer existed. Unit 9-E, discontinued thirty years ago after an Echoform incursion wiped out its entire squad.
"Gods…" Seyfe muttered under his breath.
He began checking each cell more closely.
He saw civilians—some dressed in attire from cities long fallen to the Rift Wars.
Guards—likely from the cities around the perimeter of collapsed realms.
And even children.
Tiny skeletal frames, seated quietly in the corners of their cells, as though waiting to be told it was okay to leave.
But none of them ever did.
"They were all…" Seyfe muttered, stepping back. "Taken here. After death. Or… no. Before it."
He turned to a wall with tally marks scratched deep into the stone. Thousands of them. Some marked over with blood, others smeared beyond recognition. This wasn't a cellblock. This was a collection chamber—a place where the lost, the dead, and the forgotten were harvested.
But why?
His eyes flicked to one small room at the end of the hall, set apart with an ornate circular lock instead of bars. Curiosity pushed him forward.
The door creaked open with pressure, like it hadn't been touched in years. Inside was a single occupant, upright, shackled to a slab of stone.
Not quite dead.
Not alive either.
The man's face was dry—almost mummified—but his eyes twitched weakly as Seyfe approached. A tube was connected to the back of his skull, pulling green fluid from his spine and sending it upward through the wall.
A faint glyph pulsed above the prisoner's head. Not one of suppression.
But of memory extraction.
Seyfe stared, stunned.
"They didn't just use you to experiment on the body…"
He looked at the tube again.
"They're using your thoughts… to fuel the system."
He turned away, disgusted, but even then he heard it.
A weak whisper—not from the man's lips, but from the room itself, like the memories the cell had absorbed over time were spilling out.
"It's not the dead who haunt this place… it's the ambition that killed them."
Seyfe descended the spiral stairwell that had been carved directly into the stone. The further down he went, the tighter the air became—stale, rancid, and clinging to his throat like wet smoke. The walls now wept green condensation, slick and warm, as though the facility itself was sweating.
There were no more signs. No glyphs or runes to warn or explain.
Just the moans.
Low at first. Then rising.
Not like the tortured groans from the cell block above—no, these were raw, visceral, like every wail had been scraped directly from the soul.
When Seyfe reached the bottom, the narrow stairwell widened into a cavernous chamber.
And that's when he saw it.
Dozens—no, hundreds of corpses suspended from the ceiling by rusted chains, each one wrapped tightly around their necks like nooses forged from razors. The chains weren't merely hung—they twitched with rhythmic pulses, jerking the bodies in sharp spasms as if they were dancing marionettes in some cruel ritual.
The air was thick with the stink of rotting meat, but far worse was the sound:
A chorus of shrieks, all mismatched—some too high, some gutturally deep, many overlapping in a maddening cacophony that clawed at the mind.
The corpses weren't still.
Their mouths were wide open, tearing at the corners as if screaming so hard they could rip their own jaws off. Tongues dangled or had been severed entirely. Eyes twitched uncontrollably, rolling back or jittering toward Seyfe as he stepped into the room.
He tried not to gag, covering his mouth with his sleeve.
Each corpse was in a different state of violation:
Some had stitches across their stomachs, leaking greenish-black fluid.
Others were headless, yet somehow still shrieking.
A few were missing hands, replaced with tubes that ran into the walls like siphons.
One man twitched violently, a sigil carved across his chest, blinking with a sickly green glow—like a pulse that didn't belong to him.
The worst were the children.
Their smaller bodies dangled closer to the front, swaying gently like leaves on a breeze. One of them had no face—just a blank, stretched skin with a mouth that shouldn't have been able to scream… but did.
Seyfe's breathing hitched.
This wasn't a prison anymore.
It was a chamber of sustenance. A living scream farm.
His gaze darted upward to the ceiling where the chains all converged into a single, massive bone-like chandelier that pulsed with every shriek. Each cry seemed to feed it, causing veins of green light to run through the ceiling like ivy. The structure drank in their despair like nectar.
"They weren't killing them," Seyfe whispered. "They were keeping them alive in death… just to make them scream."
He backed up slowly, his boots sticking to the floor with each step.
As he turned to leave, the shrieking reached a crescendo. One of the corpses jerked so violently that its spine cracked, flinging its upper body toward the bars that separated it from the walkway. Its bloodied face stopped inches from Seyfe.
Its eyes locked with his.
And then…
It smiled.
A grotesque, broken smile.
"You're here now," it croaked. "You belong to the choir too…"
Seyfe shoved back with a growl, his hand reflexively reaching for his weapon, but he caught himself—there was nothing to kill here. Nothing that hadn't already died too many times.
Seyfe slammed the rusted gate shut behind him, metal screeching as it echoed through the corridor like a banshee's cry. His breathing was sharp, ragged, and full of grit. Sweat clung to his brow and his boots dragged sludge with every step.
"There has to be a control node... Something, anything..."
He muttered under his breath, eyes darting across the twisted, warped facility. What once might've been scientific halls had long since lost their identity—now mutated into a labyrinth of agony.
He entered another chamber.
Rows of glass cylinders, cracked and yellowed with age, lined the walls like trophies. Inside each was a female head, preserved in green solution, hair floating like seaweed, eyes wide open. Some were beautiful. Some were screaming. Others looked peaceful in a way that disturbed him more.
Each tank bore a handwritten label:
"Subject 029F – Vocal Tuning Incomplete.""Subject 045F – Memory Saturation Achieved."
He stepped back, revolted.
The room next door was worse.
Male bodies, this time. Not just heads—but entire torsos, flayed open, organs displayed and hooked to rusted mechanisms still twitching. Their veins had been replaced with tubes, green fluid still pumping. Most were eyeless, sockets stuffed with soaked cloth, mouths sewn open in permanent grins.
The stink was unbearable.
Seyfe dry-heaved in a corner before forcing himself forward, one hand clutching his side. His boots squelched through puddles of something thick and sticky—he didn't dare look down anymore.
"Why… why does this place exist? Why am I still here?" he hissed.
Every hallway bled into another horror.
A room filled with stillborns, their miniature limbs dangling from the ceiling like windchimes. Another with cages, where corpses were packed tightly together like meat stuffed in jars. Some had marks of recent movement. Others had notes sewn into their flesh, written in a language Seyfe didn't recognize, yet could feel press against his thoughts.
At one point he saw a mirror. Just a regular one. But when he looked in, he didn't see himself.
He saw a man stitched from parts, crying silently as a scalpel hovered near his chest.
"This is sick… It's all sick," he murmured.
Then he ran.
Room after room. Hall after hall. His body hurt. His head throbbed. His soul clawed at his ribs.
Eventually, through sheer panic and momentum, he burst through a bulkhead door.
And stopped.
The chamber before him was larger. Cleaner. Lit by pulsing green runes etched into the floor. In the center sat what looked like a control pillar—a pillar of flesh, wires, and bone intertwined into a grotesque throne that still hummed with power. Tubes extended from it in all directions, climbing the walls like arteries, leading to every chamber he had passed.
On the surface of the pillar, hands were molded into the flesh—dozens of them, grasping upward in frozen agony.
"Finally," Seyfe muttered.
But as he stepped toward it, the pillar twitched.
And a voice whispered through the room—not in his ears, but directly inside his thoughts:
"Why do you want to stop the song?"
Seyfe froze.
"Because it's not a song," he growled. "It's a goddamn funeral march."
He pulled out his knife, eyes narrowed, and stalked toward the core.