The tunnels felt alive.
Every step Fred and Clara took echoed strangely, as if unseen things were moving just beyond the light.
The walls, damp and cracked, seemed to breathe with a slow, rhythmic pulse.
Fred tightened his grip on his blade.
Clara's hand hovered near the pistol strapped beneath her jacket.
Neither trusted the silence.
"Where are we going?" Fred asked finally, his voice little more than a whisper.
"Somewhere they can't find us," Clara said.
"And somewhere you'll see the truth."
---
They turned a sharp corner and entered a long hall lined with ancient carvings.
Symbols.
Strange spirals, broken circles, jagged crosses.
Some looked like letters Fred almost recognized—but not from any language he'd ever learned.
Clara paused, tracing a particularly deep carving with her fingertips.
"This isn't just a hideout," she murmured.
"It's a graveyard."
Fred frowned. "A graveyard for what?"
She turned to him, her eyes shadowed.
"For the ones who came before. The ones who tried to stop them… and failed."
---
At the far end of the hall stood a heavy iron door, so old it had fused partly into the stone around it.
Fred stepped closer—and recoiled.
Smeared across the door was a handprint, dark and dried, but unmistakably blood.
Fresh blood.
Someone had been here recently.
Clara cursed under her breath. "We're not alone."
Fred felt it too—that electric prickle of being watched.
Behind them, in the suffocating dark, something shifted.
A whisper.
A scrape.
Fred spun, blade ready.
But there was nothing.
---
The iron door creaked open on its own, inch by inch, as if beckoning them forward.
Fred and Clara exchanged a glance.
Without a word, they slipped through into the darkness beyond.
Inside was a small chamber, lit only by the weak beam of Clara's lantern.
The walls here were different—covered not with carvings, but with names.
Names scratched into the stone by desperate hands.
Hundreds of names.
Maybe thousands.
And at the center of the room, surrounded by flickering candles that hadn't yet burned out, sat a small black box.
Unmarked.
Untouched.
Waiting.
---
Clara stepped back, suddenly tense.
"That box," she said slowly, "is why Velmont and Thorne want you dead."
Fred stared at her, heart hammering.
"What's inside it?"
She shook her head.
"Something that doesn't belong to either of them. Something... older. Something worse."
The air grew colder.
Fred reached out toward the box—but Clara grabbed his wrist, hard.
"If you open it, there's no going back."
Her voice was fierce, almost desperate.
Fred met her gaze.
And without hesitation—
He lifted the lid.
---