The world slammed back into place around Kane.
He stumbled through the Breach door into a different place — no longer the bone cathedral.
This was a hallway.
Long. Narrow. Metal walls, slick with condensation.
It looked like an old laboratory, abandoned for decades.
The lights above flickered.
Every flicker showed something different — sometimes the hallway was normal.
Sometimes it was flooded with blood.
Sometimes the walls moved, breathing in and out.
Kane wiped the sweat from his forehead.
His hand came away black.
The Rot was closer to the surface now.
Waiting.
---
Ahead, a door stood half-open.
The sign above it read:
ARCHIVE ROOM - LEVEL 7
Kane crept closer.
Inside, he found rows of filing cabinets, computers stacked like corpses, old photos pinned to the walls.
Something had happened here.
Something bad.
He flipped through a dusty folder left on a desk.
Inside were black-and-white photographs.
Pictures of monsters.
A man with no face, only spirals where features should be.
A child with a mouth sewn shut, eyes open too wide.
A creature made of writhing hands stitched together.
Each photo had the same marking stamped across it:
PROPERTY OF BLACK MERIDIAN
Kane's stomach twisted.
The dates were even worse.
Some of the photos were decades old.
The Black Meridian hadn't just found supernatural horrors.
They had been studying them.
Breeding them.
---
A monitor in the corner buzzed to life.
Static cleared.
Halstram's face appeared — pale, smiling thinly.
> "You're doing well, Kane.
Better than we expected."
Kane stepped back instinctively.
"What is this?" he growled.
Halstram chuckled.
> "This is the truth.
Meridian was never about stopping the Rot.
We are its shepherds.
Its keepers.
Its weapon-makers."
Images flashed on the screen — brief, terrible:
Experiments performed on living people.
Bodies stitched into machines.
Children injected with black serum, screaming as their bones shifted.
Kane's fists clenched.
"You used me," he said, voice low.
Halstram nodded.
> "Of course.
You're the perfect hybrid.
Human enough to obey.
Rot enough to survive.
You're a weapon, Kane.
And weapons don't get to choose their wars."
The screen went black.
---
Kane stood there for a long moment.
The Rot whispered inside him:
> "Burn them.
Break them.
They lied.
They are food."
For once, Kane agreed.
He turned toward the exit.
The hunt wasn't just for Riftborn anymore.
It was for Meridian too.
They had unleashed this darkness.
Now it would come back for them.
And Kane — half-human, half-Rot — would be its sword.
---
As he walked away, the walls of the archive began to bleed.
The whole building groaned.
The Black Meridian's secrets were no longer safe.
And neither was anyone inside.