Just as Shin turned toward the dim mouth of the stairwell, a sound sliced through the heavy, stagnant air.
It wasn't a loud scream, but a wet, shuddering gasp—a noise squeezed through a throat choked with fluid and terror. It lingered in the subterranean dampness, shivering off the stone before dissolving into a fragile, broken weeping.
Shin froze. His pulse spiked, blood suddenly roaring in his ears like grinding surf.
The voice was thin and raspy, but underlying its ruined pitch was a tone he knew. He had heard that cadence before, somewhere bright and warm, far removed from this dark abyss.
Driven less by courage than by a sickening pull of instinct, Shin turned back. He picked his way through the twisting subterranean network, where the tunnels curled into the stone like the intestine of some sleeping titan. Every turn plunged him deeper into an oppressive, pitch-black cold. The walls weren't merely damp; they oozed a slick, dark slime that smelled faintly of copper and ancient, trapped grease.
His shoes came down, but instead of the clink of solid flagstone, his foot sank into something yielding, cold, and unnervingly soft.
A heavy, wet squelch echoed up the narrow corridor.
Shin looked down. The faint, sickly luminescence clung to the damp walls, casting just enough light to reveal what lay beneath his heel. It wasn't mud. His boot was sunk two inches deep into a grayish-green lump of sloughed-off human flesh, liquefied at the edges and coated in a rancid yellow fat.
A wall of putrefaction rushed up his nostrils—ammonia, sweetish decay, and stagnant blood.
His gorge rose instantly. Shin clamped a hand over his mouth, swallowing down a surge of hot bile as his chest heaved. This place is a butcher's pit, he thought, his eyes watering against the stench as he forced his foot free with a sickening suction sound. He pressed onward, his breathing shallow and jagged.
A few yards deeper, the tunnel ended at a row of iron bars, heavy with rust that looked like a dried scab.
Shin stopped at the threshold of the cell. He held his breath, leaning closer to the iron grating.
Inside, bathed in deep, suffocating shadow, a shape lay curled in the filth of the stone floor. There was no torchlight, no lantern, yet as Shin's eyes acclimated to the gloom, the small silhouette took on a terrible, unmistakable shape.
It was a child.
Shin's chest locked. He knew this boy. The memory rushed back in a blinding contrast of light and warmth—standing by the bakery near the city gates with his parents. He remembered the golden, yeasty crusts of Sally Lunn bread cooling on wooden racks, the rich scent of melted butter lingering in the air, and this same boy, dressed in crisp velvet, laughing as his father handed him a sweet roll. Back then, the child had carried himself with the effortless grace of privilege and security.
Now, that same boy sat broken in the dirt like cast-off butcher's waste.
Ricky.
Shin's mind reeled as he took in the gruesome reality of the child's frame.
Ricky's face was unrecognizable—a swollen, grotesque mask of violet bruises and jagged lacerations. His left eye was shut tight under a purple, bulbous eyelid that seeped a yellowish fluid down his cheek. But worse than the bruises was his right side: his arm was gone entirely. In its place, at the shoulder, was a raw, puckered stump held together by thick, filthy hemp thread, stitched crudely and deeply into inflamed, blackened flesh. Pinkish pus bubbled around the thread with every shuddering breath the boy took.
He was devouring a filthy piece of bread the waiter had given him as if it were his last meal, his tear-streaked face contorted in pain.
Then, the boy's single, unswollen eye flickered open.
Through a veil of dried blood and yellow crust, his good pupil contracted, locking onto Shin's pale silhouette standing just beyond the threshold.
For a terrifying second, silence stretched taut. Then, Ricky's mouth tore open.
What came out was not a clean yell, but a ragged, whistling shriek—a sound forced through a larynx scarred by screaming and choked with mucus.
"Help! Please!"
The child threw himself forward with a sudden, violent surge of momentum. He didn't measure the distance; he simply lunged toward the only living soul in the abyss.
CLANG.
His brow smashed directly into the heavy iron bar with a sickening, wet crack. The impact flaked crusts of ancient red rust into the air and snapped his head back, leaving a smear of fresh, crimson gore on the oxidized metal. Ricky stumbled backward into the filth, his legs giving out for a terrifying moment, but the sheer, feverish adrenaline driving his broken body refused to let him stay down.
He scrambled forward on his knees, clawing at the stone until his good hand clamped around the rusty iron. His fingernails—cracked, blackened, and torn away at the quick—dug uselessly into the cold metal.
He pressed his ruined face against the gap between the bars. His breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps, carrying the warm, repulsive reek of gangrenous decay straight into Shin's face.
"Get me out!" Ricky wept, his jaw trembling as blood dripped from his split forehead onto his chin. "Please! I'm begging you... Save me!"
Shin couldn't move. His feet felt nailed to the slimy flagstones.
The boy before him wasn't just begging for freedom; he was radiating a primal, animalistic horror. Ricky looked past Shin, his wide, bloodshot eye darting toward the darkness behind the young man as if he could already hear the soft, crawling footsteps of whatever nightmare had torn his arm from its socket.
Save him?
Shin's chest squeezed tight, as if an iron band was collapsing his lungs. His heart hammered erratic, jagged rhythms against his ribs, ringing in his ears like an alarm bell.
Look at the boy's shoulder. Look at the coarse, black thread holding his decaying stump together. Who had stitched that? Who had dragged this child down here and butchered him piece by piece?
If Shin touched those bars, if he lingered for even a second longer, the shadow that owned this pit would find him too.
"I..." Shin stammered. The word caught in his parched throat, dry and hollow. "I... C-can't..."
Ricky's eye widened in sheer, unbelieving agony. "No—no! Don't leave me!"
"I'm sorry," Shin whispered, his voice cracking into a helpless, cowardly wheeze. "I'm... I'm sorry..."
Panic flared inside Shin like a dousing of oil on raw flame. Sanity shattered.
He spun on his heel and ran.
He sprinted away from the cell, his boots skittering wildly across the slick, fat-draped stone. He didn't look back. He couldn't look back. The darkness of the corridor seemed to reach for him, the damp, claustrophobic walls leaning inward as if trying to trap him in the subterranean grave.
His mind collapsed into a swirling whirlpool of terror.
What is this place? Almighty God, what is wrong with this city?
Nothing made sense. The suffocating atmosphere, the bar just above his head, the laughter of thugs. The dread that had been a quiet, dull ache in his stomach since his arrival now exploded into full, unadulterated madness.
Mom...
The realization hit him like an icy blade through the spine. His mother worked in this complex. If a high-born child could be reduced to rotting, stitched-up meat in a forgotten cell... what had they done to her?
And my sister.
A cold sweat broke out across his entire body, freezing him to the bone despite his frantic sprint. He had to find her. He had to get her, get out, and burn this godforsaken place to the ground.
Blind to the terrain, consumed by the hysterical impulse to escape, Shin took a sharp corner too fast.
His lead foot caught on an uneven lip of stone coated in slippery slime.
His center of gravity flipped. Shin pitched forward, air rushing from his lungs as he crashed hard onto the frozen, unyielding stone. Pain exploded through his shoulder and knee as he skidded across the damp floor, the hard impact knocking the wind completely out of him.
He lay there in the pitch-black corridor, gasping uselessly for breath, his chest heaving against the cold ground.
And from down the winding, intestinal dark of the subterranean complex, Ricky's terrified soul desperately hoped to escape