The air in the underground lab tasted of rust and wet stone.
Noa sat hunched over her workstation, the glow of her desk lamp carving a fragile circle of light in the cavernous dark. The glyphs loomed around her, their jagged lines crawling across the walls like veins. She had spent the last six hours documenting them, her fingers trembling as she sketched each symbol into her notebook.
But something was wrong.
The glyphs *shifted* when she wasn't looking.
She blinked, and the strokes of one symbol had rearranged themselves—subtly, just a curl at the edge where there had been a hard angle before. Noa's breath hitched. She reached out, her fingertips hovering over the stone.
*Cold warmth.*
The sensation slithered up her arm, a paradox made flesh. The glyph pulsed in her vision—not a color, but the *absence* of one, a hungry void that drank the light. Her synesthesia screamed. The symbol wasn't just a word. It was *sorrow*, it was *silence*, it was the scent of burning paper in a room with no fire.
She jerked her hand back.
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
The voice made her flinch. A man stood in the doorway, his frame blocking the flickering fluorescents of the corridor. He wore the DSP's standard-issue tactical gear, but his posture was all exhaustion—shoulders slumped, eyes shadowed. Captain Eren Malvek. Her new watchdog.
Noa swallowed. "Ghosts don't leave carvings."
Malvek stepped closer, his boots scuffing against the damp concrete. "You'd be surprised." He nodded at the wall. "What's it say?"
"I don't know yet." *Lie.* She knew some of it. Knew it in the way her bones ached when she looked too long, in the way her dreams had been stained black since she came down here.
Malvek studied her, then reached into his coat. He tossed a file onto her desk. "Previous team's notes. Thought you might want to see what happened to the last poor bastard who tried to read this."
Noa opened the file. Photographs of a man—hollow-eyed, gaunt—scrawling glyphs across his own skin in what looked like blood. The final image was a corpse, mouth frozen open in a silent scream, his fingers still curled around a knife.
She shut the file.
Malvek's voice was low. "He started dreaming in the glyphs. Woke up speaking words that didn't exist. Then he stopped sleeping altogether." A pause. "You hearing things yet?"
Noa's pulse thundered. *Yes.* Whispers in the dark, voices that weren't there. But she said nothing.
Malvek sighed. "Look. I don't care what you tell Ravel. But if you start seeing shit—if the walls start *talking*—you walk away. Some things down here don't want to be understood."
Noa almost laughed. Too late.
That night, she dreamed of the black cathedral again.
It stretched endlessly, its pillars carved with the same glyphs as the ruins. The air was thick with chanting, a hundred voices murmuring in a language that coiled like smoke. At the altar stood a figure in tattered robes, their back to her.
Noa stepped closer. The figure turned.
*Her own face stared back.*
The dream-Noa smiled, her lips splitting too wide. "You're listening," she whispered. "Good."
Noa woke with a gasp.
Her notebook lay open beside her. The pages she had filled with careful transcriptions were now covered in frantic, looping scrawls—a language she didn't remember writing.
And at the bottom, in her own handwriting:
*"It knows your name."*
The next morning, Noa stood before the largest glyph yet, a twisting spiral of strokes that made her teeth ache. She had avoided speaking the words aloud. But she had to know.
She traced the first symbol. Took a breath.
Spoke it.
The sound was wrong—guttural, alien, a vibration that clawed at her throat. The moment it left her lips, the air *shivered*.
And from the depths of the tunnel, something whispered it back.