Leon pushed the heavy door, but what awaited them behind it was no horned beast or hulking goblin. Instead, they found a stone passageway, unnervingly vast, stretching out with an odd sense of spaciousness. In the center of the hall, a massive rocky outcrop was bathed in a shaft of golden sunlight falling from a distant opening in the ceiling, painting a solitary spot of light amidst the pitch-black darkness.
Elara broke into a wide smile, as if a cloud had lifted from her chest. "Look, everyone... an exit! Light!" She dashed toward the rock like a madwoman.
"Elara, watch your step!" Leon warned as he rushed after her, but he stopped abruptly when a sound they had never heard before pierced their ears.
It was a monotonous, mechanical sound—the grating of enormous, meticulously oiled metal gears rotating with a terrifying regularity. Everyone froze in place; Leon drew his flaming sword, Milo summoned his luminous fox which began barking sharply into the darkness, and Kayan fell back to guard their rear.
From behind the veil of darkness, a long shadow began to form, slowly approaching the pool of light. Its crimson eyes glowed with a bloody radiance from the gloom of the passage. With its first step into the light, the team felt a piercing cold that seemed to freeze their very joints.
The entity appeared humanoid, yet it lacked everything that made one human. Its stark white hair was neatly poured back over its shoulders, matching its immaculate white garments and the long scarf that flowed behind it like a shroud.
"What are you? Identify yourself!" Leon shouted, his voice trembling for the first time.
The entity did not lower its guard. Instead, it regarded them with an ancient coldness. Leon repeated his question: "What are you? Are you an adventurer too?"
A cold laugh echoed, devoid of any emotion. "Company? How unexpected in a place like this... I am no one, child of flesh and bone. I am merely a messenger."
"A messenger? From whom?" Kayan asked, the magical pressure in the room almost crushing him.
"And why should you care?" the entity replied with lethal calm. "Shouldn't you be more concerned with your own trivial existence than the conspiracies woven against those far greater than you?"
Milo's fox began to snarl with desperate fury, while Elara collapsed to her knees, tears carving trails down her pallid face. "Please... don't kill us. We're just simple adventurers... this is our first time. We'll leave quietly and never come back."
The entity laughed again, a terrifying laugh this time. "I like this begging... it's more logical. More... human."
"Don't get ahead of yourself!" Leon shouted, trying to gather the tatters of his courage. He gripped his sword tightly and began channeling its fire, but before he could blink, he felt a sudden chill in his arm.
Leon looked down in disbelief... His hand, his sword, and his grip were already lying on the ground. Blood erupted in a horrifying crimson fountain. Leon fell, screaming in agony, writhing in a pool of his own blood.
Elara completely broke down, stumbling backward as she vomited from the horror of the sight. As for Kayan, he lunged madly toward Leon, trying to open his pack with trembling hands to search for a healing elixir. "Damn it... damn it! Where is it?"
Just as his fingers brushed the vial, the entity appeared behind him in the blink of an eye, holding Leon's fallen sword. The luminous fox tried to attack, but with a single, breeze-soft gesture, both the fox and Kayan were cleanly sliced in two.
A scream tore from Leon's throat, shaking the very depths of the dungeon, as he watched the upper half of his friend bounce on the ground. Kayan still had a flicker of consciousness; his eyes were fixed on his own spilling entrails, and he was trying, in a desperate and pitiful attempt, to push them back inside with his blood-slicked hands.
The entity turned toward Elara, who had lost all ability to move. Leon screamed, trying to snap her out of her stupor: "Elara, run! Get away! For all that is holy... use your Fucking legs!"
Elara ran... she ran seeing nothing but a fog of tears and the blood of her friends smeared across her face. But it was futile.
The entity raised its hand, and suddenly a massive metal wall erupted from the ground, blocking her path. She turned to flee in another direction, only for a second wall to surge forth. Within seconds, a third, forth and a fifth wall clamped down from above, transforming her space into a perfect metallic cube.
The cube began to contract. Elara was pounding on the walls from the inside, her screams heart-rending: "Get me out! Please!"
Leon crawled with his one remaining hand, clutching at the entity's leg, pleading for a mercy he no longer sought for himself, but for his friend: "Kill her quickly... give her a more merciful end... please!"
But the entity did not even blink. Kayan had finally died, his eyes open and staring into the void. Meanwhile, from inside the box, the horrific sound of crunching bones began to drown out Elara's screams. The box contracted and contracted, crushing flesh, bone, and metal alike, until it finally transformed into an infinitesimally small cube, no larger than an inch, which fell to the ground with a cold, metallic ping.
Amid this human slaughterhouse, Milo watched in absolute silence, his eyes widened to the point of freezing. He did not scream, did not beg for mercy. Instead, in a swift motion that seemed like an inverted survival instinct, he drew his small dagger. Without hesitation, he slit his own throat in one decisive stroke. He fell to the ground, life seeping from him in a strange quiet, preferring eternal darkness over remaining another second in the presence of this entity.
"I like that child... He was the cleverest among you," said the Messenger, its voice ringing with a metallic tone devoid of any human echo.
Leon, who was crying tears of blood, screamed with a shattered voice: "Why? Why are you doing this? What have we done to you to deserve this... this butchery?"
"Execution?" the entity repeated the word with what seemed like bewilderment, as if correcting a trivial linguistic error. "I am not executing you, my friend... I am here to *help* you. But since your limited minds cannot comprehend the nature of my work, removing you 'temporarily' is faster and simpler than attempting an explanation and risking the corruption of the Grand Design."
"You monster!" Leon shrieked, and struck the creature's foot with his one remaining hand. The blow produced a high-pitched metallic ring, as if he had struck solid, hollow ingots. The action seemed to provoke the entity's anger.
In the blink of an eye, the entity seized Leon by the neck and lifted him into the air like a ragdoll. The tiny metal cube that had crushed Elara flew toward them, while with its other hand, the entity summoned a glass goblet with a cold, mechanical motion. The cube opened, and the pulverized remains of Elara—shredded meat and shattered bone—spilled into the cup.
With an iron grip, the entity forced Leon's jaw open and pushed that horrific, bloody "soup" down his throat. Leon tried to vomit, tried to resist, but the entity's hand sealed his mouth, forcing him to swallow the remnants of his friend.
"Do you see this?" the Messenger whispered, drowning Leon in that liquid nightmare. "This is what you are now: a fragile, weak, insignificant creature... But it is not your destiny to remain so. I am the herald of your future, child of man. I am here to awaken you for the Great Wheel."
The Messenger threw Leon to the ground like discarded trash. "I am not here to kill you. You are human... an essence the universe itself cannot erase, despite your current fragility. But this is not your fault... It is theirs."
Leon crawled on the ground, spitting out the lingering taste of death in his mouth, his mind reeling between madness and reality. "There are great things in this existence, Leon... things beyond your narrow comprehension. Your future does not lie in this dark pit, but out there... where the cosmos is governed. Do you grasp what I am saying?"
"Get away from me... you lunatic..." Leon muttered, crawling slowly toward Milo's corpse, his eyes fixed on the dagger that had ended his friend's life; he wanted to catch up with him, to escape this nightmarish dialogue.
But the Messenger was faster. It seized Leon's shoulder and wrenched him around with a force that dislocated the joint. "Very well... I shall make you understand."
The Messenger's voice transformed into an earthquake that shook the foundations of space itself. Then, suddenly, a great white light erupted from its body a light that did not illuminate the place but rather consumed it, a light that washed over all existence, transforming the blood, the screams, and the corpses into an absolute, endless white.
The moment the great light swallowed Leon's cries and the remnants of his companions, an overwhelming silence fell. This was no ordinary silence—it was a "sacred" silence.
The whiteness of the light faded, replaced by the stillness of a room of faded hue, its walls seeming to be made from the dust of ages. There, within a boundless gray expanse, the Fae sat upon an ancient wooden chair, rocking back and forth with a monotonous creak that filled the void. She faced an abyssal darkness, an emptiness where no one stood, yet her eyes stared into it as if seeing legions of souls.
Resting in her lap was a crude earthenware bowl, holding pomegranate seeds steeped in thick, golden honey, its viscosity reminiscent of the blood shed moments ago in the dungeon. Slowly, she began to move her lips, her voice flowing like a thread of smoke in a cold room:
"I wake where there is no waking. No door opens for me, and no eye beholds my rising—only the edges of inverted time piling up like wet leaves."
She paused for a moment, tilting her head as if listening to a distant call. "My breath is ancient; a forgotten name spoken behind me always before I speak, demanding of me what I cannot give. I hear the world whisper: we are leaning on something that is not yet time; something that steals your senses and then tells you it is you."
She picked up a honey-drenched pomegranate seed and gazed at it with beautiful sorrow. "Yes—we are inside a dream. Everything here wears a familiar guise to deceive perception: a face, a street, logic... all are masks on the edge of the distant idea's mind, for its unborn child."
She smiled an enigmatic smile and addressed the darkness once more: "I wish to tell you how sleep extinguishes the dawn, but you will refuse to understand what has no name, so you will fall silent; and this is my gift to you. I have no purpose other than to rearrange the cracks within your story—to place you before a mirror that reflects but a single possibility: immortality as a recurring scene."
She laughed softly, a dry laugh without echo. "Sometimes I laugh with a sound that cannot be heard, for there is no need for sound before those who possess no independent memory; I merely teach them how to repeat their mistakes with new safety. I do not judge who exits—no one truly exits—but I reserve the right to remind them that the 'other outside' is not a place for punishment, but for display."
She extended her hand toward the emptiness before her, as if touching an invisible form. "Come, stand where blissful oblivion meets painful memory, and place your hand upon the story's chest: you will feel a strange pulse, warm and familiar yet real. It is not your pulse... It is the pulse of the impossible, beating when we rearrange dreams for faces yet unchosen."
She stopped rocking, and her face grew serious to the point of cruelty. "Do not let the question die in your mouth. Here, the question is the key, it is the knife, it is the final joke. And finally: if you seek an escape, teach it to yourself. As for me—I do not care much for escapees. They spoil the performance."
She placed the pomegranate seed in her mouth, and as she chewed, the scene gradually faded.