Chapter 198: Beneath the Skin of Ruins
The rusted door groaned in its frame, but held firm. Behind them, the silence grew heavier, more alert, as if the stone itself were holding its breath.
The young soldier, the last to cross the threshold, was shaking so violently the iron bar he’d just slid into place vibrated in his sweaty hands. His face, lit by the faint glow of a handlamp Julius had pulled out, was corpse-pale.
"Is... is it still there?" he whispered, voice fractured.
Julius pressed his ear to the cold metal. No scratching. No ragged breathing. Nothing but the dense silence of the deep. Still, he didn’t relax. His shoulders stayed knotted, his eyes locked on the door as if he could see through the rusted plating.
"It knows where we are," he murmured at last, stepping back. His voice was tired, but without fear. A kind of accepted fatality. "It knows we climbed. Now it waits. It’s got all the time in the world."
The air was different here. Still cold, but without the clammy wetness of the lower tunnels. A dry, mineral sharpness. And that smell... ancient dust, moldy parchment, and a metallic tang, like blood dried centuries ago.
They stood in a hallway of carved stone — more regular, more human. Low arches supported a vaulted ceiling lost in darkness too deep for their weak lights to pierce. Massive wooden doors lined the walls, some banded with iron, some swollen with age. Half-erased inscriptions, written in a language Dylan didn’t recognize, adorned the lintels.
The Observatory. Or at least, its forgotten bowels.
Dylan straightened with a muffled grunt. The burning in his muscles gave way to a deep, dull warmth that spread through his limbs like thick wine.
His weakness had faded, replaced by a raw, twitching strength. He could feel every fiber of his body, every amplified heartbeat. But it was a stolen energy, still unstable. It thrummed under his skin like a caged beast.
He glanced down at his hands. In the gloom, he thought he saw his veins glowing faintly green — where the essence ran. An illusion? Maybe. Or maybe the mark digesting its meal — too fast, too hungrily.
"What was that?" he asked, voice steadier than he’d expected, but tinged with a coldness that didn’t feel like his own. He fixed his gaze on Julius. "That thing."