Her gaze shifted from one end of the dark ceiling to the other. She saw no movement, but something strange had caught her eye. Above the large entrance she had come in from, two large holes, the length of at least two people apart, had been crumbling slowly. Something had been placed in them until only recently, but Marie was unable to determine what. The feeling of unease returned. Unease that quickly grew into panic and anger when she came upon the freshly killed corpse lying further in. A butchered male, much like the soldiers from before, wearing shredded robes that resembled those of the Knights of the Lost Star. She cursed her ill-timing.
Marie held onto the lingering hope that perhaps they had fought the vault’s defenses to a standstill and eliminated each other in the process. Hopes that were soon dashed, as she reached the back-end of the charnel room only to uncover a nightmarish sight.
“By the mad maidens’ moons…!”
It seemed to be the final ancient defense that divided intruders from their bounty. An immense, cyclopean gateway whose door, seemingly meant to block out anyone from entering, was now sitting ajar. To describe it, its magnitude could easily fit an entire crowd through the open crack. What had horrified Marie wasn’t the sheer size of the door, however, but that embedded within it was the large torso of a humanoid behemoth. Its arms held aloft and violently nailed to the door. An unclear face wrapped in rotting bandages and a jaw hanging by loose, leathery skin. The titan was killed at some point by the enormous blade stabbed through its heart, the gaping wound still fresh. The door-giant lay there, a lifeless relic, unable to fulfill whatever duty it held during its long-lived history. And with his passage now opened, Marie realized she had arrived too late.
The priestess rushed in, racing down dark corridors with endless ceilings. Her mask helped enhance the semblance of supernatural light that was recently lit to guide the previous intruders. At the end, she found herself face to face with an arched, wooden door that was much smaller than the previous one—already opened and invaded and revealing an ancient temple inside. Strange pillars surrounded the room along with long abandoned chiseled altars made with the express intent of hosting abhorrent and unnatural ceremonies. One such altar presented itself with an empty pedestal that Marie believed recently held the dangerous artifact she had been searching for. Angry and pensive, she ran back out towards the large chamber to once again inspect the corpse of the fallen knight for any clues he might have held. But upon entering, she noticed something that sparked another unusual sense of dread within her. What first appeared to be a discoloration along the high walls of the chamber were actually rows of long steel links of considerable size bored deeply into the ancient rock—frightening tools of imprisonment meant to bind the terrible dark titans that once terrorized the land. Marie thought back to the living door and felt relief that whatever creatures were once chained here still paled to its colossal size.
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The further in she looked, the more rusted shackles she could perceive in the darkness above—still wrapped crushingly around desiccated remains and rotting mammoth bones. The chains seemed to circle around the entire chamber, evoking a strange dungeon-like feel. But unlike the panopticon back home, where they kept the vilest of captives, this place had more of a ritual feeling. As if the monstrous prisoners were forced to bear witness to whatever strange, eldritch rites were once held in this room.
Making her way to the other side where she had entered, she remembered the distinct pair of crumbling gaps above. The mystery of what they once held now unfortunately obvious. And with no sign of any fallen chains below, there was a startling possibility that a once imprisoned behemoth of old was now set loose upon the world.
Taking one last look at the dungeon around her, she began to notice not just the single fallen knight from before, but a multitude of them. Hordes of dead bodies littered the dark chamber floor, all freshly slain. Whatever had escaped had left a bloody trail in its wake.
She desperately searched the corpses for any sign of the missing artifact, but her thorough inspection came up completely empty in the end. It took her a couple more hours to finally make it back to the entrance, where the blackened sky and frozen clouds of night greeted her.
Marie checked her Scarlet-Strap, a private line of communication that all the priestesses used, to get an accurate reading of the current time and noticed she had received several missed calls. Being as far underground as she was, it seemed her watch's signal had been blocked until the very point where she made it back to the surface.
“Surely you could have waited a single day for me to return, Zulie.” She said aloud while checking the private channel on her device where reports from the others are usually recorded and transcribed.
"Report for me, please."
A synthesized voice emanated from her device.
“You have 10 new messages.”
Marie grew slightly worried. It wasn’t like someone as experienced as Sister Zulema to spam her watch with messages, especially with how little the girl interacted with the others in the Scarlet Sister group chat that Marie would constantly try messaging her over.
The shaken and staticky voice of Sister Zulema cut through the silence of the midnight air, “Sister Marie!! ... Kzzt… Code Scarlet! We’ve made contact with…Bzzt… Eleutheromania class entity. It… Bzzt… Sister Lucia! She… She…Bzzt…!”
The majority of the messages were incoherent and practically unintelligible due to some unknown interference. The final message seemed to be Zulema scrambling to dictate her position and a possible farewell to her sister. Whatever creature they had encountered must have damaged her communications watch.
“What happened…?”
Marie turned back to the doors behind her—a warm, howling draft bellowed from deep within.