All the wires run around the room here, convalescing into a central node, all of them coming together into one humming mass in the center that sinks away beneath the stone floors. Sitting all around the circle are bodies. They look like skeletons, but an old, leathered flesh still clings to their frames. They are robed like the purple robed cultists. The buzzing wires run through the gaps of their joints, snaking through open mouths and out of empty eye sockets. Between their fingers. Running just beneath their arms that are held aloft, threatening to blow them to pieces should any of them move even an inch. All of them are stuck in a variety of different incredibly strenuous positions, forced to hold themselves perfectly still as the wires hum around them. All of them are still alive.

What in the name of the dark-lord?

  My eyes follow the wires, trying to decipher where it is that they’re going. What the end-result of their power is. But I can’t see anything in particular. The wires just either seem to loop around indefinitely forever. Some of them go down to touch the circle engraved into the stone, or so I thought, but on the opposite ends of the circle I see more wires coming back out. Are these all different cables? Or is this all one, giant cable that is looped around thousand and thousands of times, only to feed back into itself. It hums.

Though none of the bodies can move for fear of being destroyed, I nonetheless feel their senses drift towards us, towards me. With empty sockets and an ever-present drone in their ears, they watch me. They listen. What a horrible sight they are. I look at them. I pity them.

  “It feels weird being back here, right?” asks the thief. I nod. I can’t say anything to the statement of being ‘back’ here. But being here in general feels weird. Where are the trash-mobs? What is this? Is this the sub-boss? They don’t look like they could put up much of a fight, honestly. She looks at them as well and they look at her. Their faces hollow, their teeth removed, all to make space so that the cables can run through the fronts of their skulls without ever touching them. Listening closely now, I hear it. I hear them. They hum too. All of them. How many are they? A dozen? More? All of them release a gentle hum in the same frequency of the buzzing cable’s.

Does the cable hum, or is it their voices being carried out throughout the construction? I can not say.

“Let’s go,” says the thief and I don’t feel like arguing.

  But as we walk past and through the room, towards the other side. I can’t help but look at the large circle engraved down below. I can’t help as if I’ve seen it before, that intricate pattern woven into it. It looks like some sort of summoning ritual. But… I feel a pair of hollow eyes gaze my way. What did they summon? What could have been worth this fate? This eternal imprisonment.

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Why don’t they just touch the wires to end it? Why don’t they just sleep?

  We leave the room and go down a similar hallway, as to the one before. Short corridors and sharp corners define the stone-wrought path. The humming is all around us. My mind goes to the battlefield floor before. I kind of want to go back and fight there, kind of really, really badly, actually. But I can’t. I know that I can’t. I’d sigh, but I have no mouth. Focus. There’s work to do. There’s…

- Something blue?

  Something blue catches my eye, from down in the corner, just near my waist. There is just a tiny, minuscule crack in the stone, a little itsy bitsy bit of rock, that has broken apart over the aeons and fallen down and nested there and deep inside, I see a single sliver of shining blue. I stare at it curiously. It stares back at me, much the same. The electricity hums.

  I don’t have skin. I don’t have nerves. I don’t have any senses like that in this body. But I feel something nonetheless. I feel… I feel as if the hairs on my arms should be standing on end. I feel unsteady, as if waiting on the next beat of my heart to come, as if I were unsure if it even would. I feel… cold.

  My armor rattles, not from the vibration now, but from a deep uncertainty. A fear. A fear or what? What am I afraid of? I don’t know. Look around you, Miika, what do you see? I ask myself now, wondering. What is it, Piotr? What do I see, in the blue shine behind the wall? In the glow that shines with ephemeral pulses. In the eyeless sockets that watch me. What do I see?

The thief stops. My eyes turn towards her as she turns back to me, she looks at me, perplexed, perhaps wondering why I’ve stopped. She doesn't know. She doesn't feel it. She doesn’t feel it coming.

  “Hey. We have to keep goi-,“ she stops herself mid-sentence, as the vapor of her breath floats out of her mouth, forming a tiny cloud of mist just before her face. It’s getting cold. Her eyes grow wide, not in a look of obsession, but in one of confusion. “That’s odd, it’s not supposed to be cold here?” She doesn’t know. Guy. Guy! Listen. Listen. Do you hear it? Do you hear it too? That sound?

  Something is coming. Listen… Listen! Shh! Quiet, friend! You need to listen… I hear something down behind the wall, through the crack. Some wet, slopping, sloshing noise. As if a mass of dank, slimy meat was being dragged along the surface of the stones. Like something was crawling towards us, towards me. Lurching. Encroaching. I look into the gap again, just as I see it reaching, as I see a single tendril make its way forward towards the hole from the other side. I see it reaching for my eyes.

I run.

  “What are you doi- IE!” Scooping the thief up in my arms as I barrel down the way, she squeals in surprise as I pick her up again. Something cracks, the stones behind us, they crack. Not from some great shattering of some force smashing through them, but from the ice. From the ice that’s growing. It hums. Can you hear it? My metal boots strike against the stones, clank, clank, haha! It hums. It hums! ‘Bmmmmm-.‘ Sprinting, I turn the corner. The air is growing cold. It’s growing frigid. I see her breath rise up before me like a great wall of fog, as if her soul were leaving her body, then it vanishes into the darkness, leaving me here alone again. Don’t, don’t go. Don’t leave me here alone. I only spare a second to look behind myself, to look behind us, at the corner that we leave behind. It is covered in ice growing out from the crack. All of it now, already completely frozen. The cables crackle and spark, as the wetness comes into contact with them, but it grows further outward nonetheless. It pursues. It encroaches. I run. I run.

I see it, Piotr. I feel it. It’s coming.

I clench her tighter and I run.

Something wet is behind us, slapping against the stones. Can you hear it too?