Thud. The final, echoing scrape of stone grinding against stone sealed the passage behind me. The relative brightness of the previous chamber vanished, plunging the narrow, sloping corridor into near-total darkness. My shielded lantern cast a weak, dancing beam ahead, carving my elongated shadow onto walls that seemed to drink the light. The only other illumination was a faint, rhythmic blue pulse bleeding from somewhere deeper within.

  The whispering voice – “…forever…” – evaporated as suddenly as it had manifested, leaving a silence so profound it felt like a physical weight. Except it wasn’t truly silent. A low-frequency hum vibrated through the smooth, dark material of the walls and floor, a pressure against my eardrums, a thrumming deep in my bones that set my teeth on edge.

  Inside me, The Hunger’s reaction remained unsettling, but it had shifted. The raw, primal terror it felt near the construct was still a cold knot in my gut, but the frantic edge was gone. Now, it felt… watchful. Tense. Like a predator gone utterly still, assessing something deeply unnatural. It wasn’t the scent of prey or the challenge of a rival. This energy, this place… it felt wrong on a fundamental level The Hunger couldn’t categorize, only fear. Whatever lay ahead wasn’t just dangerous in a way I understood; it felt alien to the very concept of life and consumption.

  I pushed the internal unease aside, focusing on the immediate. The passage was maybe ten feet wide, the ceiling just high enough to walk comfortably. The walls, floor, and ceiling were crafted from that same seamless, dark, non-reflective material I’d seen on the construct – cool, slightly slick to the touch. Intricate geometric patterns were etched into the surfaces, glowing faintly with the pulsing blue light, like dormant veins waiting for a surge.

  My lantern beam found the figure at the end of the passage, guarding the threshold to the next chamber. The ancient corpse. Seated on a simple stone dais, a macabre greeter. Or a stark warning.

  I approached cautiously, sword held low, lantern light playing over the desiccated remains. Gods, it was old. Impossibly old. The remnants of its clothing were stiff, brittle, practically fused to the mummified skin beneath – some kind of unfamiliar fabric, embroidered with faded threads in patterns mirroring the geometry on the walls. The figure itself was skeletal, skin like cracked, dark leather stretched taut over bone. Its head was tilted slightly, empty sockets staring blankly towards the passage entrance, towards me. Accusation? Warning? Impossible to tell. Just… stillness.

  In its right hand, skeletal fingers clamped tight, was the crystal orb I’d glimpsed. Roughly the size of a human heart, multifaceted, made of a cloudy, greyish crystal. It pulsed faintly, dimly, in perfect time with the blue light emanating from the chamber beyond. Had the whispering come from this? Or the orb? Or was the place itself just messing with my head?

  A fleeting, powerful urge surfaced – reach out, touch the orb. See what it was. But I recoiled instinctively. Every nerve, amplified by The Hunger’s low thrum of alien fear, screamed danger. Not the danger of a trapdoor or a hidden blade, but the danger of touching something fundamentally unstable, like grabbing exposed lightning. Best left alone.

  Taking a deep breath, tasting ozone thick in the air, I stepped past the silent sentinel and into the chamber beyond.

  It was perfectly circular, perhaps forty feet across. The ceiling domed high overhead, maybe thirty feet at its apex, entirely covered in the same intricate, glowing blue patterns as the passage walls. The low, resonant hum was much stronger here, a physical vibration that made my teeth buzz. The static charge in the air was intense; I could feel it crackling against my exposed skin, tugging at the fine hairs on my arms.

  And in the exact center, floating maybe five feet off the floor, was the source.

  It stole my breath. And turned my stomach. A massive crystalline structure, easily six feet tall and nearly as wide. Not a single solid piece, but a complex lattice of dozens, maybe hundreds, of interlocking facets and sharp angles. It glowed intensely from within with that same pulsing blue light, rotating almost imperceptibly, casting shifting, hypnotic patterns across the chamber. This was it. The heart of whatever this place was. The source of the light, the hum, the static, the ozone… and, I suspected, the draining presence I’d felt.

  My eyes dropped from the mesmerizing, terrifying crystal to the floor beneath it.

  Bile rose in my throat.

  The floor wasn’t empty stone. It was littered with husks. Desiccated bodies, dozens of them, scattered like fallen leaves. Some were ancient, clad in the same rotted finery as the figure guarding the passage – whoever built this place, maybe? Others were horribly recognizable as local wildlife from the Fringe – the massive, shriveled carcass of a cave bear, its fur stiff and grey; the leathery, outstretched wings of giant bats, now brittle as old parchment.

  And then… the guards. Flicker’s missing caravan patrol. Three of them. Clustered together near the edge of the chamber, not far from where I stood. Slumped against each other as if for comfort in their final moments. Faces frozen in slack-jawed horror and utter exhaustion. Skin like drawn parchment, uniforms hanging loose. Drained. Utterly consumed by the silent, passive hunger of this place.

  The air was thick not just with ozone, but with the profound, horrifying stillness of consumed life. This wasn’t violence as I knew it. This was slow, silent erasure.

  Forcing my gaze away from the gruesome tableau, I studied the chamber again, using my lantern to pierce the ambient blue glow. The geometric patterns covering the walls… they weren’t just decoration. Thin channels, like grooves or conduits, linked various points and junctions, all seemingly converging towards, or emanating from, the central floating crystal. Some sections sparked erratically, tiny blue arcs jumping across gaps or damaged-looking sections. Okay, so energy flows through these paths, and some paths are broken. Basic observation.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  The crystal itself… as it slowly rotated, I could see hairline fractures spiderwebbing across some facets. Faint wisps of the blue energy leaked from these cracks, dissipating like cold steam. It’s damaged.

  My mind raced, trying to piece together what I was seeing through the lens of survival. This wasn’t a tomb, not in the usual sense. The structure, the patterns, the central object… it felt like… a mechanism. Vast, ancient, and clearly malfunctioning. The sparking conduits, the fractured crystal, the indiscriminate draining of any life that wandered too close… this couldn’t be its intended function. This felt like failure. Catastrophic failure. The constructs outside? Maybe automated caretakers or guards, following corrupted orders, trying to manage a broken system by simply eliminating anything that didn’t belong? It was a terrifying guess, but it fit the pieces I had.

  As I stood there, the crystal pulsed again. A stronger wave of blue light washed through the chamber. I felt it instantly – that same hideous lethargy, a gentle but insistent pull on my own vitality. It was stronger here, closer to the source. Much stronger. Not aggressive like the construct’s beam. It was passive, pervasive. Like standing near a forge draining heat, except this drained life.

  The guards hadn’t been attacked by a monster. They had likely just… lingered too long. Drawn in by curiosity or duty, weakened gradually by this invisible leeching field, until they couldn’t muster the strength to leave. Collapsing right here, becoming just more husks feeding whatever broken process was happening. A slow, quiet horror.

  The Hunger writhed within me. Its fear was a constant, cold pressure, but its nature felt increasingly alien. It wasn’t the fear of being eaten or destroyed. Through the bond, I felt… a revulsion? It perceived the blue energy from the crystal, but not as life force, not as something consumable or desirable like the fading warmth of the Lurker or the vibrant energy of living things.

  This energy felt… static. Empty. Like potential without warmth, without the thrum of actual life. It felt like stillness. Like the concept of entropy given form. It didn’t feed the way The Hunger understood feeding – a dynamic act of consumption, assimilation, conversion. This energy simply… erased. Reduced life to inert components, absorbing the potential, leaving behind emptiness.

  It was the antithesis of The Hunger’s nature – all movement, consumption, relentless need. This crystal represented stillness, silence, the void where hunger itself ceased to matter because there was nothing left to consume. The Hunger feared it not as a predator, but as an opposing, negating principle. A terrifying concept for an entity defined solely by its drive.

  This alien perspective, bleeding through the fear, offered a crucial insight for me. The crystal wasn’t alive. It wasn’t a creature. It was… a thing. A device. A power source? Something technical, gone wrong, leaking dangerous energy. Deadly, yes. But maybe understandable on a purely mechanical level?

  If it was a machine, maybe there was an off switch. Or a control panel. My eyes flicked back towards the passage entrance, towards the ancient attendant slumped on its dais. Had it been operating this thing when it failed?

  Moving carefully, skirting the scattered husks, I returned to the passage entrance. Kneeling beside the ancient corpse, keeping a wary distance from the faintly pulsing orb in its right hand, I examined it more closely with my lantern.

  And I saw it. Something clutched tightly in its other hand, the left one, resting against its leg. A small, metallic cylinder, maybe six inches long, made of the same dark material as the walls, tarnished but intact. Skeletal fingers were wrapped around it possessively.

  Prying the fingers open took more force than I expected, joints cracking dryly. The cylinder fell into my palm. Cool to the touch. One end seemed designed to twist. Holding my breath, I turned it. Smoothly, silently, it clicked open.

  Inside, wound tightly, was a scroll. Not parchment, not paper. Thin, flexible metallic foil, silvery and strangely resilient. Covered in inscriptions – the same complex, geometric symbols etched into the walls. Utterly indecipherable. Useless.

  But then, below the dense blocks of alien script, there were diagrams. Clear, precise line drawings. Thank the gods for pictures.

  One showed this chamber – the circular shape, the floating crystal, the conduits in the walls. Simple enough.

  Another showed smaller, fist-sized crystals – different from the orb the attendant held – being inserted into specific points along the conduits on the chamber walls. Arrows indicated something flowing from these smaller crystals towards the main one. Okay, small things feed the big thing? Or maybe… control it?

  A final, stark diagram showed the same setup, but one of the smaller crystals was depicted shattering. Energy lines sketched around it looked chaotic, erratic. The main crystal in the drawing looked brighter, angrier. Broken small crystal makes big crystal go bad.

  This was it. The closest thing to an answer I was going to get. This… machine… relied on these smaller crystals. Regulators, maybe? And one had failed, causing this whole mess. The draining field, the instability. The solution, theoretically, was to replace or fix the broken regulator.

  Easier said than done without a spare ancient alien crystal. But maybe… removing the shattered bits? Disrupting the damaged connection point? It was a long shot, founded on guesswork and crude drawings, but it was the only lead I had.

  Armed with this fragile hypothesis and the cryptic diagrams, I tucked the cylinder safely away and scanned the circular chamber walls again. Looking for those insertion points, the nodes. The diagrams showed several, placed high up, near the ceiling.

  My eyes traced the glowing conduits upwards. There. Directly above the floating main crystal, near the apex of the dome, was a recessed housing built into the wall, matching the diagram. And inside it… glittering fragments. Shards of broken crystal catching the pulsing blue light. The failed regulator. My guess seemed right.

  As I focused on the damaged node high above, the energy leaking from the main crystal seemed to pulse more violently. Thin tendrils of blue energy, like ghostly snakes, writhed outwards from the central mass, seeming drawn towards the broken node. The humming deepened, taking on an unstable, discordant edge.

  Then, something below the crystal moved.

  My head snapped down. One of the desiccated corpses. One of Flicker’s guards. His head, attached by taut, dry tendons, slowly lifted. It twitched. Empty eye sockets, dark pits in a parchment face, fixed unerringly on me.

  Thin, shimmering tendrils of the same blue energy snaked downwards from the main crystal, connecting to the husk’s back and limbs like grotesque marionette strings. The corpse shuddered.

  A low groan echoed through the chamber – a horrible, dry, rattling sound scraped from an impossibly desiccated throat.

  Slowly, jerkily, pulled by the energy strings, the dead guard began to push itself upright, limbs moving with the unnatural, shambling gait of something animated by a force utterly alien to life.

  And it started walking towards me.