Dark Earth: Nocturne (I)

CHAPTER 8: Catacombs

It took what felt like hours for him to finally move. When he turned around upon exiting the cell-like chamber, Layne's environment had altered itself in absolute silence. No longer was there a room behind him, but rather a simple cobblestone wall displaying a small painting of the same room. The longer he gazed at this image, the more unsettled Layne became; he forced himself to look away and keep moving.
The musty scented, mold-caked cobblestone hallway was labyrinthine and carried on in multiple directions, but that was expected.

He reflected on his predicament once more.

Layne had never once been imprisoned before this point in time; the closest he'd been to such an incident was during the winter arbor of last year, when he was accused of stealing food by some old hag. He was lucky to have gotten off with just a scolding, even if he'd never actually stolen anything; the poor were always mistrusted by everyone else, no matter what they did. No matter where he went, there was rarely any form of sympathy, let alone empathy.
        That included the scenario he was currently entrapped by: these halls stretched for miles in every direction, and the further he walked, the darker, filthier, and more pungent they became. It was too late for any second thoughts, not that he had any; just like every story had an ending, every maze had an exit. As with the fishers and their swamp of bile, he didn't need to find a way out, —he only needed to think of one.

Perhaps, that was yet another gift which he possessed.

        Indeed it was.

        Long before he'd hunted even his first rabbit, Layne was jumping across Maire's close-quarter rooftops, running around street corners, plundering old alleyways, and scrambling through sewer passages in search of the unknown; he formed a keen sense of direction from these early ventures. His dreams, nightmares included, were always escapable. This should be no different.

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         The tunnel-like passage grew tighter the further Layne went, —to the point where he had to crouch just to move at all. Eventually, after minutes of trudging through dust-coated darkness, it opened into three separate hallways, barred off on either side. The winding stone path which he traveled began to eat away at his nerves; there was something else down here with him. From his peripheral vision, he saw a pair of abnormally tall, spindly and featureless shadows stride down the left hallway; they quietly hissed to one another in a strange, archaic language as they passed him by.

Layne's blood froze solid; he recognized these entities. The sense of fear they emitted permeated his soul and left him in a psychic chokehold.

Shades: Shadow melding, miasmic servants of the darkness that tormented and sucked the life out of their victims, —leaving nothing behind. Soul fishers were illusionary, —demons of the mind at best—, but these beings were real. Just like the phantom.

He pivoted halfway, looking in either direction to be certain of where they'd came from. The shades in the left hall mirrored him.

        They stopped in sync with Layne's movements, melted through the hallway bars like a gaseous mist before pooling on the floor, and promptly rose up to reassume their gaunt, stick-thin humanoid forms.

It was impossible not to make eye contact; though faceless, he felt them leer at him psychically, spreading their edgy influence in his direction. For some inexplicable reason, their presence felt like smaller extensions of Cauldrith's; they must have come from that realm of pulsating villi just as Layne did. But, as he knew, these weren't just illusions.
No, —they were standing before him, their anorexic, black-that-made-the-shadows-gray forms were really there, —motionless and staring at him.