Darkness greeted them with a cold frigid atmosphere as they descended the diagonal staircase that seemed to lead into an abyssal void. Their footsteps echoed against the ancient slabs and it seemed to awaken the slumbering vault, it felt like they were the first one down here in ages.

  “I am guessing we should have brought a source of light,” Al Sahim muttered under his breath and his voice eerily reverberated multiple times.

  “Best to keep ourselves hidden in case of any surprises,” Marius replied in a rather relaxed tone. The Marshal wasn't bothered by anything.

  The stairway led them to the entrance of a narrow hallway, only large enough to allow two people to walk side by side. The walls of the corridor were made from an obsidian mineral that neither of them recognized and three large metal pipes ran alongside the walls.

  “Jalin, with me,” Dale ordered. “Reece, fall in the middle with his Brilliance and Marius, Sir! Please guard our rear with Shalliah!” he spoke in a hushed tone. “Please remember, we are only here to scout, if we do discover anything, we move away silently. Our priority is to get back home with information.”

  “Aye!” they all replied in unison and then fell into formation.

  Reece was a bit insulted by the formation, he and Al Sahim had been tagged the weakest of the group. He sighed, everyone who read his file always felt the same way. His abilities had been listed under the non-combative ones and been tagged strictly for sensory purposes.

  In fact, he knew that was the reason why he was brought along. Dale didn't have much trust in thaumaturges but seeing him use his abilities earlier probably changed his mind. They entered into the hallway and the air around them seemed to get a bit warmer.

  There was nothing to be seen for at least a hundred meters aside from the blackness of the corridor. Reece had switched from using his eyes to his empathic vision. All he saw were different colors of swirling and lingering emotions but it allowed him to outline the hallway in a clearer way.

  Shalliah also seemed to be using a different sensory ability, among the three of them, she was the most versatile. Her abilities allowed her to control different aspects of nature and it made her into a mix between a beast tamer and an apothecary. Patelon would be the most useless here, as his abilities were more straightforward and probably the most useful for combat purposes. He was an elemental with the ability to manipulate water.

  “I simply do not like the silence in here,” Al Sahim said after a while, the man has been shaken ever since the appearance of the vault. “Can we please keep speaking, so I at least know I haven't wandered into the realm of Other, may her cold embrace guide us all on our last days,” he kissed his index finger after speaking.

  Other was the goddess of death and decay, one of the most revered in the kingdom and even outside it. “Oh, the ferryman rows,” Shalliah’s voice pierced the darkness in a low tone. “through rivers of deeds, sown!” she sang softly, that they could barely hear her themselves but they could hear enough to follow the tune in their head.

  The song was a famous one, composed by Reece’s other-mother, Lorna. It was one of her more popular songs and people seemed to love this particular one because it spoke of death in a sympathetic manner. The song hummed through the area and it seemed to calm everyone's emotions, including Al Sahim’s.

  The song took Reece back to simpler times, when his other-mother would sing this while he painted a portrait of her. Half of the time, he’d mess up a stroke and they would have to start over the second day and she would sing a different song, patiently waiting for him to get it right.

  He remembered her elation when he did paint the perfect portrait. Although she couldn't tell why that particular one was perfect she’d been happy for him either way. Erous had only grunted and muttered something about marrying lesser than his standards. Reece was so lost in the thoughts that he didn't notice he was smiling, however an emotional signature slapped him back to reality.

  He frowned, stopping in his tracks, this made everyone pause. “What?” Al Sahim asked in a shaky tone.

  “I feel something,” he muttered and then closed his eyes. What bothered him most was that he wasn't supposed to be able to feel any foreign emotions at the moment because he was literally only using his eyes to recognize patterns so only really intense emotions could pass through to him.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  He let in the symphony, entering into a cogitative state by grinding his teeth. He reached for the field of emotion around him and it swirled like a turbulent river. He remembered when he first tried using this ability, he’d spent two days unable to feel anything but an intense longing for sweet things.

  Drowning in his own emotional turbulence could turn him to a soulless husk if he wasn't careful. However, he was very adept at using this ability now, he descended into the river and willed its form to change and it bent to his will. Instead of a mass of restless currents, the ethereal energy coalesced , each emotion aligning and thinning out to form strings.

  If he could be observed through the physical eyes, he would look like a man standing with millions of strings dancing around him. Reece’s mind couldn't encompass all the variable emotions yet, so some strings were fainter than the others. He kept all the strings around him, making sure that they didn't interact with their environment without proper supervision.

  He stretched the tendrils outwards, threading them through the entire corridor as they carried ripples of emotion back to him. Reece stiffened, he couldn't see these emotions earlier because they seemed to be a lot older, as recent emotions had flooded the area. He could sense the pain, the suffering and the icy feeling of hopelessness.

  Something was wrong about this place, something was very wrong. “Follow me!” Reece ordered as one of his emotional strings latched on to the very recent emotions of an anxious person.

  In his mind, Reece was making preliminary guesses about the situation. He could confirm one thing though. Lots of people had traversed this area a lot recently. The empathic signatures were too prominent to be more than three days apart.

  He moved with a quickened pace and soon enough they arrived at a room with a locked metal door. Hushed voices escaped from behind it and Reece could easily sense multiple people on the other side. They all seem to be in a cogitative state, as their emotions were balanced out.

  He used his emotional string to scout the area and Dale signalled to the others to halt. He counted nine men and one woman, then his emotional string hit something attached to a wall and he reeled back in shock. He withdrew everything, as blood dripped from his nose and he stiffened a groan, before falling to the ground.

  Jalin was the nearest to him and the soldier rushed forward to help him up, his feeling of concern swarming over Reece whose state of mind had been disturbed. He held his head in pain as he held back from screaming, he gritted his teeth and then felt himself enter a plain state of mind once more.

  Shalliah was beside him by the time he opened his eyes and he could feel her touch relieving him of pain. “We need to leave!” he whispered to them.

  What he felt wasn't something they were equipped to tackle at the moment, whatever was going on behind that metal door, it would be best left for professionals to handle.

  “Why?” Dale asked in a low tone, as they quietly stepped away from the door.

  “I will expla…” the sentence was caught in his throat as a massive explosion shook the ceiling, a huge mass of concrete detached itself from the wall right on top of Reece, Shalliah and Jalin.

  He reacted swiftly, pushing both of them against the metal door, ready to bear the weight of the rock, even though it was obvious he would be crushed to death, but the door opened simultaneously and he fell right through the door with the other two. The large rock crashed into pieces, just missing his leg. He glanced at it with a sigh of relief, but his celebration was short-lived. He felt himself being pulled into the room forcefully and then watched as the door slammed shut in front of him. The resounding bang echoed throughout the entire tunnel.

  Reece sprang up immediately, his instincts kicking in. He entered back into the state of cogitation as the other two also got up behind him.

  There were ten people in the room as he’d sensed earlier, all dabbed in red cloaks, aside from the woman who was wearing absolutely nothing.

  She was naked, her fair skin laid bare in front of the world as she stood underneath a pipe that was leaking burning oil. The nine men knelt in front of her, all raising their hands while chanting in the édé tongue. Reece wasn't fluent in the language, but he could pick up some words.

  Their statements seem to be focused on something opening. Several candles surrounded the group, all of them burning in blue incandescent flames. The room itself was littered with several oil lamps, hanging from the roof.

  Reece's gaze turned to a grimace as he laid eyes on what was attached to the wall. He gritted his teeth, biting back his nausea. He’d felt this thing earlier and he’d almost drowned himself in emotional turbulence.

  There was a large cluster of decaying flesh attached to the wall in the shape of a human being writhing indefinitely, like it was made of worms. Once in a while, yellowish pus will pop from the wall, dripping to the ground while releasing a rather foul stench that Reece had never smelled before. Its entire gut was dangling outside its stomach at what would have been its thighs. The intestine pulsed and writhed into each other, seemingly digesting something.

  This mass of writhing flesh seemed to have been split down the middle and a large thin veil of an embryo sac pulsing as if it would explode anytime and the veins underneath it moved like a mass of tape worms. There appeared to be a thousand tiny hands pushing against the embryo and soft wails of agony escaped through it from time to time. A certain brown liquid dripped from the very surface of the embryo and the flesh itself produced spore filled tongues that licked it off occasionally.

  Then from the head of this horror was a mouth dripping black liquid and wailing endlessly, in different voices at the same time. So the wail sounded like a terrible cacophony of hymns that was not meant for this world.

  Several flesh pipes were plugged to it and they seemed to be pumping something into the body. The carrion mass itself was wrong, not in the way such things were supposed to be but in a more fundamental way. A feeling of evil and vileness escaped from it and it was like it was not completely made for this existence. In fact, it appeared incomplete, like parts of it that were missing. It felt like a scar upon the world… like an open wound.

  The naked lady walked slowly towards Reece, her footsteps alluring and tempting. He found himself captivated by her movements and how her waist swung freely in the open space. His eyes ran along as hot oil ran along her chest through the midriff between her succulent breasts down to her stomach. His heart began to burn with an intense desire, causing him to forget all about the grotesquerie in the room.

  This made the thaumaturge frown, he realized, he shouldn't be feeling like this after he’d just witnessed such a visceral scene. He snapped his mind to focus, and even in his plain minded state, it was hard for him to not think about how beautiful the woman was. She was breathtaking, tall and elegant, like everything he had been searching for in this world.

  His heart pounded and his brain seized all thoughts and he descended into a realm of imagination and wonder. She reached him and smiled. “We have been waiting for you,” she said with the most beautiful voice he’s ever heard. “My gold blooded prince!” She smiled and traced his face with her finger, running it down to his chest. “How your heart beats for me.”

  Shalliah and Jalin were frozen in their boots behind him, unable to move. The lady then proceeded to rip Reece’s shirt open.