‧₊˚✧ Chapter 1 ✧˚₊‧
⊹ ₊⋆ ☁︎ ⋆⁺₊⋆₊⋆☁︎ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☀︎ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☁︎⋆⁺₊⋆⁺₊⋆ ☁︎ ⋆₊ ⊹
The road thinned into something that barely deserved the name.
Noah Mercer walked the last stretch alone, his footsteps crunching against cracked stone and scattered gravel as the landscape slowly abandoned any sign of life. The wind should have been present here—open space, empty land—but there was only a strange stillness, like the air itself had grown tired of moving through this place.
Ahead of him, the facility finally came into view.
It rose from the ground like something forgotten rather than built, a massive industrial structure swallowed by rust, silence, and time. Broken fencing leaned outward in uneven angles, as if it had tried and failed to keep something contained. Faded warning signs clung to bent metal posts, their words long erased by weather and neglect.
Noah stopped.
Rumours had always surrounded this place. People in nearby towns spoke about it in half sentences, like saying too much might draw attention.
No one who goes in comes back out.
Sometimes you hear noises at night.
The place is still active... somehow.
Noah didn’t believe in rumours.
Not really.
But he also didn’t come here expecting nothing.
Noah - “This is it,” he muttered.
His father’s facility.
The place where everything ended.
Or began.
He looked up at the structure.
As a child, it had been different.
Back then, it had been impressive.
Clean corridors. Bright lights. People moving with purpose. His father walking ahead of him like someone important, someone who mattered. Noah remembered thinking the place was alive.
He remembered thinking his father was saving people.
Now that memory felt distant, almost embarrassing.
Because Noah knew better now.
Something had happened here.
Something no one would explain properly.
Most of the staff were dead.
His father was dead too.
That was the only confirmed part.
Everything else was silence.
And Cassian...
Noah hesitated at the thought.
His older brother.
The one person he barely remembered, and somehow couldn’t forget.
He didn’t know if Cassian had survived the incident. He didn’t even know what ‘survived’ meant in a place like this.
That was why he came.
Not for closure.
Not for curiosity.
For answers.
The gate groaned as Noah pushed through what remained of it.
It gave way too easily, swinging inward like it had been waiting for him.
Inside, the facility courtyard stretched out in lifeless stillness. Broken concrete. Overgrown cracks. Fallen signage half-buried in debris.
No movement.
No sound.
No life.
Noah walked forward slowly.
Every step felt louder than it should have been.
The main entrance loomed ahead.
The doors were partially open.
Not forced open.
Not broken.
Just... left that way.
Like someone had walked out once and never bothered to close them behind them again.
Noah stepped inside.
The interior swallowed him immediately.
Light faded behind him as the building closed around his presence. Dust hung in the air, drifting lazily through weak beams of light coming from cracked windows high above.
Everything was still.
But not untouched.
Furniture lay overturned. Metal carts were knocked sideways. Papers and folders were scattered across the floor, soaked in old stains that no longer had clear colour.
Some of them looked like rust.
Some of them looked too dark to be rust.
Noah didn’t stop walking.
He told himself not to think about it too much.
A broken security desk sat near the entrance, its monitors cracked and dead. Above it, a faded sign still clung to the wall:
AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY
Noah almost laughed at that.
Almost.
He moved deeper into the facility.
The further he went, the more the building began to feel wrong in a different way. Not just abandoned—butdisturbed.Like something had happened here that the walls still remembered even if no one else did.
He passed a hallway where the floor had collapsed inward, revealing a lower level through twisted metal and broken concrete. Another corridor showed scratches along the walls—deep, irregular marks that didn’t look like tools.
Or time.
He stopped for the first time.
Noah - “...What happened here?”
His voice sounded too loud.
Too alive.
He kept moving.
The upper floors were a ruin of what they once were.
Offices lined with shattered glass.
Research rooms stripped of anything useful.
Medical equipment left behind like it had been abandoned mid-use.
Noah looked into one room where chairs were still arranged around a table, as if people had simply stood up one day and never returned.
But something about the destruction wasn’t consistent.
Some areas looked decayed over time.
Others looked... torn apart.
Deliberate.
Like someone had been searching for something.
Or trying to erase it.
Noah frowned.
That didn’t make sense.
Nothing here made sense.
And yet—
Pieces of memory started to surface.
Not clear ones.
Fragments.
A long hallway.
A door he was never allowed to touch.
A hand—guiding him away from a corridor while voices continued behind a sealed door.
Cassian’s voice, calm but firm.
“Not there.”
Noah blinked.
The memory disappeared again.
He kept walking.
Then stopped.
A faint pressure settled in his chest.
His thoughts drifted without permission.
His mother.
He hadn’t meant to think of her.
But the memory came anyway.
She had died when he was born.
That was the only thing people ever said about it.
Not how.
Not why.
Just that she didn’t survive.
Noah swallowed and looked away.
That wasn’t why he was here.
He pushed the thought down.
Hard.
There was something missing in this place.
Not objects.
Not people.
Something more deliberate.
A section of the building felthidden—not destroyed, not abandoned, but intentionally separated from everything else.
Noah stopped again, scanning the corridor.
Then he remembered.
There was always a place he wasn’t allowed to go.
A section his father never explained.
A place Cassian always seemed to redirect him away from without making it obvious.
Noah turned slowly.
He tried to picture it.
The layout.
The paths.
The memory of walking here as a child.
And then—
He saw it.
A seam in the wall.
Too clean compared to everything around it.
A structure that didn’t belong to the decay of the rest of the facility.
A concealed access point.
Noah stepped closer.
His heart beat a little faster.
He reached out.
Paused.
For the first time since arriving, doubt settled in.
If he opened this—
There was no going back to ignorance.
Only answers.
Or something worse.
He exhaled slowly.
Noah - “...Cassian,” he whispered, almost without realising it.
Then he pressed forward.
The hidden entrance slid open with a reluctant mechanical groan.
Cold air spilled out from below.
Not just cold—
Old.
Like the building had been breathing it alone for years.
Darkness stretched downward beyond the threshold.
No visible end.
No sound.
No return.
Noah stood at the edge for a moment longer.
Then he stepped forward.
He didn’t look back.
He just kept going down.
As if following a path he had spent his entire life trying not to remember.
⊹ ₊⋆ ☁︎ ⋆⁺₊⋆₊⋆☁︎ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☀︎ ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☁︎⋆⁺₊⋆⁺₊⋆ ☁︎ ⋆₊ ⊹
