A thick stench of rotten, damp wood filled the air. The darkness extended from unseen areas, covering the room in a dense shadow.
The sound of mechanical cogs turning in the background, alongside the eerie punching of metal on metal rang into his ears like loud drums.
Dim yellow lanternlight illuminated a cramped workshop filled with uneven wooden tables and piles of strange cube-shaped objects covered in engraved markings. Several exhausted people sat nearby assembling them in silence, their hands moving mechanically. Dark circles were present under their eyes, and for a moment, as Roy got up to take a good look at them, relief washed over him.
People.
His mouth opened to call out to them.
But then he stopped.
And he really looked at them.
His breath slowed.
They looked... wrong. Their eyes twitched unnaturally inside their sockets, bloodshot and unfocused like those of sleepless animals trapped in cages for too long. Their skin had taken on strange shades of red and brown, twisting inward around parts of their faces in warped spirals, as though flesh itself had begun circling into some unseen drain.
And they were smiling.
Every single one of them.
Their mouths simply hung open in wide sickening grins that stretched far too deeply into their cheeks. Uneven rows of teeth too many to count pressed against one another inside wet gums.
One of the workers quietly assembled cubes while half the skin along the side of his face peeled downward in loose strips, exposing glistening red muscle beneath. Blood dripped steadily from his jaw onto the wooden table below.
Roy looked around. His motorcycle was gone. He still had his clothes on and there was no visible exit to this place. Only the room itself extended like a hallway in one direction, but the darkness made it hard to judge how far.
Just then, while he was thinking on his next course of action, he heard it.
A hoarse, old voice that felt like it was straining to get words out despite pain.
"Slacking on the job!?"
He flinched as he heard it, and then came the footsteps barreling out of the darkness accompanying a massive body of red skin and lanky limbs.
It was a man.
His face was broad and distorted, skin sagging unevenly around his mouth like melted wax. Blue paint covered his face in strange archaic symbols that Roy recognized from old books about the gods. One cloudy eye stared lazily downward while the other twitched erratically inside its socket. In one hand he carried a massive curved blade, its edge chipped and darkened from repeated use.
His belly protruded out like a pot and below it he was naked. His penis hung out, dangling as he walked closer and closer on his bare feet. Many parts of his chest and thighs were pierced with large wooden sticks. And finally, at his back were two curved hooks, upon which the skin of his back was cut open and stretched taut, like the olden methods of torture - a blood eagle.
"What do you think you're doing?! Did I tell you to rest?!" The strained voice of the man came out with a tiring hoarseness.
"Wait..." Roy backed away slowly. The man was not tall, but he gave the impression that he knew well of how to use the curved blade at his hand.
"Wait, I don't know what this place is... please, I just want to go home. I was heading through a forest and then-"
"Shut up!" The man barked angrily. "You don't need to know anything! You're just a stupid fucking human after all! Now back to work!!"
Seeing the man screaming at the top of his lungs and the curved blade at his hand, Roy thought better than to anger him further. With hesitant steps, he shrunk his body to make himself smaller and moved towards one of the benches.
On the bench were hundreds of parts. As he took a hold of them, his fingers seemed to understand faster than his mind did. In just a few minutes, the cube was done.
The metal was uncomfortably warm now and the symbol on it, a chaotic sprawl of lines converging in on each other - representing the Old God Vinushka became terrifyingly familiar.
Roy's heart dropped into his stomach.
The man and the woman who took him here, the mutilated man who wanted him to assemble cubes which had the symbol of an Old God...
It all practically screamed a big blood magic ritual, of which he was to be a part of.
The man watched him for some time before seemingly losing interest in him and scuttling away into the darkness where he came from.
But Roy felt all the more unnerved.
He was no stranger to stranger to olden ways, when blood magic rites and crucification was commonplace and there were even talks of there being horrific monsters.
As successful as software engineering was in the current age where computers were a thing, Roy had failed to find a lasting job because of his condition and the current war going on. He had joined the library because of that, and there he did nothing more than read.
He had read all about them in the library. More than he cared to admit.
But he was never a believer.
After all, in the age of modern weaponry, who would care to believe in such archaic concepts such as magic and monsters?
But now... oh, he was a believer alright.
Roy heaved a deep sigh and calmed himself down. His breathing steadied little by little, though his heart still felt like it would leap out of his chest.
"Fuck..." He muttered a curse and then began to look around, his fingers working, trying to assemble another cube in case the man came to check again.
For some odd reason, Roy felt a name drift into his head for the man.
The Janitor. That felt oddly apt, but he had no idea where the name had sprung into his head from.
His eyes drifted toward the darkness where the janitor had disappeared. The distant sound of turning cogs continued echoing through the structure like the heartbeat of some gigantic unseen machine.
The cube clicked together in his hands.
And then—
Something shifted at the edge of his vision.
Roy froze.
At the far end of the hallway, standing just beyond the reach of the lanternlight, was a girl.
She looked about 20, with short brown hair and wore a pink dress. And unlike the othere, she looked normal.
Instantly, a glimmer of hope began to rise in Roy's chest, accentuated only by the fact that the girl, upon noticing him, motioned at him to follow.
As the worker's continued to assemble cubes amid the constant scream of cogs in the background with giant grins etched onto their faces, the girl ran farther into the dark, disappearing from view.
Roy immediately rose from the bench and the chair scraped loudly against the floor.
Several workers twitched at the noise.
One of them began giggling softly through broken teeth.
Roy ignored them.
He quickly stepped away from the workstation and hurried toward the hallway.
Three seconds.
That was all it took before the janitor's voice thundered from the darkness.
"Where do you think you're going!?" The janitor dashed out from the other end of the hall, the blade in his hand raised high and a crazed look on his face.
"Wait!" Roy screamed like a little girl and narrowly dodged an overhead swing. Stabalizing himself, he picked up the wooden chair and intercepted another swing.
Whoosh!
And then realized that he was now holding two pieces of the previously intact chair.
"Bloody hell." His voice came put surprisingly meek.
The janitor swung again and Roy ducked under it, the blade passing right by his hair with the sound of ripping air. Adrenaline coursed through his blood and his hands began to shake. Without waiting, as the janitor's guard was done, he dove right in and buried his fist into his chest.
Bam!
What met him was not the response of the man falling backwards as he was expecting. The janitor's chest felt like it was sculpted out of stone, with muscles like steel and a thickened skin which seemed to absorb all impact. He stumbled back before stabalizing and looked at him with a murderous gaze.
The next few moments passed by in a flash. Honestly, Roy didn't even understand half of what happened. How his body moved like that and how he even gained the courage to fight against this crazed man was beyond him.
The janitor swung the blade in large arcs and he dodged them, valuting himself over the bench and throwing a metal cube at his head.
Clang!
The sound of ringing metal, but Roy was already running halfway down the hall.
The surrounding people did not even look up, as if completely dissociated from the rest of the world. The janitor gave a sickening scream and his footsteps thundered behind him, merging with the sound of cogs in the background. Roy had never run as fast as he did.
He was honestly surprised his feeble strength could make him run that fast.
The sound of the janitor's footsteps disappeared behind him and not even a second after, his screams died down too.
But Roy had no desire to stop running. He came by a turn, at the corner of which was a giant contraption which he couldn't understand at a glance.
After going through more turns and seeing more strange machinery, he came across another large room.
This one was well lit than the others, and inside it were mountains of metal.
Cubes upon cubes formed large monoliths, each one glowing with a symbol of a separate old god, though Roy predominantly observed Vinushka's.
Ahead, the wall broke off to lead into pure darkness.
Roy swallowed and looked back. The janitor was nowhere to be seen yet but he would be here any moment now...
Steeling his nerves, Roy looked ahead, hoping that he wasn't getting himself into a worse off situation.
He took a deep breath, and walked ahead and into the darkness.
The sound of his footsteps soon disappeared into the surroundings and for a moment, Roy felt like he was standing in complete nothingness.
And then it happened.
Buzz-
It started as a faint buzzing at his temples. The blood rushed to his head and his nose started to bleed. Monolithic figures dressed in dark robes rose around him. Gigantic figure sitting on equally gigantic chairs surroundings gigantic tables.
All of them had strange anatomies, some simply muscle without skin, others carved out of gold and some sofas profoundly beautiful that they felt more like porcelain dolls.
They sat still on their seats, not moving like statues frozen in time.
Roy felt his head spinning and vomit bulged into his oesophagus.
What is this... His thoughts came out muddled. Slowly, his feet moved subconsciously.
He didn't know which direction to move towards, nor did he understand where he was or what was happening.
He just moved ahead.
The buzzing intensified.
Roy nearly collapsed as another violent pulse slammed through his skull.
It felt as though invisible hooks had been driven behind his eyes and were now slowly pulling outward. Blood dripped steadily from his nose, splashing across the black stone beneath his feet in thin crimson trails.
The figures around him remained seated.
Watching.
Or perhaps not watching.
Roy genuinely could not tell.
The room—if it could even be called a room—was impossibly vast. The darkness above stretched infinitely upward while enormous pillars vanished into unseen heights. Strange blue flames burned inside massive braziers, casting dim light across the colossal seated beings.
The pressure inside his skull worsened with every movement deeper into the chamber. Thoughts that did not belong to him flickered across his mind in violent fragments.
Great cities drowning beneath forests.
Mountains split open like rotten fruit.
Men nailed to trees while chanting hymns in dead languages.
A moon staring down at oceans of corpses.
Roy staggered sideways violently.
"Gh—"
Vomit spilled from his mouth onto the floor.
Buzzzz—
Another wave struck him.
Roy cried out and dropped to one knee. Something wet crawled from his ear.
Blood.
His vision blurred heavily now.
The darkness ahead twisted. And then a strange door emerged. He stumbled into it, and the pressure disappeared.
Roy collapsed hard against cold stone flooring, gasping desperately for air while tears streamed uncontrollably down his face.
"What the fuck…" he whispered shakily.
And then looked up.
And his breath stopped.
Twin towers rose high into the sky like giants bones against a black sky. The ground was paved with yellowed stone and a strange wind blew from the horizon where giant, towering buildings stood like sentinels.
Somewhere far into the street stood a large figure made out of stone.
Instantly, a name surfaced into his mind without reason.
Ma'habre.