The floor beneath Ashe's feet reflected the light and the surrounding structure, creating faint and distorted images that moved with her.
The corridors ahead were very high, with ceilings barely visible above at all. Their walls were layered, embedded with unusual elements she couldn't clearly identify. Thin lines of light still ran through them, which felt strange in a place that looked so abandoned.
Ashe slowed her pace slightly and let her eyes move across the walls as she passed them, trying to distinguish the mechanisms on them. They all varied in size and form. Some were small and barely visible, others were larger and appeared mostly broken. Some even had materials she wasn't able to classify at all.
She tried to compare what she was seeing to something familiar, anything that might exist in her memory, but each attempt had the same result. A faint buzzing in her head and a complete blurriness of unclear thoughts.
She moved forward slowly through that space as each step was a challenge in itself. The cold she had felt earlier had spread further, and her hands began to tremble slightly.
The deeper she went, the more visible the damage became. Entire sections of infrastructure had been forced through the walls, as if something inside had broken through. She could see large pieces of machinery laying across the floors or hung in the upper areas of the corridors.
Ashe tried to make sense of what she was seeing.
She did not have the knowledge to understand the mechanisms themselves, but she could observe the pattern of damage. It looked like something had happened suddenly, with enough force to disrupt multiple layers of the structure at once. This couldn't have been just slow and gradual decay.
Also, given the scale of the facility, whatever had caused that damage had to be significant.
That thought remained with her as she walked.
But most importantly, through all of the wreckage and destruction, there were no signs of life anywhere. No movement. No evidence that anyone else had been there recently, or even at all.
That's what she had hoped to find. Someone who could help her understand what was happening.
After a while, she entered another section of the facility that stood out to her.
At the far end of the room, she noticed a series of objects arranged in a perfect lineup pattern. They resembled consoles of sorts.
She approached one of them carefully, scanning the area around for anything that might have been dangerous. When nothing happened, she stepped closer.
Up close, the console was even harder to interpret. Its surface was smooth and simple, despite the torn sections. A few dark lines lay scattered on it, which Ashe assumed had some sort of technical meaning she wasn't able to grasp. Yet there was no obvious call to action, nothing about it made it clear as to how it was meant to be used.
She extended her hand.
As she touched it, a thin layer spread across the surface from the point where her fingertips made contact. It resembled water just floating over the console. When she withdrew her hand slightly, faint ripples moved across it, creating caustic effects all over it.
This was certainly not technology she understood.
But before she could process any of that, a sharp pain hit her in the chest, throwing her off balance. It was happening more often now, that it kept reminding her of Seven's warning earlier in the pod chamber. It disrupted her breathing so she instinctively pressed a hand against her chest, as if that might have eased the sensation.
She told herself though that pain and discomfort were natural given the circumstances and that she just had to move forward and find help somewhere.
When the sensation diminished, she gave another last look to the strange moving console in front of her, then turned and left the area.
As she walked, her thoughts returned to Seven's writings in the pod chamber. She remembered the words he had mentioned: Threnos and Harmonic Seeds. She whispered them several times, in an attempt to store them in memory even if she did not understand their meaning. They were perhaps the key to prove to herself eventually whether she was actually losing her mind or not. Because in those moments, anything felt possible.
After a while of struggling to keep her thoughts steady, she noticed something ahead. A faint light was slightly moving somewhere in the distance in random ways. From her vantage point, she couldn't clearly tell what it was, but in a place where everything else seemed to be overwhelmingly static and broken, its movement certainly drew her attention.
She approached carefully and stepped through the arch that followed.
The chamber ahead was smaller than the others she had encountered, but at its center, suspended in the air, stood something she had no words for. Its form was fractured and crystalline, with sharp edges coming out from all sides and directions. A blue light pulsed from within, and thin strands of black energy circled around it.
It looked like a mass of blue and black energy, yet its shape was mostly rigid, constantly reforming its crystal edges.
It was silent, even though it moved constantly within its own space.
As strange and unsettling as it was, there was an unusual beauty to it that Ashe couldn't ignore. She felt drawn to it in a way she did not understand.
After a moment of consideration, she stepped closer.