The tunnel opened into impossible.
Galthor stood at the threshold, his shadow-enhanced senses struggling to process what lay before him. He blinked several tis to make sure he was seeing right.
A city. An entire city, preserved beneath the earth, its streets and buildings and monunts intact as if the centuries had never passed at all.
But the city was drowned.
Water filled every space, suspended throughout, defying gravity and occupying the air itself. It was denser than normal water, darker, carrying a faint luminescence that cast everything in shades of blue and grey. Looking at it was like looking through tinted glass into another world.
And things moved in that water.
Galthor descended slowly, his body passing from air into the strange liquid dium. It pressed against him from all sides, heavy and cold, but it didn’t impede his breathing. Whatever this substance was, it wasn’t truly water. It was sothing else, sothing that rembered being water but had been transford by millennia of Abyssal corruption.
The first building he passed was a house. Through the windows, he could see furniture arranged with dostic care of a table set for dinner, chairs pushed back as if the occupants had just risen, a fire in the hearth that still burned despite being subrged. The flas were blue, cold, producing no heat but continuing their eternal dance.
There were people inside.
They sat at the table, a family of four, their bodies perfectly preserved. A man at the head, a woman beside him, two children across. They weren’t decomposed, weren’t skeletal. They looked alive, except for the absolute stillness that gripped them.
Then the man moved.
His hand reached for a cup that sat before him. He lifted it to his lips, tilted it, set it down. Then he reached for the cup again, lifted it, tilted it, set it down. The sa motion, repeated endlessly, a loop of behavior that had no beginning and no end.
The woman spoke. Her lips moved, forming words that Galthor couldn’t hear through the dense dium, but he could read them nonetheless: "The soup is getting cold, dear. Should I warm it?"
She had asked that question for a thousand years. She would ask it for a thousand more.
Galthor moved on. He couldn’t make sense of anything that was happening.
The streets of the drowned city were lined with similar scenes. A baker stood in his shop, forever kneading dough that never rose.
A blacksmith hamred at an anvil, his arm rising and falling in chanical rhythm, sparks of blue fire scattering with each strike. Two lovers embraced in an alley, their kiss eternal, their passion frozen in the mont before consummation.
None of them noticed Galthor.
None of them could.
They were trapped in their final monts, echoes of lives that had ended so suddenly that the souls hadn’t realized they were dead.
The entity he had absorbed, the forr Comforter of the Dying, stirred in his consciousness. It had known this city, he realized. Had felt the deaths when they happened, thousands of souls snuffed out in an instant, their grief adding to its collection.
But the entity hadn’t been able to help them. Its domain was easing the passage from life to death, and these people had never made that passage. They were stuck between, not alive but not truly dead, their souls bound to the patterns of their final monts.
Galthor continued deeper into the city.
The buildings grew larger as he approached what must have been the city center. Hos gave way to shops, shops to warehouses, warehouses to grand structures that spoke of wealth and power. This had been a prosperous place once, a trading hub or administrative center, important enough to warrant impressive architecture.
He passed a marketplace.
The space was vast, an open plaza surrounded by stalls and vendor stations. Hundreds of people filled it, buyers and sellers frozen in the eternal act of comrce. Their mouths moved constantly, haggling over prices that would never be paid, arguing about quality that would never matter.
"Three silver for the lot, and not a copper more!"
"You insult , sir! This silk ca from the eastern provinces! Seven silver, or take your business elsewhere!"
"Four, and I’m being generous!"
"Six, and only because I like your face!"
The sa conversations, repeated endlessly. Galthor walked through them, his body passing between the spectral rchants like a ghost among ghosts. They didn’t see him. They couldn’t see anything except their own eternal loops.
But sothing else could.
Galthor felt the attention before he saw its source. A pressure against his consciousness, subtle but unmistakable. Sothing in this city was aware of him. Sothing that wasn’t trapped in a loop.
He slowed, his senses extending outward, trying to locate the watcher. The shadows in this place were strange, not true shadows, but areas where the luminescent water grew darker, denser. His new powers worked here, but not as well as they had in the canyon above.
There.
A figure stood at the edge of the marketplace, motionless as all the others but different sohow. Its posture was alert rather than chanical or controlled like a puppet.
Its eyes tracked Galthor’s movent instead of staring blankly ahead.
It was a soldier. Or had been, once. The armor it wore was ancient, styled in patterns Galthor didn’t recognize, marked with symbols that might have been military insignia or religious iconography.
A sword hung at its hip, and its hand rested on the hilt with the easy readiness of a trained warrior.
Galthor approached.
"You’re not like the others," he said. His voice sounded strange in the dense dium, distorted and echoing.
The soldier’s head tilted. When it spoke, the words ca clearly despite the water, as if sound traveled differently for those who were aware.
"No. I am the Watcher. I was set here when the city drowned, to guard against those who might seek to plunder its secrets."
"By whom?"
"By those who drowned it." The soldier’s eyes were pale, colorless, long since dead, studied Galthor with sothing like curiosity. "You are not a looter. You carry power that does not belong to this place. What are you?"
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