Jared lingered, watching the rescue team arrange their gear. Nothing left for him here. He turned away, letting their voices fade behind him. His work waited elsewhere. East, along the tracks, he moved. His eyes searching for the next wrongness, the next ripple in the dark.

The voices and machine hums faded, swallowed by the tunnel. Cold pressed in as he left the known behind. Only the thin glow of emergency lights and his own beam cut the dark. He preferred it that way.

He let the Dark inside him uncoil, thin ribbons slipping out to taste the air. Vibrations trembled through the rails. Trains, maybe, or something else. Water sighed through broken conduits. Electricity pulsed, a heartbeat in the walls. The tunnel spoke in its own tongue. Jared listened, sifting meaning from the hum and rot.

The official report called it an accident. Mechanical failure, they said. Plausible enough. But he’d seen the ogre. Not the cause, but a sign. Shadow Kind always gathered where the Dark pooled, drawn to the wounds in the world.

Witnesses spoke of a tentacled face, something steeped in Dark. Maybe it caused the crash. It had been here, taking people. That much was certain.

A ribbon of Dark brushed an irregularity in the wall. He tightened his grip on the flashlight, sweeping the beam to match what his senses found. Up ahead, left side. A jagged hole torn in concrete. Metal pipes bent outward, broken ribs exposing a dark chamber. Rubble scattered at its feet.

He stepped closer. The smell struck. Damp, threaded with rot. The Dark flexed around him, reaching into the shadows, searching for what waited there.

He crouched, flashlight catching the pale scrape of stone. Parallel grooves scored deep, swirling like the lines in a zen garden. Only this marked violence, not peace. The pattern spoke of swimming, not smashing. Not a break, but a dig. Something strong, patient.

“Not structural failure,” Jared murmured under his breath. “Manual excavation. Big claws.”

Jared dragged his fingers through the stone dust. Fine powder, flaking away at his touch. Not fresh, but not old. Rail crews would have seen it. The hole was human-sized, maybe eight feet tall, a rough semicircle. Whatever dug this wasn’t massive, but still larger than him. Always larger.

He scanned the floor. Debris mounded in small piles, pushed aside with intent. No footprints. He straightened, swept the light into the hole. Air hung thick with dust, motes drifting in slow spirals. The passage beyond sloped downward, rough and uneven. 

“Time to go find myself a Shadow Kind,” he whispered to himself. “Because that never goes badly.”

He drew his pistol. Cold, dark steel settled into his palm, familiar. The runes etched along the metal vibrated with Dark power, humming in time with the energy that spun around him.

For a moment, the abyss behind his eyes pulled at him. Its call, always there, summoning him back to where all things begin and unravel. A second heartbeat, stronger than the one he was born with.

He blinked, forcing the images back.

Water dripped from the wall, pooling in a dirty puddle. He pulled the Dark back, pushed it into the water. The puddle shuddered, then rose, balancing on spindly legs. Eyes opened in its center, watching him in silence.

"You're going to be my backup," he said to the small elemental creature.

The elemental quivered, arms forming from its liquid body. It shuffled ahead, as if it remembered the way.

He pressed a hand to his chest, spinning the Dark into a tight shell around himself. Coiling strands settled against his skin, pulsing in time with his heart. Safe and exposed, both. The Dark would shield him from all that came, even as it gnawed at his core.

He stepped into the tunnel.

The air thickened, humid with wet earth, swallowing the rail’s acrid tang. Raw stone and dirt pressed in, uneven, forcing him to stoop. His flashlight skimmed over deep claw marks. Scrapes repeating, methodical, intentional.

Sound was strange here. There were no echoes. His footfalls seemed to be absorbed into the walls and muffled into silence. For a moment, he thought he heard a faint scraping ahead. Maybe something large shifting its weight. But when he paused to listen, it ceased entirely.

Claustrophobia pressed in, pressure beneath the skin. His heartbeat tapped anxiety against his ribs, the Dark answering in rhythm. The coils tightened, and he sighed, pleasure and fear mingling. He steadied himself against the wall, breath shallow.

Dark swirled, ebbing into his bones. The black tide crashed through him, cold power shooting up his spine, flooding his mind with ecstasy. Wonder crept in. Something vast watched from the deep.

He shuddered, forced the sensations away. Breath steadied by habit, thoughts narrowing to cold focus. The elemental moved ahead, leaving wet prints in the dust.

A low vibration brushed his boots, faint as a distant tremor. Not a train. Something moving beneath. He froze, lowered the beam. Dust rippled upward, forming rings.

Then the vibration stopped.

Jared waited. Silence thickened the air. Pulse ticking in his ears. The light trembled in his grip, beam jittering over stone. From the deep, a slow, grinding inhale. A sound with weight.

He took a step back, careful, controlled. “Command,” he whispered, touching his commutator link. “Blake reporting. There’s movement down here. Something heavy. Possibly burrowing. I’m moving forward to investigate a side tunnel off the tracks.”

Static answered him.

He frowned. Signal lost, swallowed by stone. Two clicks to store the message. He slid sideways, pressed to the wall. The light caught a shift. A glimmer, not reflection, but dust in motion.

And then, silence again.

Jared crouched, bracing. Weapon up, sight aligned. The flashlight cut a thin line ahead. Nothing. Darkness thick enough to touch.

The wall to his right shuddered. Stone cascaded down, surface cracking outward. Something vast pressed from within, mass straining against earth. Then it broke through, bursting into the tunnel in a rain of debris.

Jared stumbled forward, dirt raining down. His light swung wild, catching flashes. A man-sized creature, brown carapace gleaming. Claws like serrated shovels. Bladelike jaws snapping at the air. The head turned, beam caught in compound eyes, light fracturing in a dizzying kaleidoscope.

“Shit—” Jared dropped low as the thing lunged. The claw struck where he’d been, gouging the rock wall with a screech. Debris rained down.

He fired twice. Shots struck, barely marking the chitin. Sparks of Dark flickered where the slugs hit. The creature recoiled, more anger than pain. It hissed, guttural and grinding, the sound vibrating through stone.

Jared backed away, step by step, light steady. The air bent, edges blurring. Vision doubled, tripled. The tunnel warped, funhouse angles. Stomach twisted. Dark spun at the corners of his sight. For a moment, he was falling.

Cold water splashed his face. He snapped back. The creature swiped at the water elemental. Claws tearing it into a thousand droplets. Mandibles flexed, a roar. It lunged. Jared dove, mandibles slicing air above him. He scrambled to his feet as the creature fell back.

Don’t look at its eyes.

He dropped his gaze, fixed on claws. Confusion eased, though the world still swam at the edges. The creature scraped forward, mandibles gnashing stone. Each step deliberate, blocking the way deeper. A guard.

“You’re not what they saw,” Jared said quietly. His own voice steadied him. “You’re the sentry.”

He slid sideways, pressed to the wall. The creature tracked his sound, antennae twitching. Movements too precise to be wild. Trained, commanded. That thought chilled more than its form.

It lunged, claws slamming into the wall near his head. Jared ducked, rolled, came up firing. Muzzle flashes strobed the chamber. Carapace, teeth, wet gleam, a dozen staring eyes. The thing screamed, high and metallic, the sound clawing into his mind, shredding thought to static.

He fired again, aiming for joints, until the slide locked. The creature staggered, ichor spilling in ropes. Movements jerky, spasmodic. Still, it held its ground.

Then, abruptly, it stopped.

It tilted its head, mandibles quivering. Eyes shimmered with inner light. Resonance, not reflection. Something answered from deeper in the tunnel. A pulse vibrated through the floor, rattling Jared’s teeth. The creature turned, not to him, but to the deeper dark, and began to dig.

He reloaded, hands shaking. Forced focus. Dark poured into the weapon as he fired into the retreating creature. It slumped.

Jared stood staring at it, chest heaving.

He reloaded again, staring at the creature in the trembling light.

He crouched, pried a fragment of brown carapace from the ground, smooth, gleaming. He tucked it into his pack, eyes fixed on the tunnel ahead. The dark pressed in, thicker, alive.

“Something else down here,” he murmured. “And it’s smarter.”

He switched off the light, letting darkness settle. In the black, faint luminescence pulsed far below. Soft, rhythmic, a heartbeat in the earth.

Jared exhaled slowly.

He flicked the light back on, checked his weapon, and moved deeper into the earth.