Holding a silver torch smeared with black oil, as it descended to the depth of stillness, sharp luminance tearing through the stubborn dust and jungle debris scattered across the black, blood-darkened wooden steps, exposing the oppressive gloom of cellar. From those very stairs, a man was coming down.
"Casimir, wearing a waistcoat that gripped him tight, holding a silver-bleached torch in his white-knuckled grip, its sterile piercing radiance cut through the gloom, hemorrhaging light across the darkness."
Darkness seemed to have devoured the room entirely. Only one pillar caught the sharp luminance of the torch.
Crates lined along the walls; rifles, shotguns, and boxes of explosives stood beside them. The crates were crammed with gleaming ammo, jumbled and unorganized, mixed with deprieved detritus—long bullets for rifles, thick shells for shotguns.
The torch's sharp luminance now flickered; its battery was running low. He picked up a crate of ammo and a sack of gunpowder, placing them on a rotting table near another pillar, beside which lay a closed, battered book.
Then, he lowered the spider-meshed doomed lantern that hung from the roof. Beside him, another third pillar standing in the depth of hollow which has a storage box,
he took a box of matches and struck one near the lamp again, lit it.
His torch, nearly dead, was turned off in favor of a smaller backup light.
He lifted the crate that was driven from the first pillar, opened completely, and placed dozens of shotgun bullets into the inner pocket of his trench coat. The small sacks of gunpowder went into the other side of the pocket.
His gaze shifted toward the unholy, shadowed, darkened chamber where the third pillar stood, upon which hung a four-barrel blunderbuss—unique among the other weapons—and a normal blunderbuss beside it. Casimir picked up both weapons and set them back on the table.
His gaze fell upon the book at the side. A plain cover, flecked with rodent droppings and other detritus, woven in a delicate spider-meshed doom.
That book was not new to Casimir. It had been the first and last book he had truly comprehended ever. 'Since childhood, my grandfather had taught him only this book's literature; no formal school had ever reached him, being a powerful deviant, he could not be restrained by my parents.' And now, that same book lay before him again.
Casimir flipped it, removing the cover, but this time, a strange unfamiliar feeling gripped him—as if it contained something entirely new.
The cover was blank, but the next page held a glyphic sentence that, amid uncanny symbolic and ruptured lines, something he had read dozens of times in childhood. Yet today, it felt alien. Casimir read the words again with the same familiarity— "The 6 Steps Took, Yet The World Dragged Backwards Into 11 — In That Undoing, I Learned Terror." As he read— The entire cellar seemed to shatter into stillness, as if time itself had snapped.
The scraping sound traveling down the stairs echoed, as though some vast pit were being dug. The moment Casimir heard it, he closed the book, gripped the torch tightly, and ran toward the stairs. But this time, no light came from the steps. He had pushed the door before entering, and it could not be closed. When he realised, his vision narrowed into a pinprick, consciousness plummeted into a hallowed abyss. A enormous creature had jammed the gateway and was now slithering through the narrow gap.
Casimir grabbed the shotgun from the first pillar, drew bullets from the inner right pocket of his trench coat, reloaded, lit the torch briefly, and advanced toward the stairs with the barrel raised.
Casimir was unfamiliar with weapons, yet his mind felt far too acquainted with them.
Peering down the stairwell, he saw a appendage on the steps, with an eye on its node and a piercing notch above it.
Bang.
Bang.
Corrosive shots erupted from the shotgun. There was no lingering echo, only the sudden, violent silence of things being erased.
Casimir stepped back, observing the chamber. He noticed uncanny motions. Moving toward the other pillar, murmuring clicking sounds came from ahead, but his shotgun was not reloaded, Then an eerie figure—an imp with a mass of tangled hair, falling like a weight to the ground—leapt.
The imp lunged at his legs and began to climb, but Casimir shoved the shotgun's head against its head and kicked it with his other foot, sending it flying away.
This gave him time to reload and reach the forward pillar. Casimir opened the explosive crate and grabbed three sticks of dynamite. From his pocket, he struck matches, just burning the det cords of all three sticks together.
On one edge of the dark, eerie, hallowed room, a flare ignited, revealing the chamber in such a way that even Casimir's blurry, eerie memory became unfamiliar and horrified.
Before him lay a tyrant-like, boneless creature—leaning to the ground, without arms or legs, only a head with dozens of eyes. From his lower body, dozens of umbilical cords extended, connecting to the abdomens of several imps as if they were its newborns.
In that darkness, the imps' numbers were hidden deep. The sight sent a cold wave through Casimir's soul. In less than a second, he steadied himself.
He threw two of the three sticks forward at the abominable tyrant and one backward toward the stairs, running toward the right corner of the room—so fast it felt as if space itself pulled him.
Boom.
Boom.
The explosion hurled Casimir deep into that hallowed space. Shreds of tiny imps—their heads, legs, hands, and unrecognizable organs—flowed into the boiling, corrosive acidic fluid. Many eyes searched for their heads; many heads tried to reconnect with their hosts.
Another boom, but that explosion defied all explanation because it happened across the sight.
The corrosive fluid surged over Casimir's palms, melting the ridges of his palms into smooth, raw, marble-like skin.
In that horrific silence, the wet rasp of his own breath began to terrify him.
One side of the imp's skull was a jagged ruin of shattered bone and grey matter, still clamped to its mouth to his forearm. Bang. A sudden shot split its skull, and the luminance vanished into the hallowed chamber.
Bang. Bang.
After the first shot, he reloaded and pierced the heads of other two imps that emerged from the acidic river. "Looks like that boneless tyrant has fallen from that explosion with his minions," he continued his murmurs. "The creature, leaning on stairs and grazing against the wall, is about to be seen, but the shotgun hadn't hurt him previously." Casimir steadied himself, moving to the table by the third pillar. Picked up the four-barrel blunderbuss. Grabbed packets of metal pellets and their gunpowder.
Lifted the hanging lantern, whose handle was broken but still tied with a fabric cord.
The acidic Fluid had cooled, becoming syrupy and sugar-like.
Casimir ignored the uncanny organs of those little imps, corpses strewn upon it.
Casimir saw the abominable tyrant's corpse, now turned into a purplish fluid. Then he grabbed dozens of sticks from the other pillar. Pockets nearly filled. Cleared the blunderbuss and slung the shotgun.
Advanced toward the stairs. Sounds of new creatures stirred behind him. He ignored them. The doorway had widened.
There was the same tentacle creature—tubes lined with dozens of eyes. Casimir slammed the lamp against the wall. The strained-glass shattered, spreading sharp fragments. He lit a stick of dynamite.
But now the abomination had fully noticed him. Previously creature was just waving its appendages with a mindless, twitching rhythm, upon the head exposing nerves and leaking fluid, like its thoughts churning through the exposed, mangled ruin of a skull that no longer held a mind, sending more than half of its tentacles surging toward him. Casimir aimed his blunderbuss toward the advancing tentacles.
A 'Bang' scattering their formation. numerous piercing spores driving deep into the abomination's body; still, many particles embedded themselves along the sides, and several tiny spores tore through half of the accelerating tentacles in a single instant.
Three shots still remained—but were unnecessary. "Those tiny spores aren't enough," the sides of his lip twitched with an amiable and advancing formal smile, and he continued, "You have to leave the stairs too, or else I will just erase that weighted footing."
His voice rasped through the smoke. With a grunt of effort, he hurled the stick. It arched through the air and landed squarely atop the tangled mass of appendages that jammed the stairs.
And then, without a sound, he dissolved into the dark, Unchallowed depths of the chamber.