🔻The Subterranean Awakening🔻
The lights flicker. Shadows stretch and twist. The walls whisper with echoes of lives long lost.
Baren believes he is one of thirteen survivors stationed at Noremberg, the last southern outpost left standing after the Ravager attack. He eats, he patrols, he listens to his comrades bicker—anything to pass the days until reinforcements arrive. But something is wrong. The blood never fades. The screams never stop. And when the lights go out, reality seeps through the cracks.
The station is rotting, but so is Baren’s mind. Every flicker of light is a fracture in the illusion he unknowingly built around himself, each pulse of darkness peeling away another layer of his fabricated world. His comrades joke and argue, but sometimes their voices distort—sometimes they aren’t there at all. Then the corpses start appearing. First at the edge of his vision, then standing right in front of him.
But the horror isn’t in the dead. It’s in the realization.
There were never twelve soldiers. Never a mission. No reinforcements are coming. The station is empty, has always been empty. The ghosts in the halls, the shifting shadows—they were pieces of his fractured sanity, desperately clinging to a lie. He wasn’t a survivor.
He was the only one left.
And as he stands among the bodies, drenched in blood that was always his own, he understands the truth.
The end is the beginning.
Noremberg was never alive to begin with.