Saturday, August 25

Beneath the Mason Ruins, Part III



I descended into the sinkhole by jetpack, and Koen leaped down after me. We followed the constructs as they scurried back and forth like ants. We passed through several chambers that had obviously one been used for scientific and medical research. The equipment..and apparently the unwilling subjects..had been hastily abandoned and left to their fates. The few scraps of documentation I did find made my shiver to the core. Obscure studies blending magic and science to improve the human race..this easily could have been purloined from my Father's lab, except the means to the ends were unspeakable. Father would never experiment on an unwilling subject! We saw many skeletons of both human and neko origin. There was even a case of small fairies impaled on pins like a butterfly collection.


Finally we arrived at the boiler room. The heat was stifling for my brother, but he said he smelled something familiar.


There was a cage, large enough for a human. We saw one of the golems waddle between the bars into the cage and replace the tray of rotting food with a tray of raw meat. Another one carried away an empty chamber pot. The automatons were blissfully ignorant to the fact that the front door of the cage was wide open and that the cage was empty.

Koen crouched, peering into the lock.

"Chicken bones. Works every time."

Just then we heard an inhuman roar from the far corridor. You would not believe what I saw unless I developed the image from my visual cortex. It was a large, pulsating amorphous blob with multiple mouths. As it floated into the room, bluish orbs escaped from one of its maws with methodic regularity while a trail of bright red orbs trailed behind, one of the sets of jaws on the best greedily swallowing them up.

If the orbs were some form of giant blood corpuscles, then this living hive was a giant heart!

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