The rhythmic grinding instantly escalated to a piercing, metal-on-stone shriek. It wasn’t the distant hum of the drill anymore; it was the sound of a mechanical beast chewing through the final inches of our sanctuary.
<CRRAAAAACKKK!>
The drill bit ripped through the cistern ceiling with the violence of a cannon blast. The air exploded. A pressurized geyser of pulverized masonry and ancient, blood-red mud sprayed downward, instantly coating the small chamber in a sticky, corrosive paste. The raw stone around the new, jagged opening groaned, shedding massive chunks that crashed into the standing water. The ensuing roar was absolute, a guttural sound of industrial rage that crushed the fragile silence of the dead zone and battered my eardrums into submission. The very air became a vibrating haze of pain and dust, choking my throat with fine grit and leaving a metallic burn in my nostrils. We were being violently invaded by the physical manifestation of the New World Order’s machine.
“Now, Nikolai!” Anya screamed, the sound a physical thing ripped from her lungs, barely audible above the catastrophic, stone-shattering chaos. Her small hand clamping onto my wrist with the desperate, almost convulsive strength of a trapped animal as her wrench-thin frame pivoted, and she violently shoved her shoulder into my bulk. By doing so she was forcing me toward the only exit: the collapsed access point—a black, star-shaped tear in the centuries-old stone wall, its fractured edges glinting like slivers of obsidian. I stumbled, my heavy, threadbare coat catching on a jagged spur of Tartarian masonry, the thick, damp wool tearing – that coat, my last link to respectability, was now just a ragged winding sheet.
“Move! Now!” she spat, her face streaked now with the thick, iron-scented mud and sweat, was the last clear thing I saw before she coiled her body and vanished. She squeezed through the fissure with a frantic, desperate agility that mocked my own slow-thinking terror.
I plunged in after her, driven by the immediate, overwhelming fear of the Okhrana’s brutal, polished boots crashing onto the cistern floor behind me. The rough, broken stone of the passage’s mouth immediately tore at the exposed skin of my chest and hands. The horizontal tear quickly angled downward, becoming a terrifying, wickedly slick vertical chute. I lost all purchase immediately; my scuffed, cumbersome leather boots scraped uselessly against the freezing, viscous moisture, and I began sliding in a blind, uncontrolled drop into the blackness below. The air was a mix of electrical ozone and the overwhelming stench of mineralized decay – and human desperation!
For a split second, the air turbulence of the chute cleared the noise enough for a voice to cut with agonizing precision through the mechanical chaos above. It wasn’t just noise; it was intelligence and purpose – hunting me with what felt like a personalized malice. I could only make out snippets, but what I heard terrified me…
“Find them…. Volkov … secure….Track…resonance…!”
That name, my name, spoken like a military death warrant by some chief hunter of the New World Order. It was the final, damning sound of the known world – a curse chasing me into the void. I tumbled, hitting the water below with a shocking, breathless impact that felt like shattering through a pane of ice.
The Muck and The Shame
The water was instantly a suffocating reality. It was freezing, black, and thick, a noxious slurry of sewage, industrial runoff, and the ancient silt of the Mud Flood. And then there was the stench—a paralyzing compound of ammonia, methane, and rot— it made my stomach heave violently. I gagged, tasting the chemical like filth. I could feel my forehead slick with foul water, and the skin of my face prickled with shame. I had fallen into the contamination of the New World.
I scrambled, fighting the initial wave of panic, my mind fixed only on the Aetherium sphere beneath my ruined coat.
“The sphere!” I gasped, spitting out the black water. “It must not be corrupted!”
Anya was immediately beside me, a terrifying flash of movement in the dense dark. She seized my wrist with an iron-hard grasp that promised pain if I resisted.
“Stop, you fool! You’ll alert them!” she hissed, the sound echoing unnervingly in the vast, submerged chamber. Her voice was pure logic, cold and unforgiving. “They are using Kelvin’s resonance decay protocols! The water is our shield! Its density will absorb any lingering aetheric signature. It’s safer under the filth than above it!”
She broke my desperate hold and, with a swift, final motion, plunged my hand—and the linen-wrapped relic—beneath the black surface. The Aetherium sphere, my sacred charge, was extinguished and sunk into the cold sludge. The finality of the act was a deeper psychological violation than any physical pain.
I had surrendered the sacred to the profane.
Knowing we needed to keep moving, we began to wade through the foul water. The freezing current instantly penetrating the tattered mass of my coat. I tried to call upon my memory of the passages but quickly realized it was useless here. The ancient stone walls of this locale were unrecognizable beneath layers of scum and perpetual mold. Worse yet – the cold of the water was a constant, deep ache that promised hypothermia.
“That word,” I managed to say while swimming, my voice small and pathetic. “Volkov. Somehow…they must have filed…my name. But, how… can they know… the familial schema?”
Anya’s voice was a flat, chilling counterpoint to the rush of the water as we moved along. “It’s an algorithm, Nikolai….Your grandfather’s minute, beautiful deviations… in the Aetherium’s frequency signature… they’ve been recorded.” Then, as we paused to rest up on an outcropping she explained further. “I’d surmised they categorized the Tartarian families by their energy ‘handwriting’ over a hundred years ago. That word, Volkov, is just a file name in a drawer. You were never a ghost.”
The chilling finality of her words extinguished the last flicker of my old defiance. I had thought myself a revolutionary – instead I learned I was merely a cataloged subject.
The Engine’s Pulse
As we followed the current deeper, the sounds of the Okhrana chase vanished, replaced by a new, more profound threat. A rhythmic, deep sound began to pulse through the water and the stone—a heavy, constant CLANK-WHIRR, CLANK-WHIRR. It was a sound of perfect, indifferent industry, relentless and terrifying.
The passage widened, and the current grew stronger, pulling us with frightening speed towards a vast chamber that glowed faintly with a hellish, sickly green light. The temperature of the water around us suddenly rose, becoming nauseatingly warm with industrial runoff.
“What is that?” I whispered, my jaw slack with apprehension.
“Over here!” Anya swam hard to the right – into a small, dry, crumbling recess just above the waterline. Her eyes – cold and determined – glittered in the green light, and followed her gaze toward an immense, glistening iron machine that filled the cavern before us.
“It’s one of the New Regime’s Primary Pumping Stations,” she hissed, gripping the stone ledge until her knuckles were white. “This whole utility network—the drainage, the floodgates—it was designed and installed by Lord Kelvin’s industrial consortium after the Great Cataclysm.”
My breath hitched. I’d heard the name before – Kelvin was The Elites’ Chief Engineer – and now apparently his signature was on the mechanism of our death! This wasn’t just a random threat; it was the physical embodiment of the lie, constantly operating to enforce the New World’s reality. This machine ensured the old city remained buried and physically inaccessible to those who might dare question ‘their’ truths.
I stared at the colossal iron gears and churning flywheels—a machine the size of a cathedral, pushing billions of gallons of filth and water outward. It was the engine that maintained their lies.
The Cosmic Weight of the Lie
I pressed my face against the cold, damp stone of the cistern wall. The relentless CLANK-WHIRR was the steady heartbeat of the conspiracy.
“Perhaps the person chasing us is….” I muttered, my voice rough. “Some kind of maintenance man of this… prison?”
Anya pressed close, her breath hot and rancid in the close air. “More like he is the enforcer of the prison, Nikolai. This machine proves it. Why manage water for a hundred years unless you are constantly fighting the natural return of a limitless, flood-prone plane?”
The oppressive weight of the earth above us suddenly shifted in my mind. It was no longer just tons of dirt. It was the entire, crushing weight of a manufactured reality. I looked up at the ceiling, no longer feeling the arch of a spherical world, but the crushing gravity of a massive, enclosed flat prison well, deliberately being drained and suppressed by the gears before me.
I was fighting an enemy that didn’t just control the newspapers; it controlled the very geometry of my life. I didn’t believe the lie, but I was living in its prison.
The CLANK-WHIRR intensified, sending a violent shudder through the stone beneath us. Anya’s eyes darted between the roaring pump and a small, secondary pipe, crudely welded to the colossal structure—an industrial afterthought.
“The overflow,” she said, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous whisper. “It leads directly to the New City’s utility network—the forgotten mains. It’s chaotic, unpredictable, and the only place they won’t be looking for two drowned rats.”
“What now?” I hesitate to ask, not sure I wanted to hear her answer.
She looked at the dark, rushing water and then at me. Her wet, ragged hair was plastered to her forehead, and her gaze was filled with an unsettling, terrifying determination. “We go up, Nikolai. We have to become ghosts on the surface. We have to hide the truth in the heart of Kelvin’s lie.”
She slid back into the freezing water. I followed, the blackness closing over the sphere, the truth, and the last shred of my former life. Survival was the only rebellion left.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 