Chapter 2: Echoes in the Drowned Tunnels

The Drowned Tunnels stretched beneath Delrick like the fossilized remains of some ancient leviathan, their curved walls slick with condensation and decades of accumulated grime. Deon moved through the ankle-deep water with practiced silence, his flashlight's beam cutting through the perpetual twilight that existed in the city's forgotten depths. The beam revealed rusted maintenance ladders, corroded pipe work, and the occasional rat bold enough to challenge his passage.

It had taken him eighteen hours to piece together the trail from Tin Alley. His contacts in the information trade had come through with locations of three other symbols identical to the one that had nearly fried his brain. Each marking corresponded to a recent disappearance—not just Leo Vasquez, but a dozen others over the past month. The pattern led inexorably downward, into the maze of abandoned transit tunnels and storm drains that the city planners preferred to pretend didn't exist.

The energy signature was stronger here. That was the only way Deon could describe the sensation that had been growing since he'd encountered the symbol in Tin Alley. It felt like standing too close to high-voltage cables, a persistent buzzing that made his teeth ache and his vision shimmer at the edges. Whatever force powered those cursed runes, its source lay somewhere in this subterranean warren.

His boots splashed through a particularly deep puddle, the sound echoing off the tunnel walls with an unnatural resonance. The acoustics down here were all wrong—sounds carried too far and died too suddenly, as if the very air was infected with the same wrongness that emanated from the symbols.

Deon paused at a junction where four tunnels converged, consulting the hand-drawn map one of his sources had provided. The woman—a tunnel rat named Sasha who survived by scavenging salvage from the depths—had been paid well for her information, but even she wouldn't venture into the sections where the "hungry water" lived. She'd described creatures that moved through the flooded passages like living nightmares, things that had once been human but were now something else entirely.

A sound from the left tunnel made him freeze. Not quite a splash, not quite a whisper, but something that suggested movement through water by something that had no business being in these tunnels. Deon clicked off his flashlight and drew the ceramic knife from his boot—metal weapons had a tendency to malfunction in the deeper parts of Delrick's underground, another inexplicable phenomenon that the city's authorities refused to acknowledge.

The sound came again, closer this time. In the absolute darkness, Deon could hear his own heartbeat and the steady drip of water from somewhere overhead. Then came a new sound that made his blood freeze: the wet, tearing noise of something large forcing its way through a space too small to contain it.

Light bloomed ahead of him—not the clean white of his flashlight, but the same sickly radiance he'd seen pulsing from the symbol in Tin Alley. It illuminated something that his mind initially refused to process: a human torso stretched and distorted like putty, its limbs elongated into boneless appendages that writhed through the water with serpentine grace. Where the thing's face should have been was a mass of exposed muscle and bone, and carved into its forehead was the same symbol that had triggered his vision.

The creature's head snapped toward him with predatory awareness, and Deon saw that its eyes—what remained of them—burned with the same malevolent fire he'd glimpsed in his nightmare of the Warden.

It lunged.

Deon threw himself sideways, his shoulder slamming into the tunnel wall as elongated arms whipped through the space where he'd been standing. The creature's movements were impossibly fluid, as if the laws of physics had been suspended in its vicinity. It flowed around the tunnel's curve like liquid mercury, and Deon realized with growing horror that there wasn't just one—shapes were emerging from the other passages, all bearing the same twisted anatomy and glowing brand.

"Fold-Gnashers," he whispered, remembering Sasha's terrified description. Humans who had been caught too close to whatever dimensional barrier separated Delrick from the realm beyond—the Fold, she'd called it. The process changed them, made them into something that was neither fully human nor entirely alien.

The nearest creature reared up, revealing a mouth that split its torso nearly in half. Rows of teeth lined the cavity, and Deon could see deeper into the thing than should have been anatomically possible, as if its internal structure had been redesigned by someone with only a theoretical understanding of human biology.

That's when it happened.

As the Fold-Gnasher prepared to strike, the world around Deon suddenly shifted. The oppressive darkness was overlaid with new information—threads of sickly light that connected the creatures to something deeper in the tunnel system, pulsing conduits of energy that flowed between the symbols carved into their flesh and a distant source that burned like a malignant star in his enhanced perception.

Rune-Sight. The word came to him unbidden, carrying with it the weight of inherited knowledge he didn't understand. He could see the magical energy that animated these abominations, trace the connections that bound them to their master's will. More importantly, he could see their weaknesses—the points where the controlling force was anchored most tenuously to their transformed bodies.

The first Fold-Gnasher struck, but Deon was already moving. His ceramic blade found the glowing nexus point at the creature's shoulder, where three energy conduits converged. The rune carved there flickered and died as his knife parted corrupted flesh, and the thing's coordinated attack dissolved into spasmodic thrashing.

Deon didn't wait to see if his attack had been fatal. He vaulted over the wounded creature and sprinted down the tunnel, his new sight revealing the network of energy flows that connected this entire section of the underground. The other Fold-Gnashers pursued, their movements becoming increasingly erratic as the controlling influence fought to compensate for the damage he'd inflicted on their network.

The tunnel ahead split into three branches. Deon's enhanced perception showed him that the left path led to a dead end, the right curved back toward the creatures' nest, but the center route... the center route pulsed with so much magical energy that looking at it was like staring into the sun.

That was where he needed to go.

The passage narrowed as he ran, forcing him to duck beneath low-hanging pipes and navigate around pools of water that seemed to move with their own current. Behind him, the sounds of pursuit grew fainter but didn't disappear entirely. The Fold-Gnashers were regrouping, adapting to his newfound ability to disrupt their coordination.

The tunnel opened into a circular chamber that had clearly never been part of Delrick's official infrastructure. The walls were covered in symbols identical to the one from Tin Alley, but these were larger, more complex, and burned with an intensity that made his eyes water. They formed a pattern that hurt to follow, as if the geometric relationships between them violated some fundamental law of reality.

At the chamber's center stood a raised platform carved from the same dark stone as the symbols. On it lay the remnants of what had once been people—clothes, personal effects, and stains that Deon preferred not to examine too closely. This was a processing station, a place where the missing were brought to be transformed or consumed by whatever force lurked behind the dimensional barrier.

The energy signature was overwhelming here, a constant pressure that threatened to drive him to his knees. But his Rune-Sight also revealed something else: a weakness in the pattern, a section where the symbols' arrangement was flawed or incomplete. If he could disrupt the flow of power through that nexus...

A wet sliding sound announced the arrival of his pursuers. Three Fold-Gnashers flowed into the chamber, their forms even more distorted in the presence of so much concentrated magical energy. But they moved differently now, with more purpose and coordination. Something was directing them more actively, paying closer attention to the threat he represented.

Deon backed toward the platform, his knife ready. The creatures began to circle him, but they were no longer attacking with mindless aggression. They were herding him, driving him toward something specific.

That's when he felt it—a presence vast and alien pressing against the edges of his consciousness. The voice that spoke didn't come through his ears but seemed to resonate directly in his bones:

"Interesting. Another one develops the Sight. Tell me, little fixer, do you wish to serve willingly, or shall we make the choice for you?"

The pressure increased, and Deon felt his enhanced perception being turned against him. The energy flows he could now see became chains, reaching out to bind him to the same network that controlled the Fold-Gnashers. He was being invited to join them, to become another tool in whatever grand design required the harvesting of Delrick's population.

Instead of resisting, Deon did something unexpected. He embraced his new ability, opened himself fully to the flow of magical energy in the chamber, and then redirected every bit of power he could grasp toward the flawed section of the symbol pattern.

The reaction was immediate and catastrophic. Light exploded from the walls as the delicate balance maintaining the dimensional barrier was disrupted. The Fold-Gnashers screamed—not with their ruined mouths, but with a sound that existed only in the realm of magical energy. The alien presence recoiled, its attention torn away from him as it fought to maintain control of its carefully constructed gateway.

Deon didn't wait to see what would happen next. He grabbed one of the personal effects from the platform—a student ID that confirmed Leo Vasquez had been brought here—and ran for the chamber's exit as reality began to warp around him. The walls were bleeding colors that shouldn't exist, and the water on the tunnel floor was flowing upward in defiance of gravity.

He emerged from the Drowned Tunnels forty minutes later, hauling himself through a storm drain grate in the Mid-Tier's industrial district. His clothes were soaked, his hands were shaking from magical feedback, and his newly awakened Rune-Sight showed him traces of the symbol network throughout the city—a vast web of control and surveillance that touched every district, every building, every life in Delrick.

But he had proof now. Leo Vasquez and the others hadn't simply vanished—they'd been harvested, processed through chambers like the one he'd just escaped. And whatever was behind it all had resources, patience, and power that made his previous cases look like children's games.

As Deon made his way back to the surface streets, one thought burned in his mind with perfect clarity: he was going to need help. The kind of help he'd sworn never to ask for again, from someone who had every reason to want him dead.

It was time to find Kaelen.