Chapter 3: The Game Begins

Chapter 3: The Game Begins

The acrid smell of ozone from the fried seismograph stung Leo’s nostrils. He was still staring at the mocking green text floating in his vision when the mountain groaned.

[WARNING: YOUR SCIENCE IS NOT WELCOME HERE.]

It wasn’t a sound he heard with his ears, but a deep, resonant vibration that traveled up from the cave floor, through the soles of his boots, and into his bones. A fine shower of dust rained down from the ceiling, glittering in his headlamp beam like malevolent sprites.

“Thomas!” Leo yelled, scrambling backward, his voice cracking. “Get out! Get out now!”

From the passage behind him came a frantic, muffled reply. “Leo! What’s happening? The walls are shaking!”

“Just run!”

The groan intensified into a sickening, grinding roar. The solid rock around him seemed to liquefy. A spiderweb of cracks raced across the ceiling above the passage he’d just come through. Then, with a sound like the world splitting apart, a slab of rock the size of a small car peeled away from the ceiling and crashed to the floor.

The impact threw Leo from his feet. His head smacked against the stone wall, and his headlamp flickered violently before dying, plunging him into absolute, suffocating blackness. The roar was deafening, a cascade of stone and earth filling the space where he had just been standing, where his brother had been waiting. He heard Thomas cry out his name, a sharp, terrified sound that was brutally sheared in half.

Then, silence.

A silence so profound, so complete, that Leo could hear the frantic drumming of blood in his own ears. The air was thick with choking dust that tasted of ancient, disturbed earth.

“Thomas?” he croaked, the word swallowed by the oppressive dark. “T, answer me!”

Only the faint, distant settling of rock answered. The way back was gone. He was sealed in. Alone.

Panic, cold and sharp, pierced through the ringing in his head. He fumbled at his helmet, his fingers clumsy and shaking, slapping at the dead headlamp. “No, no, no, come on!” The switch clicked uselessly. The bulb was shattered.

He was trapped. Buried alive. In the dark.

His breath came in ragged, hyperventilating gasps. The logical, analytical part of his brain—the part that was Leo Vance—was screaming, short-circuiting in the face of a primal terror he had only ever read about in textbooks. Claustrophobia. Sensory deprivation. This was a nightmare made real. He was going to die here. He was going to suffocate on rock dust and his own failure.

He curled into a ball on the cold floor, his mind a whirlwind of static and fear. It was in this moment of absolute despair, when his sophisticated intellect had been reduced to nothing more than a terrified animal instinct, that the ghostly green text returned. It glowed softly in the otherwise total blackness, a calm, cruel beacon in the storm of his panic.

[OBJECTIVE: SURVIVE.]

The words cut through his terror like a shard of ice. It wasn't a warning. It wasn't a hallucination. It was a command. A mission statement. A game had just begun, and he was the unwilling player.

The sheer, detached malice of it shocked him out of his panic. A new emotion flared, hot and defiant: anger. Something was doing this. The rockfall hadn’t been an accident. The equipment failure wasn’t a coincidence. He wasn't just trapped; he was being toyed with.

“Who are you?” he snarled into the darkness, the sound raw and unhinged. “What do you want?”

He was answered by a sound.

A soft skitter-skitter-click.

It was the sound of a small pebble rolling across the stone floor somewhere in the darkness to his left. Probably just more settling rock.

Then he heard it again. To his right. Click-skitter-tap.

And again. Directly in front of him.

It wasn't settling rock. It was movement. Something was in the darkness with him, moving with a quiet, deliberate speed that made the hair on his arms stand on end.

He froze, straining his ears, holding his breath. The silence returned, thicker than before. And then, a new sound began. A chorus of faint, dry chittering, like a thousand insects rubbing their legs together. It seemed to come from everywhere at once—from the walls, the ceiling, the floor. It was the sound of a nest being disturbed.

A whisper slithered directly into his mind, bypassing his ears entirely. It was cold and brittle, like the rustle of dead leaves.

…unbeliever…

Leo scrambled backward, his hands scraping against the rough floor. “Who’s there?”

…so loud… his science… the whispers multiplied, weaving over each other. …brother screamed…

He remembered his pack. With a surge of adrenaline, he tore it off his back and ripped open the main compartment, his hands searching frantically for his emergency kit. He found what he was looking for: a chemical light stick, sealed in a foil wrapper. His fingers, numb with cold and fear, fumbled with the packaging. He finally tore it open, pulled out the plastic tube, and bent it sharply.

A sickly, green-white light bloomed, weak but blessedly real. It pushed the absolute darkness back a few feet, creating a small, trembling bubble of illumination.

And in that first, flickering moment of light, he saw them.

They weren't clear. They were fleeting shapes at the very edge of the glow, things that seemed to be made of shadow and packed earth. Small, gaunt, humanoid forms, no taller than his waist. They moved with an unnatural, insect-like speed, their long limbs jointed at impossible angles. As the light touched them, they dissolved back into the deeper shadows, skittering up the walls with a sound of scraping stone. He caught a glimpse of a cluster of pale, pinprick eyes, all fixed on him.

The chittering intensified, and the disembodied whispers grew more distinct, a cacophony of cruel, childish taunts inside his skull.

…he’s afraid… …smell his fear… …left his brother… …all alone…

A freezing touch brushed his ankle. He kicked out with a yell, scrambling away. The light stick cast his own shadow, huge and distorted, dancing on the walls alongside the fleeting movements of the creatures. They were playing with him, darting in and out of the light, their chittering turning into something that sounded horribly like high-pitched giggling.

His scientific mind, battered and broken, tried to reassert itself. Hypoxia-induced hallucinations. Infrasound. Mass hysteria of one. But he knew, with a certainty that chilled him more than their touch, that this was real. These were the things from the stories. The legends he had come to debunk were crawling on the walls, whispering his deepest fears into his mind. The Chatterlings.

Tears of rage and terror streamed down his face. He wasn't a scientist anymore. He was just meat. Prey.

But the thought of Thomas, his scream cut short, ignited a fire in the pit of his stomach. Maybe he was alive. Trapped on the other side of the rockfall, hurt. He couldn't die here. Not like this. His desire for his own life became a burning, desperate need to find his brother.

“Thomas!” he screamed again, his voice a weapon against the whispers. “I’m coming!”

He began to crawl, holding the light stick out in front of him like a talisman. He moved away from the rockfall, deeper into the cave. It was the only way to go. The chittering things fell silent, letting him go. The game, it seemed, had rules.

He crawled through a narrow passage, the rock scraping his clothes and skin. The whispers faded, replaced by the sound of his own ragged breathing and the thumping of his heart. Hope, fragile and insane, began to flicker within him. He had to find another way out. He had to get back to Thomas.

As he emerged into a small, cavernous chamber, he heard a new sound. A faint, rhythmic scraping. It came from a dark fissure in the far wall. It could be anything. It could be one of them.

But it could be Thomas, trying to dig his way out.

Clutching the light stick, Leo started moving toward the sound, a single, desperate thought drowning out all others: I’m coming, T. Just hold on.