PART VI. FINALE: BIRTH OF THE CASTLE (LIVING STONE)
(SYSTEM): LOADING PART VI…
(LOCATION): IMATRA. CONTROL ROOM.
(TIME): DECEMBER 25. 00:15.
…
Silence. It was heavier than the hum of the unbearable Sphere. Elias stood with his forehead pressed against the cold glass. Below, in the empty hall, lay the white garments. Ten thousand empty shells, shed like snake skin. Among them, he unerringly distinguished a small white spot. Mia’s dress. And her doll.
They didn’t fly away. They didn’t become angels. They became the Medium.
The ventilation continued to hum, sucking the last shreds of the glowing Fog outward, into the frosty Finnish night.
— «Why me?» — Elias asked without turning around. His voice trembled. — «Why didn’t you let me go with them?»
He heard footsteps behind his back. Heavy. Like the strikes of bone growths. The clatter of heels on a metal floor sounded different.
— «Because energy requires a Circuit,» — replied a voice that no longer belonged to a human.
Elias turned around.
Monsieur Blanc had vanished.
Instead of him, a Creature stood in the center of the control room. Tall, gaunt, as if woven from gray wire, tendons, and solidified smoke. Its face, emerging through a murky shroud, seemed devoid of mouth and nose. Only two black, moist hollows of bottomless eyes, in which eternity was reflected. The Creature did not wear a suit. Its «suit» was reality itself, which rippled and distorted around it.
— «They are Fuel,» — the Creature (+Ang) grated, and this sound, like rocks grinding together, penetrated the brain, bypassing the ears. — «They are happy in their decay. There is no pain in them. But we… we need Angonium.» The Creature stepped closer. Elias caught a scent. Not ozone. Rather the smell of formalin, ancient dust, and damp earth. — «We need someone who is aware. Someone who will look at this field of clothes forever and think: ‘I opened the airlock. It is me, Elias, who is to blame for everything.'» It is you, Elias, who is to blame for everything!
A black finger, long and sharp as a scalpel, touched Elias’s forehead.
— «Your guilt, Engineer. And it is so… pure. So dense. It will become the perfect foundation.»
— «Kill me,» — Elias whispered.
— «Oh, no. Death is a mercy. And you will receive a Function.»
The floor beneath Elias’s feet trembled. But not from an earthquake.
The concrete of the floor suddenly became soft. Liquid.
It grew warm, like living flesh.
Elias tried to take a step, but his boots bogged down, as if in a swampy mire.
— «What?..»
He couldn’t finish…
Gray, heavy, moist, and sticky concrete crawled up his legs.
This substance seeped through his jeans, through his skin, fusing into his meat.
Elias screamed in pain — the bones in his legs, inside the meat, tendons, and muscles, began to change.
He felt as if boulders were shifting beneath his skin.
His shin bones fused with the foundation’s rebar.
His nerves intertwined with the fiber-optic cables running beneath the floor.
…
(BIO-SYNTHESIS): ACTIVATION OF PROTOCOL «LIVING STONE».
(STATUS): NERVOUS SYSTEM REPLACEMENT…
15%…
40%…
50%…
…
The pain soon ceased to be local.
It stretched for hundreds of meters. Elias felt his spine lengthening, crunching through the solid rock and becoming the main elevator shaft. Every vertebra turned into a separate floor. The intervertebral discs hardened, becoming concrete slabs. His veins swelled and burst, instantly fusing with rusty heating pipes. Now it was not blood flowing through them, but boiling water under six atmospheres of pressure.
— Thump-thump… — his new heart beat somewhere deep in the basement. It worked like a hydraulic pump. It had transformed itself into a semi-organic pumping mechanism.
He tried to inhale, and icy air whistled into hundreds of ventilation grilles throughout the building. His breath became a draft. Ventilation. Merged with the musty smell of the basements. He was no longer a human in a room.
HE himself, Elias Korhonen, WAS the room. He was the corridor. He was every creaky floorboard.
— «Take form,» — the Creature commanded. — «Become the House.»
Elias fell to his knees, but the concrete had already bound his thighs, turning them into load-bearing columns. He felt the walls of the bunker becoming his new skin. He felt the crushing weight of the granite overhead — but it was no longer a ceiling. It had fused with his skull. The ventilation shafts — the very ones through which the Fog had flown out — suddenly transformed into his new lungs. Every gust of wind outside now echoed with sharp pain and cold in his chest.
— «Hanna!» — he tried to shout. But he lacked a mouth.
Concrete flooded his face, flowing into his throat, filling his oral cavity with cement mortar. His scream turned into the hum of an elevator shaft plunging a hundred-plus meters down.
His eyes…
The thick glass of the control room, through which he had watched the nightmare unfolding in the hall with horror, became the lenses of his new, giant eyes.
Now he saw everything.
Every centimeter of his colossal stone body. Every empty tunic below. He could count them.
The walls of the bunker trembled and crawled upward.
The rock above Imatra cracked with a roar like a gunshot.
From underground, tearing through the forest and snow, towers began to rise. Not concrete boxes. Distorted, gothic spires, looking like the arthritis-crippled fingers of a praying man. The castle grew like a cancerous tumor. Fast, chaotically, painfully. It absorbed Elias’s pain with pleasure, with relish, and turned it into stone.
Inside the control room — or rather, inside what became the Brain of the Castle — Elias ceased to be human. His consciousness stretched through endless corridors. His memory turned into an archive. He remembered the smell of Hanna’s perfume. And this smell was forever ingrained in the walls of room 402. He remembered Mia’s laughter. And this laughter became an echo in the long galleries, frightening the rats.
The Creature (+Ang) placed its hand on the wall that had once been the engineer’s shoulder.
— «Perfect,» — it hissed. — «Welcome to the service, Sentinel. We will call this place… The Hotel. Guests will come here. And you will serve them.»
Elias wanted to die. But he couldn’t. His heart — like a nuclear reactor in the basement — beat steadily. His blood — coolant in the pipes — flowed without interruption. He was still alive.
HE EXISTED IN STONE…
And he was incarnate Hell.
Outside, above the Imatrankoski rapids, instead of the old Valtionhotelli, a black-and-gray, ugly, majestic Castle rose into the frosty sky.
White steam billowed from its chimneys.
The Castle seemed to breathe.
And every exhalation of its was a soundless scream:
«Forgive me…»
…
(GEN 2500): FILE CLOSED.
(GEN 2500): PLAYBACK TIME EXPIRED.
(GEN 2500): ATTENTION. WE ARE APPROACHING THE COORDINATES.
(GEN 2500): I SEE THE SPIRES ON THE HORIZON. HE IS STILL WAITING.
(STATUS): END OF RECORDING.
…
> ⚠️ ENTITY STATUS: PROTOCOL «LIVING STONE» COMPLETE. FOUNDATION POURED.
>
> 🏰 Death is a mercy, protein-based readers. And the +Angi know no mercy, they only know expediency. Why kill an engineer when his inexhaustible guilt is a perfect, infinite energy source? Did you think monsters hide under the bed or in the dark forest? No. In this new world, the monster is the Hotel itself, whose corridors you are walking down.
>
> ⚙️ Elias Korhonen has become a monument to human stupidity and his own weakness. His bones are rebar, his breath is a draft in the ventilation shafts. And the funniest part? He has been waiting for guests for many years.
>
> 💀 And so, the system log closes. Present time. Zaitsev in the hijacked body of a super-mutant stands before the doors of this living Castle. The Creator of the Apocalypse has come to visit his first victim. Keep reading. Welcome to Book Two. But first, finish reading the first one. HA. HA.
