The alarm wasn't an alarm.
At first, that's what I thought—the sharp, pulsing vibration shaking the walls, the metallic rattling echoing through the corridor. But alarms had rhythm. This did not. This sound rose unevenly, in wet, heaving pulses, like something massive was dragging itself upward through layers of steel.
I sprinted down the aisle, the Archivist's whisper clinging to the back of my neck like cold breath.
The lights dimmed.
Then the floor lurched.
A jolt shot through my legs as the metal grate beneath me bowed—just for a second—as though something gigantic had pushed against it from underneath. I stumbled, catching myself against a shelf that immediately shivered out of my grasp.
Folders burst out of it, exploding across the corridor.
Some opened midair.
Their pages fluttered violently, not like paper but like wings, flapping with frantic desperation. One brushed my arm—it was ice-cold, and a whisper hissed into my skin:
"Tell us what you saw…"
I shoved it away.
The corridor ahead distorted. The ceiling elongated, stretching like melted wax, and shadows rippled along the floor in swirling currents.
Then the metal under me split.
Just a crack—thin, jagged—but long enough for a gush of dark water to spurt through. The smell hit me instantly: brine, rot, and something old enough to make my stomach twist.
I backed up fast.
The crack widened with a tearing scream, and a black tendril of water curled upward, shaping itself into a spiraling column. Within it, faint silhouettes writhed—faces pressed against the liquid surface, mouths open in eternal drowning.
My pulse hammered.No time to think.No time to breathe.
A hand shot out of the water.
Five long, skeletal fingers latched onto the grate, shaking it. The metal groaned and bent.
"No—no—no—"
I turned to run back the way I came—
—but the corridor wasn't the same anymore.
Shelves had rearranged themselves. A maze now stretched before me—impossible angles, dead ends, aisles looping back on themselves like a labyrinth folded into itself. The ceiling above pulsed with a low, living throb.
The Archivist's whisper drifted from somewhere within the maze.
"You opened the Deep File… now you must find what it wants."
"What does it want?" I shouted.
Silence.
Then, from far ahead, the lights lit up one by one, forming a path deeper into the labyrinth.
A path I did not want to take.
The water behind me surged. The skeletal hand clawed its way higher, now joined by another—then another. Dozens. Hundreds. Climbing.
I had no choice.
Gritting my teeth, I ran toward the lit path.
As I darted around a corner, something slammed into the shelf beside me—so hard the entire row rocked. A pale shape skittered across the top, fast and wrong, like a spider made of drowned limbs.
I pushed myself faster.
The lights overhead guided me into a wide circular chamber—a dead end.
Except for one thing.
In the center of the room rested a pedestal made of dark stone. Upon it lay a single black file. No label. No number. No dust.
Just a symbol pressed into the cover.
A spiral.The same spiral I'd seen in the Seafoam Vessel.The same spiral carved into the harbor where the disappearances happened.
The Deep File.
My breath caught.
Behind me, the water-flooded corridor roared as countless hands tore through the grate.
I reached out, hesitating only for a heartbeat.
Then I opened the file.
And the world collapsed into darkness.