I opened my eyes, and the world roared. It did not merely speak, nor groan - roared, like a cornered beast-machine running at full throttle. The air was thick, heavy, as exhaled from the lungs of some ancient monster. It reeked of soot and ash, yet something in it had no scent at all, pressing against my chest like a stone tied around my neck. Above, a crimson sky tossed and turned, scattering the nd with fkes of ash and bck snow.

  Cyclopean spires of the fortress stabbed the heavens and looked like scars on a mutited face. They drowned in the ashen haze, their grotesque silhouettes of twisted towers, gnarled like broken fingers visible only in glimpses. Shadows flickered across their stone surfaces, and when the wind drove the ash away, it became clear - these were no ordinary shadows. These were ancient runes, scratched into the walls as if cwed onto a charred skull. Somewhere within these walls, in the heart of this stone colossus, its master awaited.

  I turned my gaze beneath the fortress walls, and before me, the abyss unfolded before me. The cshing legions. From the stronghold, knights in fwless formation stood, cd in armor that glistened with cold steel. They moved with mechanical precision, each step measured to the inch. Their bdes did not merely strike down enemies, they carved through space itself, like scalpels performing surgery on living flesh.

  Against them raged the demons - chaotic, grotesque, creatures seemingly pulled from the fevered nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch on steroids. Their bodies convulsed like prisoners in the throes of agony, their mouths gaping in silent screams, yet their voices vanished into this world like dreams and hopes in the real world. Graves didn't allow himself to be them. Primal emotions, like fears and desires. He had severed them, rejected them, and now they were losing.

  I ran my tongue over my dry lips. Ash has already found them.

  "Schizophrenia. His consciousness is vast and powerful."

  I stepped forward, and ash crunched in the cracks of stones, like long-burning hopes. The fortress looms - a monolith bck mass, more than just a structure, it's a petrified idea that was torn out of the subconscious and frozen in time.

  The gates were huge, made of bck iron, covered with formus and ancient writings, as if brazenly saying: "If I y these secrets bare upon the gates, what awaits beyond them?” Above, bas-reliefs twisted - interwoven Kabbalistic symbols merging with scientific diagrams.

  Something stirred. They emerged from the stone without a single sound, as if they had not moved, but had simply always been there, but only now decided to show themselves. Two colossi, carved from ancient basalt, draped with parchment sealed with wax stood before the entrance. Their armor fused with their bodies; instead of heads, burning lights flickered - eyes scorched by endless calcutions. One of them stepped forward.

  "You do not belong here," a seismic force reverberating through my skull, invading my mind unbidden. "Return to oblivion."

  Returning so soon was not part of my pn.

  "I am a guest, invited by your master himself," I said, stepping forward as well. A little less mightily.

  The fmes in their hollow visages flickered as if caught in a draft.

  "You are an outsider."

  "You are a guardian," I narrowed my eyes. "Do you guard his will, or only his fear?"

  A sound, like the snapping of a thick thread. The lights dimmed and their shapes stiffened. The gates started to creak as they opened, spilling a bck rust onto the ground. Experience dealing with bouncers proves useful in minds far more often than one might expect.

  The gates sealed behind me, in complete silence, as if it had chosen to be my jailer itself. The corridor stretched deep, narrowing like the gullet of a serpent burrowing into a skull. The walls were lined with unusual stone, smooth in pces, scarred with scratches and carved symbols in others. In the darkness of the passage, where the shadows thickened into something viscous, dry metallic sounds rang out.

  They emerged from behind the columns without haste, tall figures in bck armor, dull as void itself. Their movements were precise, their steps more akin to the ticking of wind-up toys than the stride of warriors. Their faces remained hidden behind visors, smooth as mirror lenses.

  The closest among them leveled a spear at me, its shaft widening near the hand to guard the wielder. Many monsters of the mind and weak psionics could not wield weapons separate from their bodies, and I had forcefully completed my close-combat training with a solid B+.

  I drew my revolvers and freed the bullets. They struck armor, but the knight did not flinch. I raised my aim higher. The visor shattered. There was no face beneath - only a smooth void, as though he was already prepared to sign legistion in Congress. The knight did not fall. He merely tilted his head, as if analyzing the situation. I cursed and stepped back, recalling with nostalgia the near-empty world of the widow.

  The emptyheaded knight hesitated, allowing the second to step forward. Reaching a precise distance, he extended his spear and lunged. I dodged, throwing myself to the ground and the wall that took the blow meant for me exploded into shards and dust. Still lying, I aimed my revolvers at the enemy and shattered his mirrored visor. This, too, slowed him.

  The third knight emerged from behind a column, repeating the exact movements of the second, unching himself at me. When I leapt aside from his thrust, he instantly withdrew the spear and struck where I had nded. I was only saved because I had jumped slightly farther than before, and the spear shattered the floor between my feet.

  "Hey! That’s not very knightly!" I scolded him, springing back to my feet.

  The first faceless one reached me and tried to skewer me on his oversized toothpick. But his movements became less precise, as if he had lost part of his algorithm. I dodged and, without waiting for them to adjust, sprinted forward, diving deeper into the corridors, into the heart of the castle, all the while firing at the knights. Break their defense. Expose the void. They knew how to kill. But they didn’t know what to do when they were being killed. Leaving enemies at my back was foolish, but I had no intention of retracing my steps. I needed an answer. Or even more questions.

  The castle had noticed me. Up until now, it had been just a pce, a backdrop to the war raging below. But now, as I delved deeper, it began to change: the walls shuddered, shifted, as if the stone itself was digesting an intruder in its guts, the corridors grew narrower, ceilings dropped lower, squeezing me forward, as if space here was being rented by the hour.

  Step.

  The stone sbs trembled.

  Step.

  The walls convulsed with a peristaltic spasm.

  Step.

  And then came the voice.

  "You will get lost," it said, low and hollow, echoing from everywhere at once, as though the castle itself spoke. Uncanny self-awareness. "Here, we research. We do not shoot."

  I clenched my teeth and pressed on. Graves was wrong. It's both here. I emerged into a vast hall, and the first thing I saw was the undead. Rows of corpses – skeletons and zombies, draped in tattered robes and rusted armor, as if they had once been warriors, rogues, healers. Now they were merely reborn flesh and bone, straight out of pulp fiction and comic books about some half-naked barbarian in fur underpants.

  The boratory was drowning in jars with little freaks, alchemical stills filled with murky liquids, books covered in cryptic symbols, instruments that looked more like torture devices than scientific tools. This was a pce where science and magic had intertwined in a grotesque dance.

  I didn't wait, but pulled out my revolvers and pulled the triggers. The bullets shattered bones, blew out kneecaps, took heads clean off, yet the dead kept coming, crawling, grasping at existence.

  "Science cks patience, detective," the walls murmured. "But I am working on that."

  Skeletons crumbled under my fire, but their bones thickened in the air, reassembling themselves, as if the world itself refused to accept their deaths.

  Fine, Doc. Let’s use a head.

  A shot - an alchemical fsk shattered, spttering acid over the nearest undead.A lunge - I shoved a heavy bookshelf down, burying a cluster of skeletal minions.A kick - one of the zombies stumbled into a bubbling cauldron, and its flesh swelled like overripe fruit before bursting apart.

  The air thickened with smoke, poison, and rot. But I broke through. And that’s when I felt the steps. The ground shuddered like a ribcage beneath a scalpel. They emerged from the boratory’s shadows, and I knew instantly, my usual tricks wouldn’t work.

  They were tall, hulking, clumsy at first gnce, yet disturbingly efficient in motion. Their bodies were stitched together from metal and dead flesh, every seam sealed with glowing sigils. An unnatural blend of matter. Their heads - gss vessels filled with murky, viscous fluid, inside which pulsed living brains. Conscious, still trying to understand, even now, as their hosts advanced with the cold determination of a mechanism.

  Zakhar and Danil sang the aria of fire and iron. Liquid, sluggish silver – mercury - spilled from the wounds, but they did not fall. Their blood was alive, like a snake shedding its skin, and as toxic as a doctor’s lie when he promises, "This won’t hurt." I shot him in the head, the gss went through deep webs of cracks, but did not break. Its owner froze for a moment, running its fingers over its fractured skull, struggling to recall what pain meant.

  The first golem moved towards me, its huge hand raised to strike. I dodged, and its massive fist crushed a workbench, scattering fsks and instruments. I fired into its knee; the leg buckled, sending it crashing down. But it didn’t stop. Its hands still cwed toward me, this sack of mechanical flesh incapable of understanding defeat.

  The second golem struck, I ducked, and its fist shattered a massive gss tank with a thing inside, I could only describe as a centaur embryo, spilled onto the floor in waves of viscous, transparent liquid that reeked of dampness and something too sweet to be harmless. I didn’t stick around to analyze it. My hand grabbed the nearest gss sphere from the table, its core swirling with dark green fire, a toxic whirlwind coiled inside.

  "Scientific method, Doc," I muttered, tossing the sphere. "Let’s experiment."

  It shattered at the feet of the nearest golem, and the liquid on the floor ignited like it had met something it despised. Green fmes shot up, engulfing the golem. Fires usually tend to go out, but not this one - it was devouring. It was eating through metal, skin, the brain in the jar, writhing in living tongues of fme. Roar. Rumble. The golem writhed, its form convulsing, the mercury inside trying to stitch it back together while steel and skin argued over which would die first.

  But for every fallen one, another took its pce. There were too many. I couldn’t win this fight, but I could win some time. With a sharp motion, I toppled a nearby shelf. Books, papers, and alchemical research crashed into the fmes, and the boratory erupted in fire. A wall of fme now separated me from them, but it also separated them from me. Now they had something to deal with besides me.

  I turned and dashed down the corridor, deeper into the castle’s bowels. The fortress allowed me to leave, but its walls ughed with a deep, guttural sound without parting lips.

  A vast hall unfurled before me, ribbed columns rising like the fyed bones of a titan. The ceiling dissolved into shadows, where something wrong stirred, with angles that refused to align with logic. The geometry itself was sick. Living eyes spread across the walls like mold, blinking out of rhythm, watching me not as an intruder but as a specimen. And in its heart stood something - Doctor Graves. Or rather, what wore his body like a surgeon’s glove.

  He was rger, heavier than any man should be. His coat was torn, stained in pces with ink and something thicker that had soaked into the fabric, as if he had used it not for protection from dirt, but as a tablecloth on the altar on which he sacrificed books. His hands were long, precise instruments, moving with the chill efficiency that sent ice down my spine. His face was hidden by a hood, but inside I saw eyes. Hundreds. Thousands. Spinning in chaotic discord, each fixed on a different point. They saw more than they could comprehend. And a voice. The voice that contained dozens of voices. Voices he had studied. Voices he had buried inside himself.

  “You’ve come to study me?” the sound struck the walls, echoed from the columns, returning distorted, as if the castle itself took offense. “No, detective.” Graves tilted his head, every eye tracking me. “Here, you are the subject.”

  Graves pulled a sword from the wall. Only the size of a steel beam, crude, monstrous, not made for ordinary combat, but for sughter. The sughter of a cavalry troop by one person. He moved as no man should. One moment he was motionless, the next his massive silhouette was gone, leaving only the sensation of shifting space.

  I fired. Zakhar and Danil roared, spitting lead, but the bullets struck into the air that was no longer where it should be. Graves moved not like a fighter, but like an equation that knew the solution in advance. Like a function of my kill. He wasn't dodging, he was just getting in pces where bullets made no sense.

  “Why the hostility, Doc?” I asked, sidestepped. There was no point in shooting blindly. I needed to get him out of rhythm, to make him talk, not just cut.

  “You still think answers will help?” he lifted the bde, and the world warped in its reflection. “Both detectives and scientists seek answers. But answers are not always helpful. They are always irreversible.”

  He sshed and the air screamed. Not air - the very order of things. The cut opened a wound in reality opening a void. I barely had time to pull back, feeling something cold and foreign pulling me into the slit.

  “Oh, I’ve heard that one. Philosophy, right?” I fired again, but not at him, but at the floor beneath his feet. The stone cracked, breaking his stride. I lunged forward, slipping beneath the next arc of his bde. “How well you've studied me, if you haven't already learned that I’m just a dumb thug with guns.”

  “A dumb thug cannot use guns inside minds, detective,” he parried, sweeping a hand. The space shuddered and the hall shifted, changing and reshaping itself, forcing me to stumble backward. “We are only looking for patterns, fitting reality into a convenient version. But has it not occurred to you that truth can be haphazard?”

  I swore and rolled, firing into columns. Dust billowed, cloaking me.

  “What are you hiding so desperately, Doc?” I waited for his next move, trying to anticipate his trajectory in the cloud.

  “Excellent investigative methods,” Graves's silhouette in the cloud was not distorted, as it should have been. It was fixed, real in the world of illusion. “Ask people what they are hiding. Believe me, detective, everyone hides something. And everyone believes their secrets matter most.”

  “Give me something,” I pressed, stepping back. “So we don't pollute each other's brains for nothing.”

  “Was there ever a time when you were happy you got to the truth, Detective?” he said, and the sword snapped down.

  “So make me the unhappiest detective ever. Happiness isn't my specialty anyway.”

  I didn’t meet the blow. I dove aside, feeling the air split behind me. The castle shook as if its insides were trying to regroup. A hidden passage yawned open - a door that hadn’t existed before. Chance or trap, it made no difference.

  I sprinted through, and Graves didn’t follow. He watched, eyes writhing independently. This wasn’t just a fight. It was a test. And I didn’t know if I was passing or had already failed.

  I found myself in a narrow room lined with cabinets filled with files and papers. An archive. Almost all the drawers were closed, except for one. Inside y a single medical file. There was no text on it. Instead of words, there was bck and white light flickering, like newfangled moving pictures on celluloid.

  “Longford was old,” Graves' voice sounded muffled, distant and hollow. He spoke not here, but from the edges of perception.

  On the sheet, Mr. Longford sat on an examination couch. His face calm, yet something deeper flickered beneath. His fingers trembled as he adjusted his cuffs, not from the cold but from something deeper.

  “Old age is not merely a disease, detective. It is nature’s preordained degeneration. Loss of neuropsticity, gray matter shrinking, tau protein accumution, the unraveling of myelin sheaths. Years erase memory through neurotransmitters, slowing impulses, weakening synapses. Eventually, the mind loses its grip on reality.” Graves’s voice was cold. “It cannot be cured. It cannot even be understood, until you are caught inside it.”

  Longford’s lips moved, but the sound didn’t carry. Only his fingers tensed on the armrests. Only his eyes clung to the empty air. He wasn’t just old. He knew he was old and he knew it couldn’t be stopped.

  “He was afraid,” I muttered without meaning to.

  “Everyone is afraid,” Graves’s voice was closer now. “But Longford did not fear death. He feared there was no time left. That knowledge devoured him before anything else could.”

  “Time for what? His project?”

  The picture jerked, the film stuck in the invisible projector. Longford’s gaze snapped directly at me, seeing me, here, now. His lips whispered something silently, but before I could make it out, the world turned inside out. I was hurled out of Graves’s mind as if pushed out a door into the night by a fierce gust of wind.