The Leviathan didn't sleep.
That became clear on the third day.
Chris and Kelvin had made their camp beside a heap of half-digested bone that passed for "high ground." The air shimmered with a greasy haze. Every breath left a film in the throat—like inhaling smoke filtered through rotten meat. The heat never broke. It wasn't the kind that came from fire or sun; it radiated from within. A damp, internal warmth, like the breath of something enormous that had never exhaled in its life.
Chris woke screaming.
Not from a dream—those had stopped. His mind no longer dared imagine worse than what he could already see.
His leg burned again. The wound was healing, yes—but the pain never left. Every heartbeat was a slow pulse of magma through his bones.
"Still breathing," Kelvin muttered, voice hoarse. "That's something."
They hadn't slept more than an hour at a time. Something about the Leviathan's body refused rest. The walls pulsed with distant movement. Gurgling echoes crept through the air. Sometimes—when it was completely silent—they could hear footsteps.
Not on bone. Not in acid. On flesh.
Slow. Deliberate. Dragging.
They moved on the fourth day.
The boat they'd arrived on was now a bubbling skeleton. What little gear they had left was strapped to their backs—knives dull, Glocks already rusted, food gone.
Kelvin led, flashlight in hand, its beam barely cutting through the yellow murk. Chris limped behind, one hand on the cave wall. His Magicka was circulating now. Not constantly, but enough to numb the worst of the pain.
The tunnels had changed. The fleshy walls became tougher, less slick—coated in patches of calcified tissue like scarred muscle. Strange markings began to appear. Not natural ones—scratches. Notched into the flesh, as if made by claws.
Or tools.
"Someone else was here," Kelvin whispered.
Chris said nothing. But he saw it too.
The deeper they walked, the more bones they found. Not human. Not Leviathan. Things with too many ribs. Skulls with no eye sockets. Spines shaped like spirals.
And then—the tunnel opened.
And they saw the Spine.
It wasn't a spine in the way Chris expected.
The Leviathan's spinal column rose from the ground like a cathedral built from bone and tendon. Pillars of fused vertebrae stretched into darkness, each one wider than a truck. Between them, nerve-like cords pulsed and twitched—strings of light moving through fleshy tubes.
The entire place breathed.
"It's hollow," Kelvin whispered. "How is it hollow?"
They stepped forward. Carefully.
The bones groaned beneath their boots. Not from pressure. From awareness.
Chris stopped. He stared down at the floor.
"Kelvin."
"Yeah?"
"These aren't vertebrae."
"What?"
Chris knelt. Brushed off the film of bile and meat-stink.
They weren't standing on bone.
They were standing on skulls.
Hundreds of them. Merged together. Melded into the floor. A walkway of screaming mouths and eye sockets, all wide open, all facing up—trapped mid-scream, as if the Leviathan had digested something that refused to die.
Kelvin took a step back. "Oh my God."
Then the skulls began to twitch.
The sound was faint at first.
Like insects crawling behind drywall. Then louder. A skittering. Clicking.
From the walls, from the ceiling, from between the vertebrae.
Chris raised his Glock. "Move. Now."
They ran.
Behind them, they emerged.
Pale, translucent creatures—no bigger than cats—crawling on spider-like legs. No eyes. Just mouths. Mouths and tongues. Some had tiny hands on their limbs. Others had no legs at all—just gliding along the wall like leeches in fast-forward.
They didn't screech.
They chattered. High-pitched. Like giggling children.
One leapt—Kelvin turned and fired, blowing its skull open. It didn't scream. It burst, spraying acidic blood that sizzled into the ground.
Chris shot another—missed the head, hit the body. The thing convulsed, then split open, revealing two smaller versions of itself inside, writhing free and latching onto the walls.
They didn't want to kill. Not immediately.
They wanted to chew.
"Keep moving!" Kelvin shouted. "There—look!"
At the end of the bone corridor—a door.
A circular growth in the wall, not natural, not biological. It was metallic. Rusted. Covered in teeth-marks. A hatch.
Chris reached it first. Yanked the wheel—stuck. He screamed, slammed his shoulder into it. Kelvin fired behind him—three of the crawling things dropped, but five more took their place.
The Watch flickered on.
"Accessing emergency override. This hatch was part of the original maintenance route. Stand by."
The wheel moved on its own. Screeched open. The hatch groaned, then swung wide—
Chris and Kelvin dove through.
The door slammed behind them.
Darkness.
The room was silent.
Their flashlights flickered. Then stayed on.
Metal walls.
They were in a chamber. Real walls. Real floor. Rusted panels, bloodstains on the corners. A broken screen hung from the ceiling—displaying looping footage of something that looked like Earth.
Mountains.
An ocean.
Then static.
"This was an old monitoring station," the AI Watch said. "Created by... one of your predecessors. No one's used it in 180 years."
"Predecessors?" Chris coughed.
The Watch didn't answer.
Kelvin slumped against the wall. "What is this place?"
Chris limped over to a console. Touched it.
It hissed.
Then a compartment opened.
Inside—a preserved human skull. Polished. Staring back with hollow sockets. Something was carved into the bone.
A name.
CHRIS MANTLE
He recoiled.
"What the—"
Kelvin stared at him.
"Is that… you?"
Chris backed away. "It can't be. That's not possible."
The Watch stayed silent.
The lights dimmed.
A low hum began to rise from beneath the floor.
And far above them—in the spine, in the flesh, in the lungs of the beast—
The Leviathan laughed.
The silence inside the chamber wasn't peace.
It was expectation.
The kind of hush a haunted building keeps right before the door slams on its own. Chris could feel it in his gums. A pressure. A weight. The only real comfort came from the smell—or rather, the lack of it. No more sulfur, no more acid mist. The air was stale, metallic, but breathable.
For the first time in days, he and Kelvin weren't choking.
They didn't speak for a while. Chris stared at the skull marked with his name, still resting in the strange console. It hadn't moved. Hadn't crumbled. Just sat there. Grinning.
He eventually covered it with a nearby towel.
"Alright," he muttered. "Let's find out where the hell we are."
The monitoring station had three rooms.
One was the control chamber they'd entered—fitted with decaying equipment, some still powered by long-dead backup cores.
The second was a canteen. Small. Spartan. Lined with sealed compartments and labeled with nearly worn-away stickers: "Nutrient Ration – Mk. IV", "Preserved Flesh – Not for Vegans", "Hydration Reagents." Somehow, the food inside had lasted. The Watch explained that the room's atmosphere had been cryo-regulated, using low-frequency time-lock magicka seals.
It tasted like boiled paper—but it didn't kill them.
The third room was the archive.
And that's where the horror deepened.
Journals.
Dozens. Maybe more. Stored in tight vacuum crates, some damaged by moisture, others still pristine. Most were handwritten. Others printed in tight, neurotic fonts. All of them were written by past adventurers—or researchers—trapped here before them. Some names were redacted. Others weren't even names, just initials or identification numbers.
Kelvin sat cross-legged on the metal floor, flipping through one.
Chris leaned over another, already three pages deep.
"They were here before us," Chris whispered. "Way before."
Kelvin frowned. "How did they get in here? Why isn't this known? Why hasn't this been released?"
Chris pointed to a line.
"Mission 12 was the last. We confirmed the impossible: this Leviathan is not merely a beast. It is a pocket dimension. A prison turned inward, a maze with a stomach. Each attempt to escape only feeds it. We estimate it has consumed over 1,200 vessels in the last century."
Kelvin blinked. "...Twelve hundred?"
"That's just this Leviathan. There are others."
They kept reading.
The lore was deeper than either could've expected.
There wasn't just one Leviathan.
There were many.
Not species. Not subspecies. Individual entities. Each with their own "age," personality, biology, even dimension of digestion. The one they were inside had been named:
"Delphinon Oneiroi."
The Dreaming Whale.
And the older a Leviathan became, the more unhinged its internal logic turned. It didn't age like normal creatures—it warped. Reality bent inside them. Biology broke down. Space folded.
"The Dreaming Whale's lungs process not oxygen, but a psycho-reactive compound—part gas, part memory."
"Extended exposure produces neurological decay, night terrors, and visual overlays not grounded in the external world. DO NOT trust what you see."
"Its internal ecosystem is partly real. Partly projection."
Kelvin flipped to a chemical diagram. His eyes narrowed.
"What the hell is this?"
Chris leaned in.
The notes showed a compound—beyond comprehension. Elements labeled in made-up letters.
Xz⁴³ – Proton count: 261
Lq¹² – Reactive with human neurons
Ng∞ – Half-life of 3.5 milliseconds, constantly regenerating
St (No number) – Described only as "resonant soul vapor"
The gas mixture had no official name.
One researcher dubbed it:
"MIRAGE-9"
(Multi-Isomer Reactive Altered Gas Emulsion – Grade 9)
It didn't just mess with your head—it restructured perception. Induced artificial sensory input directly into your limbic system. Meaning: when Chris and Kelvin saw the creatures crawling out of walls, they might have been hallucinating.
Or worse: partially hallucinating.
Because the gas didn't fabricate random visions. It dug into your deepest fears, worst memories, primal instincts—and amplified them. It used your own terror to shape what you saw.
That made it more dangerous.
You couldn't trust your eyes, your ears, or even your memories. The Leviathan's lungs infected your soul with its sickness.
Hours passed.
They moved back into the canteen. Kelvin found an old heating unit still connected to the station's core. He used it to warm a pouch of synthetic protein paste.
Chris didn't eat.
He kept flipping through another journal. This one had sketches.
One of the sketches showed the skull.
His skull.
It was labeled: "Temporal Echo – Subject CM-87. Theory: Recursive Identity Loop."
He felt cold. The Watch remained silent.
Kelvin ate the paste in two gulps.
"You okay?" he asked.
Chris didn't answer.
He stared at the image of his own skull, not drawn recently—but dated over 80 years ago.
And in the bottom corner, written in the same shaky hand:
"He'll come again. He always does."
"The Whale remembers."
Chris closed the book.
The station lights flickered again.
Outside, beyond the sealed door, something began to thump softly. Wetly. A heartbeat?
No. A footstep.
The Leviathan wasn't sleeping.
It was aware.
Ten minutes later.
It was Kelvin who got the console running again.
He tore open the rusted panel with the knife, exposing a nest of brittle copper wires and faded, hand-labeled circuits. The fact that this thing even looked analog made Chris's skin crawl. It was built like something from the 1940s—but far too advanced in design. A strange middle ground between brutalist machinery and precision magi-tech.
Chris stood over him, holding the flashlight while he worked. The air tasted like copper. The overhead lights flickered in a slow, rhythmic pulse, as though synced to the breathing of the beast around them.
"Got it," Kelvin muttered. He twisted two red wires together. The panel hissed. The floor beneath their feet gave off a tremor—faint, but real. The monitor lit up.
A pale blue glow bled from the console's massive screen, the resolution grainy and smeared with dust. No company branding. No serial code. Just a loading icon shaped like a double-headed eagle wrapped in vines.
The screen flickered once. Then twice.
Then the text appeared:
"TARTARIAN EMPIRE EXPLORATION FORCE: ZETA-12"
"Welcome Back, Exploration Captain Chris Mantle."
They both froze.
Chris took a slow step backward. His mouth opened, then closed. He turned to Kelvin, who looked just as stunned.
"What the fuck?" Kelvin finally said.
Chris just shook his head.
"I—I don't know. I swear, I don't know."
The Watch's screen flickered on without permission.
"This unit detects a 97.8% match between you and the registered biometric profile of Captain Chris Mantle of Zeta-12."
Kelvin let out a laugh—dry, sharp. "A Captain? You?"
"Shut up," Chris said, but his voice was hollow.
Kelvin turned back to the screen and tapped at the console. The interface was primitive, built on something older than any operating system either of them had seen—some forgotten tech. The mouse cursor lagged behind like it was wading through syrup. The language was a mix of archaic English and Latin. Everything felt... off.
"Tartarian Empire?" Kelvin repeated under his breath. "Who the hell are they?"
"No clue," Chris said. "But apparently, I worked for them."
He found a file directory labeled:
MISSION LOGS: ZETA-12
DATE INDEX: -2116 A.E.
Chris clicked it open.
The logs were corrupted—most reduced to gibberish or static. But a few were readable. Photos. Maps. Videos of giant megaliths, flying pyramids, even enormous underground cities carved into the roots of what looked like miles-high trees. Soldiers in dark armor wielding Magicka in forms they hadn't even seen before—Magicka that bent space, fractured light, rewound time.
"This isn't possible," Kelvin whispered. "We didn't have this kind of tech over a hundred years ago."
"No," Chris said. "But they did."
More logs showed ancient beasts, rival factions, floating cities. And the Leviathans. There were entire files dedicated to them. One showed the internal map of Delphinon Oneiroi—the one they were inside.
The map was crude, distorted, but it gave them something they hadn't had since entering:
A path.
"Tail section," Chris muttered, pointing to a flickering marker. "Here. Says there's an 'Extraction Pod' lodged in the vertebral duct."
"That's halfway down the body," Kelvin said, zooming in. "We're here—barely in the upper lung. It'll take days."
"Better than starving in a haunted whale," Chris muttered.
Kelvin nodded, then looked at him. "And if you are this Captain Mantle… you think you've been here before?"
Chris didn't answer.
But in his mind, something shifted. A deep echo. Like a thought he didn't know he had.
The words from the journal returned:
"He'll come again. He always does."
Chris felt the chill crawl up his spine like centipede legs.
They began packing.
The canteen provided one more meal. Enough to last two days—if they rationed. They salvaged batteries from dead units, scavenged a second flashlight, and filled two small canisters with rehydrated protein sludge. It wasn't survival gear—it was a prayer.
Before they left, Chris paused in front of the console. His fingers hovered over the command line.
"What if we're walking into something worse?" he muttered.
"We already are in something worse," Kelvin said. "Might as well keep walking."
Chris exhaled through his nose, nodded once, and stepped away.
As they entered the corridor toward the spinal passage, the Watch buzzed softly.
"Probability of survival has increased from 0.0004% to 0.0032%. Caution: trajectory still indicates extreme fatality risk."
Chris ignored it.
The hallway beyond was curved, organic, like they were walking down a metallic throat. Strange lights shimmered through pulsating membranes in the walls. No sound but their boots and the faint hum of the Leviathan's unknowable biology.
And behind them, back in the monitor room, the console screen blinked one final message before fading to black:
"He remembers. You forgot. Welcome home."