Into the Dark

The air grew colder the deeper Maren descended. The narrow stairway, carved through concrete and reinforced with scavenged steel, spiraled downward like a wound in the earth. Her lantern’s glow flickered over the walls—graffiti, handprints, and faded slogans from a time when people still believed in protest. Freedom for All. End the Tyranny. The paint had run with the moisture, turning the words into bleeding ghosts.

Above ground, the villagers had watched her vanish into the entrance hidden behind a half-collapsed wall of a gutted train terminal. For a moment, no one moved. The only sound was the wind sighing through the skeletal remains of Los Angeles.

“She went down there,” a young man whispered.
No one replied.

Old Tomas, the unofficial leader of the group, tightened his jaw. “If she’s who she says she is—Silen’s blood—we can’t let her go alone.”

Another villager—a woman with soot-streaked cheeks and the cautious eyes of someone who had survived too much—hesitated. “And if it’s a trap? You remember what happened the last time someone came from the north.”

Tomas looked at the cracked stairway yawning into darkness. “Then we’ll deal with it,” he said quietly. “But if there’s even a chance she’s telling the truth, that she’s found something down there—maps, routes, proof of others—we can’t ignore it.”

One by one, the villagers gathered torches and makeshift weapons. The firelight painted their faces in amber and shadow, each expression caught between fear and faith.

Below, Maren pressed forward, the tunnel opening into what had once been a maintenance corridor. Her light skimmed over remnants of a world long gone: an overturned cart, a rusted sign reading Metro Division—Restricted Access, and, scattered across the ground, fragments of paper that looked eerily familiar.

She knelt, heart pounding. On one of the scraps, half buried in dust, was a name she recognized—written in his hand. Silen.

The ink had run, but the looping “S” was his, unmistakably. Her breath caught. He had been here.

Then came a sound—faint but distinct. Footsteps echoing in the distance. She turned sharply, lantern trembling in her grasp, the flame dancing across the dark.

“Hello?” she called, her voice a whisper swallowed by the tunnel.

No answer—just the steady rhythm of boots on concrete, drawing nearer.

Above, the villagers reached the stairway entrance. The ground shuddered beneath them as if the tunnels themselves had exhaled. They looked at one another—hesitant, uncertain—but Tomas nodded once.

“Go,” he said.

They descended into the dark, unaware that the air below had begun to hum, faintly, with the first hints of power stirring from the old grid—a sign that something deep in the underground was waking.