His steps echoed in the empty corridors, only accompanied by the quiet crackle of some sparsely placed torches here and there, nearly not enough in numbers to illuminate this somber place. After a while, Shin had resolved himself to take one directly from its metal holders with him. Better than to suddenly and unexpectedly finding himself in the dark if one of those blew out (and flickery like they were, they probably would).
So, source of light held out by the arm he hadn't invalidated when throwing himself on his door, he explored the place.
Not like there was much to explore anyway. There were mossy stones that reeked of humidity, molded beams of dark wood to support the structure of these tunnels, and locked doors he didn't have the patience to knock down like he did with his own (he pushed down the little voice in his head that wondered if behind each of these was trapped someone, just like he had been. So what if there was ?).
So Shin kept on walking.
Step
step
step
...
Shin stopped in front of an opened metal door. Looking up at it suspiciously. It was the fifth one he'd come across in this specific tunnel.
He inched closer, holding his torch ahead of him, trying to cast some more light inside the dark cell.
A putrid smell emanated from the space, the young boy swallowed his disgust and stepped forward, feeling a now instinctive recoil as the obscurity seemed to swallow him and his fire. Something cold and sticky met the bare skin of his feet, he didn't have to look down to know it was blood.
But it hadn't dried yet. Shin looked around, sure enough, there in the corner, facing the wall, a not-entirely-decomposed corpse laid on the grey stone. Across the five cadavers he'd come across in the opened rooms, this one was, by far, the best preserved.
That, other than deeply unsettling him, earned Shin an interesting fact; they had been locked up at different moment.
He gently deposed the torch on the ground and kneeled next to the young corpse, his invalid arm limping to his side uselessly. He then proceeded to turn the corpse in his direction, not without difficulty, ignoring how the skin felt under his fingers.
It reminded him of an overly ripe apple, soft and bruised.
The sickly pale face of a girl that looked no older than he did greeted him, contorted in a convulsed expression of pain, frozen on her face, eyes completely white and wide opened, lips purple and chapped.
Just to be sure, Shin placed a finger under her nose, no breath.
He pressed a thumb against her carotid artery, no pulse.
He looked down at the puddle of still -relatively- fresh blood under them and raised a silent eyebrow. Where did it all come from ? Her shirt (the same material as his, he noted) was tainted with reddish-brown spots.
He remembered his own hemorrhagic episode and turned her around again, with lesser care than would've been appropriate for a dead body, revealing a large blood stain, still crimson in the middle. Between the shoulder blades.
Shin's hand inched forward, he paused, muttering a 'sorry' under his breath before lifting the corpse's shirt, just enough to reveal the raw, bloody skin underneath... And the deep gashes in it.
Several lines carved in the skin itself, Shin observed the edges of the wound, clean and neat. He resisted the sudden and odd urge to run his fingers along it. It didn't look like random slashes of anger or of sadistic intent. It looked... Purposeful ?
He narrowed his eyes, reaching for the torch to bring it closer.
It looked like writing. The cuts appeared like brushstrokes, the skin like a blank canvas, and the blood like some sort of sinister ink. A shiver ran down his spine at the troubling comparison that came to his mind. His hand absent-mindedly reached over his own shoulder, slipping under the fabric of his shirt, brushing against the top of a shoulder blade. He suddenly felt overly aware of the dried blood that itched his skin.
He couldn't help but wonder...
...
He came across more and more bodies, all dead, none alive. At one point, he didn't even bother to look at the open doors anymore, it was always the same thing; dead children, lying in a pool of their own blood. He'd checked the back of a few of them, all had those mysterious engravings, all of them were slightly different, but similar enough for Shin to deduce that it was, indeed, a pattern, and not random cuts.
He had also found, more encouragingly, empty rooms.
Empty rooms that had been recently deserted, by the look of the red stains on the floor.
That means he wasn't the only one that had managed to escape, which was good, even better, some doors had been busted from outside, not from the inside, which meant that there were people actively trying to help whoever was trapped in them. Shin wasn't quite sure he would be able to readily trust anyone he'd meet in these shady corridors, but hope was starting to swell in his chest.
He passed by a few more doors, the more he seemed to progress through these tunnels, the more open metal doors he found, he noted vaguely.
Squeak.
Shin paused, halting right there in his tracks at the sound, unsure if he had heard right.
Somewhere in the darkness of the tunnel, something shifted. A high-pitched sound reached his ear again, one that sounded extremely out of place in the silent tunnels.
What was that ?
He slowly placed his torch on the ground, carefully stepping forward, in the direction of the noise.
He took a turn in one of the intersection, quieting down his own steps until the only sound that could be heard were the crackle of the torches on the walls.
And the unknown squeak.
As he slowly but surely got closer, another noise reached him. He narrowed his eyes he heard a laborious and pained breathing, accompanied by odd gurgles, interrupted by cries so raspy and low they were almost inaudible.
A person ?
Shin had left his torch behind to not alert any potential source of danger, and in the badly lit place, he could see nothing but vague shadows in front of him. But the source of these weird sounds was getting closer.
He just didn't know how close until something shifted in the dark, revealing a pair of eyes the color of rubies gleaming in the obscurity. Shin stopped dead in his tracks, watching with some sort of horrified fascination the outlines of a person lying flat in the middle of the way, weakly struggling under the red-eyed creature as it feasted on their neck.
