The Smell of Decay
Eliana's heart hammered in her chest as she staggered through the endless tunnels. The stone walls pressed in closer with every step, closing around her like the jaws of some ravenous beast. The air was thick, pungent with the scent of rot, a stench that clung to her skin and curled in the back of her throat. It was the smell of death—of goblins who had failed to survive in this savage, merciless world, where strength and cunning were the only currencies worth their weight.
As she moved deeper, the corpses grew more common. They littered the tunnels, twisted and broken, some half-consumed by the fungi and insects that thrived in this foul place. They had all been abandoned, forgotten by the world above. But down here, in the darkness, survival was a constant battle. Here, there was no mercy. The weak were torn apart, devoured, and left to rot as the stronger, the smarter, the more ruthless claimed their place.
Her eyes burned from the acrid air, but she didn't stop. She couldn't. Every moment spent in these tunnels brought her closer to the edge, closer to the point of no return.
Her breath was shallow, ragged. She had been walking for days, though it felt like weeks, maybe even months. Time didn't have meaning down here. The labyrinth twisted endlessly, stretching far beyond the limits of her understanding, and she had long since lost track of the days. The only thing she was sure of now was the gnawing hunger that clawed at her insides, the ache of her empty stomach a constant reminder of her fragility.
The food she had once scrounged was long gone, and now, the only scraps she could find were picked clean by other, more desperate goblins. Every day was a fight for survival. Every day, she found herself becoming more like them—more like the scavengers who thrived in the shadows, who fed on the misfortune of others. And in that, she realized the terrible truth: she was becoming one of them.
The Struggle Within
Eliana's body had grown thinner, frailer—an angular frame of bone and desperation wrapped in grime-soaked rags. Her once-muscular orcish form, so powerful and vibrant after her grotesque evolution, now looked withered, half-starved, stripped of all pride and presence. Her fingers trembled as she moved, her eyes sunken and ringed in bruised purple. She had become a thing that slithered through the cracks, scavenging like the lowest of vermin. There were no mirrors in this place, no reflections, but she no longer needed one. She could feel the hollowness.
What did it matter how she looked? There was no vanity down here. No dignity. No identity. There was only the next breath, the next stolen bite of fungus, the next moment of not being torn apart. Beauty and lineage were dead languages beneath the surface. Down here, names meant nothing. Only power. Only cruelty.
She stole without shame now. Food, water, rags, even bone-charms and fetishes torn from the necks of dying goblins who had wandered too far from the pack. There was no guilt. Only need. If her dagger found a throat in the dark and there was meat to be taken, she would take it. Eliana had long passed the threshold where morality lived. She had killed in silence, pressing her hand over mouths as her blade did its work, watching the flicker of life leave pale yellow eyes. Sometimes they didn't even scream. Sometimes they whispered thanks.
No one could be trusted. Not the goblins who roamed the tunnels with their jagged teeth and flared nostrils. Not the ones who whispered madness, or the ones who watched her too long in the flicker of dying torchlight. Every creature she passed could just as easily slit her throat as share a scrap of moldy bread. She knew this. She felt it in her bones. And yet, in a way that filled her with a deep, choking unease, she recognized herself in them.
The goblins were wretched, savage, always grasping, always hungry. They lived by instinct, by the law of the kill. They trusted nothing, loved nothing, hoped for nothing. They existed to persist. And so did she.
The realization hit her like ice in her lungs: she was no longer different. She had become them.
And it was that—the recognition of herself in their twisted grins, their hollowed eyes—that terrified her more than anything else in the labyrinth. She had clung so tightly to her purpose, to her grand narrative of vengeance. But now, that purpose felt like a rotting fable. Her mind—once sharp, a fire of ambition and rage—was unraveling. She had trouble holding on to thoughts. Words escaped her. Her memories slipped through her fingers like ash.
Lord Theron's face, once a beacon of fury that guided her through suffering, was becoming harder to recall. The details were bleeding away: the curve of his sneer, the exact shade of his eyes, the way he had laughed as he cast her out. They were just shadows now. Ghosts.
Even her own name began to feel foreign, like something belonging to a different creature, in a different time. "Eliana" was a word with no weight in this world. Who was Eliana, here, in the gut of the earth, starving and afraid? She was not a warrior. Not a noble. Not even a person. She was a thing. A scuttling beast. Meat and teeth and fear.
The darkness whispered to her. Not with words, but with presence. It pressed against her skull, seeping through the cracks of her unraveling sanity. It told her she was nothing. It told her she was food for something deeper. Something watching.
Sometimes, she could feel it—the thing beneath the labyrinth. Not goblin. Not beast. Older. Vaster. It breathed through the tunnels, slow and wet and eternal. It pulsed beneath the stone, and in her lowest moments, Eliana imagined that the entire kingdom was its body, and she was crawling through its intestines.
Her dreams had become nightmares. Not visions of fire and vengeance, but endless halls of flesh and bone. She wandered through them screaming, but no sound came. Her feet sank into marrow, her hands pulled at walls that bled when she touched them. She would wake with her nails bloody and broken, having clawed at stone in her sleep.
She knew the hunger was changing her, but the horror ran deeper. It was inside her now. The labyrinth wasn't just taking her strength. It was devouring her identity. Devouring her sense of self. Every day, a little more of Eliana died. And what replaced her… was something else.
Something feral.
Something that could no longer remember why it crawled, only that it must.
Something that didn't scream when it ate cold flesh, that didn't blink when it watched the weak fall behind, that didn't feel guilt anymore—just the bitter relief of still breathing.
And in the suffocating dark, with the blood of strangers on her hands and the echo of her own name ringing hollow in her skull, Eliana began to wonder—
Had she already died?
Or worse—
Was this the shape of her rebirth?
The Weight of Fear
Eliana pressed on, though every step felt like walking through molasses. Her legs were leaden, her muscles screaming, her bare feet raw and blistered against the jagged stone. She had long since abandoned any hope of escape. The labyrinth was not a place meant to be escaped. It wasn't a maze—it was a mouth. And she had been swallowed whole.
The tunnels twisted impossibly, folding back on themselves like the coiled guts of something alive and mad. Every corridor bled into another, like a looping nightmare with no edge, no center, no meaning. She marked the walls at first—scratches with her dagger, drops of blood, scraps of cloth—but it didn't matter. The marks were always gone the next time she passed. Or worse—they had moved. Shifted. Rearranged. Some even seemed to mock her, shaped like crude smiling faces, etched by fingers not her own.
And then came the sounds.
At first, they were subtle—just the faint rustle of air, like breath against the back of her neck. A whisper behind a wall. A gentle scuff, like skin brushing stone. She had told herself it was the tunnels shifting, the echoes of her own passage, the tricks of a mind stretched thin by hunger and dread. But the longer she stayed, the more those sounds grew teeth.
Clicking. Soft at first, like fingernails drumming against bone. Then sharper, scraping, dragging. Like claws. Like talons.
At night—if night could be said to exist in this place—they came closer. The scratching grew louder, more erratic. Something skittered along the ceiling while she tried to rest. Something breathed slow and wet just out of reach. She would wake with her torch sputtering, cold sweat pouring down her back, convinced she had heard her name whispered in a voice that wasn't hers.
She stopped sleeping.
She stopped blinking.
She stopped breathing when the sounds grew too near.
The worst was the silence between them—the held breath before the predator pounces. The silence was never comforting. It was loaded, oppressive. It throbbed like a drumbeat beneath her skin. It told her she was never truly alone.
Something was out there.
Watching.
Waiting.
Every time she moved, it moved with her. Just outside her field of vision. Just behind the next bend. She learned not to turn around. The first time she did, she thought she saw something—long limbs, hunched spine, gleaming eyes like pits of oil. But when she blinked, it was gone. Or maybe it had never been there. Maybe her mind had begun stitching monsters into the shadows to explain what she could no longer understand.
But the fear didn't care whether the danger was real. The fear lived in her now.
It breathed with her. It walked beside her. It nestled beneath her ribcage and throbbed like a second, infected heart.
She tried once to speak—to call out, to challenge whatever stalked her—but her voice cracked in her throat. Her words felt alien in this place. The sound of her own speech seemed to offend the tunnels, as if language didn't belong here. As if speaking had awakened something. From that moment on, the noises grew bolder. The whispers no longer hid. They called.
"Closer...""Flesh...""The hunger walks..."
She didn't answer. She couldn't.
Her dagger was always in her hand now, her knuckles white from the strain of holding it. But what would a blade do against what she could not see? Against the thing that lived just behind the veil of perception, dragging its claws through her thoughts?
Sometimes, in the liminal hours when her eyes drooped and her grip weakened, she would catch glimpses—lank figures crouched at the end of the corridor, limbs too long, faces too smooth. Always smiling. Never blinking. Watching.
She dared not blink either.
The shadows had weight now. They leaned against her. She could feel them pressing on her shoulders, tightening around her chest like unseen hands. Her breath came in shallow, panicked gasps. Her mind flitted like a moth trapped in a jar, frantic and aimless. There was no reason here. No control. Only survival. Only fear.
It wasn't just that she was being hunted.
It was that whatever hunted her—wanted her to know.
It wanted her to feel the slow, strangling build of dread, the sick weight of inevitability. It wanted her to spiral. To unravel.
And she was.
She was.
Down here, beneath the world of light and life, Eliana was no longer who she had been. She was a trembling animal, scuttling through bones and bile, pursued by a nightmare too cruel to show its face. She had thought she'd known fear before—on the battlefield, at the mercy of Theron, in the pit of her transformation—but that fear had been a spark compared to this endless, devouring void.
And still she walked, step after step, heart thudding against her ribs like a death drum, the whispers always just behind her.
Closer.
Closer.
Let me know if you'd like to continue with Part IV or shift focus back to her evolution or confrontation.
The Hollow Despair
One night—or what passed for night in that unholy place—Eliana collapsed against the cold wall of the tunnel, her bones trembling beneath her skin like splintered twigs. Her limbs refused to move, the ache of starvation settling deep into her marrow. Her tongue was dry, swollen in her mouth like a lump of rotting meat. She couldn't even remember the last time she'd eaten. Water was a memory. Rest was a lie. Strength had become a joke the tunnel told her, day after day.
And then she understood.
She had nothing left.
No food. No water. No strength. No vengeance. No self.
The labyrinth hadn't just taken things from her—it had hollowed her out, piece by piece, like a worm burrowing through fruit until all that remained was skin and emptiness. The Eliana who had once burned with purpose, who had clawed her way through evolution and blood, who had defied her uncle's shadow to forge a destiny of power—she no longer existed.
She was something else now. Something thin. Something transparent.
Something broken.
Her breath came in ragged gasps. Her back scraped against the damp wall, slick with a film that might have been moss, or blood, or something worse. The stone pulsed faintly behind her like a living thing, and she felt it—the heartbeat of the labyrinth, slow and deep, thudding in rhythm with her despair. The tunnel was alive. And it had digested her.
She stared into the dark, her eyes glassy, wide. And in that blackness, she saw herself—not as she was, but as she had become. A filthy, emaciated creature huddled in the bowels of the world, trembling at shadows. Her nails were cracked and black with dirt, her hair matted to her skull, her skin marred by sores and insect bites. She couldn't even remember her own voice.
She had become one of them.
A crawler. A shadow. Another monster lurking in the forgotten corners, too far gone to remember what it was like to be a person. Too far gone to care.
The darkness welcomed her. It slithered into her ears, her mouth, her soul. It whispered in a hundred voices, a hundred tongues she almost understood. "Lie down," it said. "You've done enough.""Rest.""Become."
She gritted her teeth, but her resistance was paper-thin. Her mind drifted, thoughts like loose threads unraveling. Was this how they had all died? The corpses she'd passed—had they, too, thought they could resist until the moment they simply... stopped?
And then, piercing the silence, came the laughter.
It was faint at first. A giggle. A breathy, childlike thing. But it grew. It always grew.
It slithered in from the cracks in the walls, curled beneath her feet, spilled from the ceiling like oil. A dozen voices, no, a hundred, each one high-pitched, gleeful, hungry. It didn't echo like normal sound—it clung, soaking into the stone, seeping into her skull. The sound was wrong. It wasn't coming from one place. It was everywhere.
"There she is...""Still breathing...""Not for long...""She hears us now..."
Her heart slammed against her ribs. Her vision trembled at the edges, black spots bleeding inward. Every nerve screamed. Her instincts roared—Run. Fight. Hide. Anything.
But she couldn't move.
Her eyes jerked to the left—movement. Something just out of frame. A shape that wasn't there a second ago. A slithering mass. A silhouette with too many limbs. Watching. Always watching.
She snapped her gaze toward it—and nothing. Empty air. The sound of dripping water.
But she felt it.
Breathing.
Waiting.
Mocking.
Her skin prickled with gooseflesh. Her stomach twisted with nausea. She wasn't alone. She had never been alone.
The laughter was rising now, climbing in pitch, in fervor. Like it was celebrating. Like it had already won.
And maybe it had.
Maybe this was the end—not with a scream, not with a fight, but with the slow, slinking realization that she had been broken. That she was no longer the hunter. She was the prey. Always had been. Since the moment she stepped into this place, she had belonged to it. The labyrinth didn't need to kill her. It only had to wait.
And now?
Now she was ripe.
"Almost ready...""She knows...""She sees...""She hears..."
She clutched her head, pressing her palms against her ears, biting down on her tongue until she tasted blood, just to drown it out. But it didn't matter.
The voices were inside her.
And they were laughing.