It felt like stepping straight into someone else's memory. A memory that wasn't passive or quiet—it hunted for ears.
The tunnel tightened the farther they went. The walls leaned in, slick with moss, swollen fungus blooming from cracks like tumors fed fat on secrets. Somewhere ahead, music bled into the air—not music, not exactly. Notes without sound. Shaped, not played. Like the air itself was waiting to hum along.
The smell hit next. Sweet, wet rot. Like fruit left out under a sun that didn't care anymore.
Vines knotted up in shades that didn't look natural—purples sickly and greens too pale—crawled over stone gone black with age. They clutched at the walls like dead fingers reaching back toward breath. Behind them, their shadows warped, trailing too long. They bent the wrong way.
No one talked. Not because they wanted to be quiet. The place punished sound. Even breathing felt wrong, like dragging burlap through the lungs.
These walls weren't built. They were sculpted. By memory, not hands.
Ezreal stopped fast at the bend, his eyes lighting up with that cold eldritch sheen. "Something's off," he said, voice taut like a pulled thread about to snap.
"Gee, y'think?" Dax muttered, rubbing at his neck as he glared at the slick stone. "This hallway feels like it wants us dead and digested."
Verek dropped into a crouch beside a smear of glowing spores, fingers brushing across the wet gleam. "This isn't dwarven," he murmured. "Or Phokoran. These weren't meant to be walked. They were meant to be survived."
"I can survive just fine," Caylen muttered, palm pressed to the stone beside him. "But I'll complain the whole way."
Thimblewick hovered just behind Verek's shoulder, a twitchy black blur of fur and arcane nerves. He didn't say anything. Just listened, ears flicking like antennae with each pulse of light.
They turned the corner.
The silence on the other side swallowed them whole.
A dome spread out above them, high and wide and wrong. The walls were lined with stone benches, curved like some twisted choir pit. Fungal veins wept violet light down broken columns. In the middle, the floor dropped away into a pit ringed with bone shards, melted wax, and the charred stink of incense long dead.
And floating over it all—something shaped like a man.
Only, it wasn't. Not once your eyes focused. Too tall. Too stretched. Skin pulled taut like leather over void-colored veins. Its robes hung in strips, rotten and fluttering as if underwater. And where the mouth should've been—nothing. Just a chest cavity, hollow but pulsing slow and steady. Like it was breathing through the wrong part of itself.
Verek stared, voice low and still as prayer. "The Graveborn. A failed apotheosis. Someone who tried to ascend… and didn't finish dying."
The thing tilted its head, slow. Not seeing. Listening.
Its chest opened.
And the choir began.
No words. Just a groaning sorrow that tore through them like wet cloth. The voices of the dead, screaming their last breath on repeat. Grief turned into sound, soaking the air, crawling into their bones.
Ezreal doubled over, clutching his head with both hands.
Caylen's lute made a single awful note and went dead.
Dax dropped to one knee, knuckles white where they hit the stone.
Only Verek stayed standing, eyes blazing faintly like some far-off constellation caught fire. "It sings with memory," he said, voice slicing through the noise. "Voices it swallowed whole."
The pit answered back.
Bones shifted.
Skeletons dragged themselves out of the black. Not called by magic—yanked by pain. They jerked like puppets with the strings tangled. Mouths wide open, limbs twitching like they forgot how to move.
Ezreal wiped blood from his nose, his voice gone to gravel. "Now. We end this."
They charged.
Dax was the first into the fray, fists lit like stars going out. Every punch cracked bone to dust. Caylen's melody bent strange, pulling loose the threads that kept the dead together. One note and the husks unraveled.
Verek spoke a single word—sharp, final. Flame burst out in a ring, consuming everything that still crawled.
Ezreal slipped between them, blades flashing firelight, movement as fast as spite and twice as sharp.
The Graveborn didn't move fast. It didn't need to. It floated like regret—slow, constant, impossible to outrun.
Its song didn't cut. It hollowed.
Ezreal stumbled. The voices turned inward. They knew him.
You will die like the others. Alone. Unwanted. Chosen by suffering.
"No," he growled, fury snapping his voice in half. Eldritch force burst from his hands, tearing straight through the thing's chest.
It reeled, howling through that hole where its mouth should've been. The whole dome shook.
Thimblewick darted ahead, his tiny body casting up a shield of starlight just in time to catch a blast of pure sound headed for Verek.
"You're late," Verek said behind the shimmer, calm but not casual.
"I hate choirs," Thimblewick snapped, ears flat and sharp.
Dax launched from a broken bench, slamming his staff into the Graveborn's ribs with a crack that made the walls flinch. Caylen's voice surged higher, all raw light and cracked rage.
Verek lifted a hand.
"Fall."
Gravity turned mean. The Graveborn slammed into the floor hard enough to break things that didn't heal. It writhed. The song faltered.
Ezreal didn't stop walking. His blades burned brighter with each step, the kind of fire that eats guilt and keeps going.
"This song's done," he said.
He drove the blades deep into the chest cavity.
The music died.
Bones dropped.
The Graveborn broke apart, crumbling into ash like it'd never belonged in this world to begin with.
Silence.
They stood. Breathing hard. Shaking.
Caylen slumped against his lute like it was the only thing keeping him upright. "That was the worst one yet," he muttered.
"We're close," Verek said, but his eyes were already elsewhere. Past the ashes. Toward whatever came next.
Ezreal wiped blood from under one eye. "Too close. We're out of pauses."
Dax spat blood, wiped his mouth, and grinned crookedly. "Then let's make what's left count."
Something stirred underneath them.
Not magic. Not power. Something thinner. Older. Barely holding shape.
It buzzed up through the floor and into their ribs, making dust spiral in little lazy loops. Moss shimmered on the walls.
And then the walls showed things.
Not art. Not quite. Murals that hadn't existed a blink ago now stretched out—half-finished, like dreams half-remembered. Wings too wide. Eyes without anything to belong to. A figure kneeling with its hands empty.
The stone under their boots flexed.
Not stone.
Something else.
Muscle. Skin. Whatever this place had been made of—it was starting to wake.
The quiet between footsteps thickened.
The song didn't return.
It had changed.
The catacombs remembered.
Rot sank deeper. Dread turned heavy, oily. Time slipped weird, unspooling around them. Minutes blinked past. Or hours. Or both.
They kept walking. Through walls that felt like veins. Past webs of fungus that hissed when touched. Even the shadows started to smear together, until light felt like something they'd made up.
Then—light.
Ezreal slowed, eyes narrowing. "Wait," he said. "Something's here. Not hostile… just not all there."
"I vote hallucination," Caylen groaned, dragging a palm down his face. "My feet just started a union."
The next chamber opened up like a sigh.
Soft blue moss coated the ground, glowing like a crushed sky. Blood-red mushrooms drifted in the stillness, their caps pulsing faint like heartbeats in a dream. A silver pool waited at the center, reflecting the spores clinging to the dome above.
Wrong, but beautiful.
"I've never seen anything… balanced like this," Verek said, kneeling beside a knot of mushrooms. His voice softened like he didn't want to wake it. "It's dreaming."
"Then leave it dreaming," Dax grunted, collapsing onto a stone slab. "I'll die right here, thanks. Preferably mid-nap."
Ezreal scanned the edges, blades still drawn. Nothing jumped out. No signs, no whispers. Even Thimblewick floated lower, curling up tight like a rabbit pretending it wasn't scared.
For once, everything held still.
They let it.
Bones loosened.
After a long while, Caylen stretched out on the moss, arms behind his head. "Ever think about how stupid-young we are?" he asked, half-laughing through his exhaustion. "We should be in some tower. Practicing stances. Getting yelled at by some wrinkled old mentor with wild eyebrows."
Verek chuckled quietly. "I got yelled at. In six languages."
"I didn't," Dax muttered from the slab. "They just threw me in with the other kids and hoped I survived."
Caylen turned his head toward Ezreal. "And you?"
Ezreal cracked one eye. His voice was flat. "I grew up with demons."
A beat.
"So… worse than Eyebrow Guy?" Caylen offered, a tired grin on his face.
Ezreal didn't smile.
But it was close.