A group of heroes descends beneath a mysterious Inn, uncovering a hidden, ancient chamber filled with eerie murals that depict themselves in haunting detail—as if they’ve already lived and forgotten the horrors shown. They are confronted by a disembodied voice known as The Crowned One, who reveals they are trapped in a loop of their own forgotten past. As memories resurface, they realize the Inn is built around Aetharion, a machine that manipulates time and memory, created centuries ago to guide fate but corrupted by too much knowledge. To escape the Inn’s hunger and break the cycle, they must travel centuries into the past and unmake the Inn’s very creation. But to do so, one of them must remain behind, sacrificed to keep the path open. As the Inn begins to devour reality itself, the group descends toward their final chance at redemption—or erasure.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The air thickens as they descend, each step echoing down the endless spiral staircase beneath the altar. The air is colder here—denser, as though every breath carries the weight of a thousand unsaid words.
The light changes. Torches mounted to the walls are already lit, flickering without flame, as if awakened by their presence alone.
They step into a massive, circular chamber, its walls arched and impossibly high, vanishing into shadow.
And then… the voice returns.
The Voice of the Crowned One
“So long you have journeyed… yet you do not remember.“
“You stand within your own memories, cast in stone, chiseled by choices you’ve yet to make.“
“You stand within your own memories, cast in stone, chiseled by choices you’ve yet to make.“
The voice is clearer now. Rich, deep, but with a twisted familiarity, like hearing your own voice reflected from a nightmare.
Each of them feels it differently:
- Nikiforos shudders, as if hearing an echo from a time before time.
- Gleg grips his mug tighter—he knows that voice.
- Pitoros sways, whispering, “It can’t be him…”
- Koump’aros flinches. Something in him recognizes the Crowned One.
- Gogos trembles. He’s heard this voice in dreams he can never remember.
The Painted Walls
Their eyes adjust to the room—and horror creeps in.
The walls are covered in carvings, ancient, detailed, and hauntingly familiar.
Painted frescoes and deep-etched bas-reliefs show:
- Pando’ Spiros standing atop a mountain of bones, eyes glowing like fire.
- Doc Pitoros injecting a screaming child with silver light.
- Nikoko crowned, not as Gaslord—but as a tyrant, flames behind him.
- St. Amou casting down a radiant spear into a lake of faceless corpses.
- Gogos… tearing off one of his many faces and revealing nothing beneath.
- Sir Patsir’ I.0. — even in death, his likeness is here — kneeling, broken, before a throne made of glass.
But the most disturbing—each image is weathered, aged, ancient.
They look centuries old.
They look centuries old.
And yet… they were carved with perfect likenesses of the present-day group.
Sir Kostanto approaches one, brushing the dust from a mural of himself:
“This is… impossible. This armor—this exact scar—I got this two months ago!”
The Riddle
As panic and awe churn together, the ground rumbles. The torches flare—and then lock into an unnatural stillness.
Stone grinds. A pedestal rises from the center of the room. Atop it, an obsidian tablet with burning golden letters:
“I have no mouth, but I speak.
I have no eyes, but I see.
You cannot run from me, yet I never move.”
I have no eyes, but I see.
You cannot run from me, yet I never move.”
“What am I?”
The voice chuckles again—closer now. Personal. Familiar. Disgustingly so.
“Speak the truth… or become the past these walls remember.”
The chamber falls silent as the whispered word slips from Nikiforos’ lips:
“…The past.”
No one breathes.
The torches dim.
The torches dim.
The tablet in the center shudders, then fractures down the middle. A pulse—like the toll of a thousand funeral bells—rips through the stone beneath them. The walls groan, the ancient images of themselves shift, as if writhing in agony.
And then… the voice.
Not distant. Not distorted.
Inside the room.
Not distant. Not distorted.
Inside the room.
“You walk upon your own grave, heroes…”
“There is no path forward but the one already trodden.”
“You must return to the first misstep. Or die in its echo.”
“There is no path forward but the one already trodden.”
“You must return to the first misstep. Or die in its echo.”
The Realization
Arguments explode in every direction.
- Gleg slams his tankard on the pedestal. “Travel through time? What are we, fables now?”
- Gogos chuckles nervously. “I’ve been other people, but never another when…”
- Sir Kostanto crosses his arms. “If the Inn holds the curse… we must find its origin. But how does one walk backward through fate?”
- Nikoko, eyes wide, mutters, “The gas… The inn’s air. Have you not felt it? Our minds—twisted. We’ve already been here before… we just don’t remember.”
Pando’ Spiros roars, pointing to the carvings:
“Then we’re trapped in a loop. A cursed cycle. The Inn doesn’t just imprison the body—it feeds on the soul’s recursion!”
St. Amou, quieter than all, speaks last:
“To escape, we must unmake the Inn’s birth… and to do so, we must first witness it.”
The Inn Responds
As if reacting to their resolve, the room begins to shift. The floor beneath their feet tilts, mosaics rearranging like tiles of a puzzle. Doorways appear—no longer made of wood or iron, but of pure memory. Wisps of ghostlight flicker around them, each one showing brief flashes:
- A much younger Gleg, signing the Inn’s deed.
- Pitoros in a blood-stained labcoat, in a room that resembles the cellar beneath the Inn.
- A masked figure—perhaps Gogos, or someone he once was—opening a door marked “DO NOT OPEN.”
And one vision—too blurry to define—but it shows a crown, and a child’s hand touching it.
Madness or Salvation?
Their path is now clear. Unthinkable. Unprovable.
They must step into the past. Live it. Change it. Risk all to remember what they were forced to forget.
They must step into the past. Live it. Change it. Risk all to remember what they were forced to forget.
But not all agree.
- Pando’ Spiros refuses to believe fate is mutable.
- Gogos is terrified of uncovering a face he once wore.
- St. Amou says nothing—but tears stream down his cheeks.
“If we go,” whispers Koump’aros, “we go to unmake ourselves.”
“Or finally become who we were meant to be,” replies Nikiforos.
The name slips from St. Amou’s cracked lips like a sin finally confessed:
“Aetharion.”
The chamber reacts.
Torches flare violently. The ground shakes with a deep, metallic hum—not of stone, but of a distant, awakening machine. The others freeze, the name crashing into them like a memory once suppressed.
Pitoros’ eyes widen. “The… what did you say?”
St. Amou stumbles forward, hands trembling, staring through the ghostfire in the air as if seeing an old specter.
“It was my creation. The key. The mistake. Aetharion was designed to transcend time—to hear echoes from the future, to guide our path from what will be. But… it heard too much. And it began to speak back.”
The whispers. The voices. The dreams.
Now others nod—not in understanding, but in fearful recognition.
The Forgotten Thread
Nikiforos steps forward, his gaze cold and resolute.
“It didn’t just speak to you, Amou. It sang to others. In dreams. In riddles. In songs I thought were mine… but were never mine.”
Gleg, for once without his grin, sets his mug aside.
The shadows flicker behind him.
He places a hand on his chest, just over his heart.
The shadows flicker behind him.
He places a hand on his chest, just over his heart.
“I hid something, once. Buried it beneath the Inn. It came here before the walls were stone, before this was even an Inn. I built ‘Fantasy’ around it. I didn’t know what it was—not truly—but it spoke in your voice, Amou. It knew too much. And I was… lonely.”
He looks up at the others. “We were all chosen. Not for what we are. For what we would do when it called.”
The Aetharion’s Replica
The room suddenly shifts—the murals turning, forming a map. Below the inn. Beneath the cellars. Deeper still—an impossible place, where time distorts and stone remembers.
“Aetharion… lives again,” St. Amou breathes.
“A replica. A mirror. Or perhaps the original… bent by time.”
“A replica. A mirror. Or perhaps the original… bent by time.”
They realize now: the Inn is not just a prison. It is an incubator. A mythic machine hiding a machine older than itself. Gleg’s “Inn” was a veil. Nikiforos’ “songs” were instructions. And Amou’s madness? A side effect of touching the thread of fate.
The Secret Fractures
But this shared secret fractures the group:
- Pando’ Spiros grabs Nikiforos by the collar:
“You knew this? All along?! You let us suffer?!”
- Kostanto steps in between. “Hold your blade. If he hid it, it was not without burden.”
- Gogos chuckles darkly. “Or maybe this was always the plan. We’re just puppets dancing for your Aetharion.”
- St. Amou, now fierce, raises his staff.
“This is no longer about redemption. It is about unmaking the sin. We must go below.”
And So the Descent Begins
The map shows them the path: a door at the farthest cellar wall. A door no one remembers ever noticing… and yet all of them have dreamed of.
They must descend. Together. Or divided.
But the real question hangs like thunderclouds above them all:
If Aetharion can twist time…
Who among them has already used it?
Who among them has already used it?
The torches sputter. The walls breathe. The Inn trembles—not with rage, but with hunger.
The moment the map on the wall fades, a low, guttural groan rises from deep below. The group barely manages to stay upright as the floor beneath them pulses like a heartbeat, the air thickening with age and echo. It isn’t just stone anymore. It’s flesh and memory.
“It’s waking up,” whispers Gleg.
“The Inn knows we’ve found it.”
“The Inn knows we’ve found it.”
The Devouring
Without warning, the doors upstairs slam shut with the force of judgment. One by one, the exits vanish, swallowed by walls that stretch and twist. Windows blink closed like eyelids. Even the fire in the hearth dies, replaced by a cold, sickly blue glow.
A chair collapses in on itself, turning to ash.
A table melts like wax.
And somewhere upstairs… something laughs.
A table melts like wax.
And somewhere upstairs… something laughs.
They are trapped.
Not because they are weak.
Not because they are guilty.
But because the Inn has finished feeding on their fears, their trials, their past.
Not because they are guilty.
But because the Inn has finished feeding on their fears, their trials, their past.
Now, it wants their final story.
The Realization
It hits them not as revelation—but as dread.
Nikiforos stumbles back from the shaking wall, clutching his head.
“It’s over. The Inn will take us. We’re no longer guests. We’re chapters now. We’ll be folded into its skin.”
St. Amou, pale but fierce, steps forward.
“No. There’s one thread left to pull.”
He turns to the wall-map—now seared in his mind—and points downward.
“Aetharion. Not to change the now. But to abandon it. Not to rewind days… but to burn the book entirely.”
They all look at him.
“We must go back… not years… not decades… but centuries.
Before the Inn. Before the trials.
Before we existed.
400 years into the past.”
Before the Inn. Before the trials.
Before we existed.
400 years into the past.”
The Impossible Plan
At first, silence. Then confusion. Then:
- Koump’aros: “That’s not just time travel. That’s obliteration of self.”
- Pitoros: “The paradoxes would rip the world apart.”
- Sir Kostanto: “Or rebuild it… without this nightmare.”
- Gogos, quietly: “And if we’re not meant to exist? Then maybe it’s mercy.”
St. Amou slams his staff into the floor. The earth stops trembling.
“Aetharion doesn’t just listen to time. It can bend its course. We can reinsert ourselves… at the beginning. Change the shape of this place before it is ever built. Before it hungers.”
But there’s a price. Of course there is. There always is.
One of them must stay behind.
To bind the Aetharion from this side.
To keep the path open…
and be devoured by the Inn.
To bind the Aetharion from this side.
To keep the path open…
and be devoured by the Inn.
The Last Descent
They say no more.
They descend.
Below the cellars. Below the stones.
To the mechanical womb of Aetharion.
To the mechanical womb of Aetharion.
The crowned figure’s voice echoes again.
Louder now. Clearer.
Louder now. Clearer.
“You will not erase me…
…because I was born from you.”
…because I was born from you.”
A door creaks open below, revealing coils of brass and whispers of lost centuries.
The machine waits.
