The building was alive.
It had always been alive in its own strange, twisted way. It breathed, yes, but not with lungs. It pulsed, but not with blood. The walls spoke in ways that would never be fully understood, though they tried. But beneath all the machinery, beneath the glass and the steel and the walls of memory, there was something else. Something older. Something far darker.
And it had waited.
The name Jamie whispered—the thing beneath you—touched something so deep inside the building that it stirred awake.
It was hungry.
Jamie stood on the precipice of the floor that the building had tried to erase from its heart. The words on the floor beneath his feet seemed to change as he walked over them, cracking and warping like ancient paper burning in slow motion. He didn't flinch.
He had crossed too many thresholds to fear now.
But the air smelled different.
It smelled like rot.
Like burial.
Like something too old to be buried had been clawing its way out for years.
His steps slowed as he reached the center of the hall.
The walls curved around him, disorienting him, like an endless hallway stretching back into itself. A hum filled the air—low, guttural, a vibration that ran through the very bones of the place. There were no windows here, no escape.
The ground beneath him trembled.
And in the center of the floor—beneath the cracking letters that once spelled his name—there was a hole.
A wound.
A doorway.
A yawning mouth.
The blackness within it was endless.
Jamie crouched at the edge, staring down. The hole seemed to pulse as if it had its own heartbeat. He knew it. He had felt it before, a long time ago, when he was nothing but a name—forgotten, tossed aside by a building that was supposed to remember.
It remembered.
But it remembered wrong.
Back on the upper floors, Ansel was still walking down the steps that seemed to lead into an abyss. Each step he took was heavy, his boots creaking on the stairs that bent under his weight like tired bones.
He was drawn, despite every instinct telling him to go back.
The air grew colder as he descended.
The walls narrowed.
The sound of his breathing grew louder, more oppressive.
He paused at the foot of the stairs. A faint light flickered at the end of the hall, just beyond the last door. But this wasn't a comforting light. No, it was wrong. Flickering too erratically. The way a dying lightbulb shudders before it dies completely.
Ansel's hand trembled as he reached for the door.
It opened without resistance.
And in the center of the room was the Rewrite Machine.
It pulsed like a living thing.
He stepped inside, not knowing that the door behind him had closed with a finality that echoed in the bones of the place.
Mira moved quickly now, running, though her legs felt like lead. Every corner she turned seemed to reveal a new stretch of hallway, each more suffocating than the last. The walls closed in on her, the darkening corners whispering secrets she wasn't ready to hear.
She thought she saw Jamie's face, just a flicker in the corner of her vision, but when she turned, there was nothing.
She stumbled. The floor beneath her groaned, and the walls pressed closer, as if trying to swallow her whole.
"Mira…"
She froze.
That voice. She had heard it before.
It was Jamie's voice.
But… no. Not quite.
It was wrong.
She turned to face the hallway behind her, but there was no one there.
The echo of her name still lingered in the air, but it wasn't just the sound. The walls themselves seemed to remember it.
And then she saw it.
A shadow that wasn't hers.
A figure standing just beyond the flickering light.
Her breath caught in her throat.
The shadow moved.
And her blood ran cold.
It wasn't Jamie.
It wasn't anything she could understand.
The thing in the hole stared up at Jamie, its eyes two black orbs that gleamed like oil in the dark. It had no face, no form. It was a shape made of darkness, a creature born of the place itself, and it remembered him.
It remembered everything.
Everything it had done.
Everything it had seen.
And now, it was awake.
Jamie leaned over the hole, his gaze fixed on the creature below.
He didn't feel fear.
He felt recognition.
The thing beneath the building had never been dead. It had only been waiting—waiting for the right moment, for the right soul to slip through its cracks. It had been born in the deepest recesses of the building, where the Rewrite Machine couldn't reach. It was the first forgotten thing.
The first name erased from the ledger.
The first death not rewritten.
The thing beneath the building was death.
And it had never stopped feeding.
Jamie closed his eyes.
He could feel it now. The pull of the thing's hunger, like a magnet, drawing him down into the depths.
But it wasn't enough.
No, this creature—this thing—it wanted him, but it had no control over him. Not anymore. Not since the Rewrite Machine broke. Not since Jamie found the cracks in its design.
He was no longer just a part of its memory.
He was something more.
Ansel had reached the center of the room. The Rewrite Machine hummed louder now, its gears spinning wildly, but something was wrong. It twitched—a mechanical pulse, almost like a heartbeat that was trying to fight its way out.
He reached for the central console, his fingers brushing the cold metal.
"Jamie…"
The name was a command.
The machine flared to life.
Mira was caught.
The shadow ahead of her stretched, rippling like liquid, moving like it was made of the very darkness around her. It wasn't Jamie, but it was.
It was something Jamie had become.
Or something the building had tried to forget.
Her heart pounded in her chest as she took a slow step backward.
But there was no escape.
The thing before her knew her name.
Jamie took a breath, a soft exhale.
He didn't want to be forgotten anymore.
And for the first time in ages, he wasn't.
The thing that had been buried beneath the building had awoken to claim what was its own. And it was starving.
The buried terror stirs, its hunger rising. And Jamie, no longer a victim of the Rewrite Machine, walks with it, carrying the weight of forgotten souls. Mira, Ansel, and the building itself are caught in the grip of what was meant to stay hidden forever.
What happens when the thing that remembers starts to remember you?