A delicate line of sound threaded through the needle of the dark, the signal wavering with unease.

"There is movement beneath the sanctum's surface... Organic movement... I will seal off the upper halls and monitor from here. Proceed with caution."

Her voice was wary, new again to speaking. Beneath the layers of cacophonic static, she sounded almost human.

"I will monitor from here; it's safer that way. Your signal is faint, though..."

The knight lingered at the stairwell's cliffside. Dust rose to meet her lantern's glow, rising like the smoke of a pillaged city, and it sang to her sweetly of rust and remembrance.

"This area was once used for prayer. I am uncertain if that matters to you."

The knight descended without reply. Her lantern light witnessed the murals of old faith: saints with melted faces, forsaken by the sun; prayers etched into stone, text as faint as dreams of gods; halos extinguished, their morning long fled; All but reduced to a memory of gold. A low hum wandered the halls, the slow sorrow of stone, aching with beatings from the tides of time.

Of all that time had spared, only a note endured. It lay waiting upon the wound of an altar, where offerings once burned, and where the last flame had knelt. Inscribed upon it were the worn marks of a desperate hand, in trembling script:

"LET MY BONES ROT, LET MY MIND MELT, BUT NEVER LET ME FORGET WHO I AM."

The miasma of decay grew thick around her, corrupted with the breath of uncounted centuries. The cobble lay asphyxiated amidst nature's slow artistry, where roots had stitched their stoic hymns along rock. Only the rot endured, yearning beneath the tread.

Cutting through the hush, the maid broke through, "I am losing signal. There is interference below. Tread heavy."

The knight halted only momentarily, for stillness counted close. An untouched hum pierced the dark, not of wind, nor of machine, but of stone remembering sea, praying to merely breathe again.

And this time, the hum answered her steps, slow and knowing; they were not her own. From the heart of that darkness, the breath of something unseen gathered, a spear of sunlight stabbing stained glass. Faint murmurs of prayer floated through the halls around her. Even her light trembled upon the carven walls, where rust had severed the stone with its serrated touch.

Yet there, beyond the safety of her glow, a shadow lay upon the wall. It bore the shape of a man, but not the manner, nor the mercy. With unblinking eyes, it stares, its glossy marbles providing a gateway into its empty mind.

And from the black came a sound that must once have belonged to a memory. It was a whispering hiss, uncertain of its own forked tongue, until it constructed itself into something almost human.

"-I am... losing sig-"

The voice bled through the interference, her voice, the maid's. It was soft, it was computed, it was wrong.

"Organic..."

The word snapped, trapped between breath and static, as though some unseen mouth was gnawing it apart. The knight turned, and her lantern's glow quivered in its glass, hoping to break free from the temple that confines it.

"Organic-" it cried, no longer speech but the scream of torn metal.

The shadow rose from where it had lain, a web of limbs and hunger, collapsing in the dusk, reforming in the dawn. The knight drew her blade and struck, the blow falling upon dead stone.

Dust ascended, and through it, the voice continued to envelop the ruin in its false echoes. It reached for her once more, gentle as prayer, blind as sin, one half born, the other half merely remembered. Its face was no face she knew, only the idea of one stretched thin across bone, held together by the hands of a seamstress.

The steel of her sword sang a single note of an old and familiar tune, meeting flesh, or what once had been flesh, and the strike rang through the walls like a bell struck for the departed.

Silence dripped off her blade, finally, as the thing lay still, its borrowed voice fading into ruin. Her breath echoed in her helm, the only heart still beating in that metal tomb.