Godliness in Stone

 

Scene 1

It smells like… time down here. Not just damp earth or rot, but something older. A primal scent that’s been waiting in the dark for a millennium. I’m recording this at the bottom of the scar somewhere in the anomaly. In my mind, it's called the Necropolis Gully. My helmet is trying to map it—casting these sterile, digital grids over the moss and the stone—but the data doesn’t make sense. It’s glitching. It’s shuddering against the reality of this place.

I don't know why I'm here, looking at ruins. Just... debris. But in the ruins, I found the ghosts of a future that never happened. I was walking over shards of polymerised memories. This was once a city.  It was meant to be the heart of a new world that... simply stopped.

It wasn't an engineering failure. It was a failure of existence. Holding that slate, I felt this... weight. The grief of the architect. The "wounds of unbuilt dreams." I realised then that this isn't a graveyard for people. It’s a memorial for ambition.

Scene 2

I felt uneasy. Statues that moved and carvings so lifelike I could converse with them. My suit registered "life signs null," but my mind screamed. A spike of loss and profound love hit me. The narrator dismissed it as a "Psychological stress response. Disregard." Yet, how do you disregard the feeling of being watched by stone?

I walked further; the dust turned to mud. There I saw The Obsidian Sentinel, a life force with a cat's head crouching in the water. My sensors read cold stone, but my gut saw the frozen millisecond before a pounce. It wasn't a statue, but a kinetic trap, a threat assessment. The gully wasn’t a tomb; it was a gallery. I was safe as long as I kept moving.

Turning a corner, I saw the strings—thin, invisible lines stretched from my wrist into the darkness. At my hand's end was a small stone puppet. I moved my hand, and the figure jerked. The true horror wasn't controlling it, but realising I hadn’t chosen the movement. "Who is the puppet?" I asked the dark. "And who is the master?"

Scene 3

JB’s first action would be to blaze away. An irresistible force when in fear, an impulse so primal it bypassed all logic. I can feel it hauling me toward the precipice of no control, that terrifying edge where instinct takes over and the rational mind becomes a mere spectator. But this is my proscenium, the curtain rising on fear that I needed to control and stop. The stage was set for calamity, a destructive, unthinking lashing out that would solve nothing and likely worsen everything. 

My answer is to employ fire with purpose, a calculated, strategic act of aggression, a pre-emptive strike not of panic, but of will. I needed to channel that explosive energy into something controlled, something that served a higher, if terrifying, objective. My internal narrator is screaming, a panicked chorus of warnings: 'Motor control compromised! Judgement impaired! Retreat!' but my legs were moving, a terrifying defiance of my own mind. My boots were stomping forward, each heavy tread marking the relentless passage through time on a path I didn’t choose, but which I was now grimly determined to master. 

Scene 4

The labyrinthine path continued, each corridor distinguishable from the last, until the sensation of being a hunted, me as a cornered beast began to recede. A chilling clarity replaced the frenzied, self-destructive urge that had driven me forward. Now, a raw, almost incandescent need for survival fueled me, a desperate resolve to comprehend, and ultimately conquer, the inevitable confrontation that awaited. The air hung heavy and motionless, thick with the fine, ancient dust of the Necropolis Gully. It was a place where certainty had dissolved, leaving only one undeniable truth: the 'performance,' whatever cryptic horror it entailed, had commenced.

In that profound shift, my role changed entirely. I was no longer merely a participant, a frantic object in motion, or the passive observer waiting for the final curtain. I became the explorer, a designation that carried a new weight of purpose. I shed the skin of the startled novelty and the unwitting exhibit. I located the lens of objective analysis, then focused, with a magnified gaze, and scraped up as much info as I could. I was precisely where I was meant to be; through my conquering arm, I became the master of my own fate.