Each step echoed like a countdown, reverberating off the stone like footfalls in a tomb. Karnak's skin crawled—not from the chill, but from something subtler. Wrong. The walls didn't breathe, not exactly, but they remembered breath. Like this place had once been alive—and hadn't fully accepted its death.
They entered a chamber.
Vast. Hollow. Cathedralesque in scale, yet stripped of reverence. No ornament. Just shadow. And at its heart, an altar—but not one meant for prayer. This was for offering. A black obelisk jutted from the stone floor, humming with a sound just below hearing. Around it, claw marks. Symbols—etched in haste or madness. Ancient blood had dried in rivers at its base.
But what truly broke the scene was the tank.
It stood like a relic out of time—industrial amidst the arcane. Frosted glass sealed it shut, lined with tubes pulsing a green-blue luminescence, like veins feeding a slumbering god. Shapes drifted inside. Humanoid. Or once-human. Their forms twisted in just the wrong ways—enough to make Karnak's mind recoil.
Around the tank, they knelt.
Figures—still and skeletal—locked in permanent poses of worship. Not corpses. Not exactly. Preserved in reverence, bone-thin arms outstretched, faces eerily peaceful. Too peaceful. As if hollowed out and left behind as masks of serenity.
Karnak slowed. The hunger inside him stirred. Something about the altar, the tank, the kneeling dead—plucked at his instincts like harpstrings. He could almost hear a song. Distant. Muffled. Wrong.
Eli moved ahead, gliding his hand over the carved symbols like reading madness in braille.
"These marks," he murmured, "aren't warnings. They're blueprints."
He turned, glancing from the obelisk to the tank—and then to Karnak.
"They built this place for you."
Karnak laughed, uneasy. "I've never set foot in here."
"Not in this life," Eli said.
The tank's fluid rippled.
Karnak's breath caught as one of the shapes within pressed a hand to the glass.
His hand. Exact—down to the faint scar on the knuckle.
The thing inside opened its eyes. Milky. Ancient.
And then it smiled.
Karnak staggered back, heart hammering. "What the hell is this?!"
Eli didn't move. "A contingency. A seed. A memory made flesh."
"You're not making any sense!"
"That's because you haven't remembered yet," Eli said, calm as dusk. "But you will. This place is the trigger. The tank is the mirror. And that—" he pointed at the altar "—that's the lock."
Karnak stared at the tank.
At himself—smiling from within.
"I don't want to remember," he whispered.
Eli's expression shifted. For the first time, something mourned behind his eyes.
"You don't get to choose."
A pulse erupted from the altar—not light, not sound. Just presence.
The tank shattered.
Not in shards, but ribbons of light. As if reality bent to release what was inside.
The figure stepped free. Calm. Precise. Steam hissed from its back like a chrysalis cracked open.
Karnak faced it—his mirror made flesh.
Same face. Same scars. But older. Sharpened by knowledge Karnak hadn't yet earned. Its eyes burned—not with hunger, but intent.
"You're…me," Karnak muttered.
The figure tilted its head. "I'm what you will be. Or rather—what you could've been."
Eli stepped closer, wary. "One of the Echoes," he breathed. "The Codex called them fragments. Failed ascensions. Dormant. But not dead."
The Echo smirked. "You read too far, Eli. Dug too deep. Good."
"You were meant to be destroyed," Eli snapped.
"Was I?" The Echo turned to Karnak. "Or was I meant to be found?"
The air thickened. Psionic pressure curled around them. Karnak's skin prickled. The hunger inside him… understood now. It wasn't mindless. It was coded.
And then the images hit.
Not memories. Instructions. Genetic echoes. Labs in flames. Screaming scientists. Test subjects turning—mutating, escaping. Humanity's final project: merge virus X with will, thought, and restraint.
Make a monster that could choose.
Make Codex Karnak.
But Karnak had failed. Neural links unstable. Readings too chaotic. Labeled a dud. Put on ice.
Forgotten.
Until Eli found this tomb.
"I wasn't supposed to wake you," Eli whispered. "I came for the archive."
"But you did," the Echo said. "And now… he remembers."
Karnak staggered, the obelisk pulsing in sync with his heart.
He saw them—others like him. Not clones. Variants. Echoes. Codex-13. Codex-21. Codex-0.
He was Codex-7.
"You were meant to die," Eli said, grief in his voice. "But something in you held on."
"Held on to what?" Karnak breathed.
"To choice," said the Echo.
To identity. To evolution without servitude.
And maybe now, with the Codex awakening, Karnak wasn't just a relic.
He was the firewall. The last wall between humanity and extinction.
"You were made to lead them," Eli said. "To stop what's coming. You can't run from that."
Karnak's breath slowed. Cold. Steady.
"No," he said. "I wasn't made to be anything. I choose what I become."
The obelisk cracked open—revealing something glowing within.
A key.
A trigger.
The first step to waking the rest.
And somewhere deep below, more footsteps echoed.