Chapter Text
The unfortunate sacrifice, the man called Arthur Lester, was laying upon a surface that might have been an altar looking, or perhaps some more ancient, more blasphemous contrivance. Cold stone, or something unnervingly similar, pressed against his flayed, feverish skin. His whole body, bound by hard ropes that felt disturbingly organic and alive, screamed with a pain so profound it threatened to unravel the very fabric of his being. They had done something to his eyesight and it felt hellish. Instead, his eyes were a swirling miasma of fractured light and impossible bloody patterns, a kaleidoscopic torment that offered no true perception and will not anymore till the rest of his mortal life.
He was here because of the investigation. A case that had started with a cry for help from one unfortunate woman, whispers in dusty archives and led him down shadowed alleys, past hushed-up disappearances and forgotten human names. It had ended here, in this place that reeked of death and the unfathomable. He had been so close to understanding, to piecing together the ghastly mosaic of a series of disappearances. And then, they took him.
Those fucking occultists!
Now, one of them, a hunched figure swathed in robes that seemed so funnily absurd, chanted in a tongue from a yellow book, voice slithered and hissed like a nest of vipers. The syllables were alien, guttural, each one a spike driven into the silence of the chamber. He could feel the malevolent intelligence behind the words, the ancient, hungry power being invoked. Creatures. The word echoed in the shattered fragments of Arthur's feverish mind, a primal, instinctual fear. Not merely animals, but things that defied nature, things that slithered from beyond the veil of stars and understanding.
Then, a sound. It was not a noise, not truly. It was a vibration, a low, resonant hum that seemed to emanate from the very air itself. It was a buzzing, slithering glide that seemed to expand, to consume, to press in on him from all sides. It was the sound of dimensions folding, of reality itself buckling under an unthinkable pressure.
And then, there was only darkness. Oh, that absolution and terrible punishment before the unknown. Not the absence of light, but a presence, a vast, suffocating void that swallowed him whole, stealing even the phantom fragments of his sight. The chanting ceased. The buzzing slid into an unfathomable silence. Arthur Lester, a man who had dared to pry open the locked doors of the other side of the known reality, was utterly, terrifyingly lost…
* * *
The transition waltz with mother darkness was not a sudden waking, but a slow, agonizing crawl from the bowels of a fevered nightmare with a taste of blood and vomit in the mouth. Arthur expected the biting cold of the altar, the grave, the metallic tang of his own blood and the rough hemp of his bonds or just to find himself in somebody's stomach. Instead, he found himself drowning in strange softness.
He was lying on a bed, oh, an expanse of down and silken sheets that felt entirely too decadent for a world he experienced recently. His limbs were free. The ropes were gone, replaced by a dull, throbbing ache in his wrists and ankles. But the true human panic waited in the stillness behind his eyelids.
He tried to open them. He felt the familiar muscular effort, the slight flutter of lashes, but the world remained a perfect, absolute obsidian. There was no grey, no shadow, no hint of light - only a thick, velvety void. For a moment, a cold, sharp realisation lanced through his chest. A newly blind man is a man whose map of the world has been burned into black ashes. Now he is a pilgrim without a compass, cast into a silent sea of journey on the edge of the mountain. He reached out with trembling fingers, breath coming in shallow, jagged hitches, touching eyelids, trying to find the light with no happy ending. But at least the pain was no more…
His world had shrunk to the reach of his arms. To sounds for the ears and to sensations on the skin.
Arthur rolled onto his side, the movement surprisingly fluid and unimpeded. His hands found the edge of the bed - what felt like carved, polished wood. Sliding off, bare feet sinking into a rug so thick it felt like treading on moss. Pleasant.
Then began the slow, stumbling pilgrimage of the newly sightless man in the unknown place.
He moved like a scared phantom, arms outstretched, fingers splaying against the air. Encountering a heavy wardrobe, mahogany, by the scent of it, and his knee struck a hard, invisible corner.
“Damn it, damn it all,” - he hissed, the sharp flare of pain grounding him in a reality that felt increasingly like a fairy-tale trap. Navigating by touch - the cold, smooth surface of a marble-topped washstand, the rough, intricate grain of a high-backed chair, the delicate, terrifying clatter of a porcelain vase as his sleeve brushed past it. Every sound was magnified - the creak of the floorboards under weight sounded like the groaning of a ship’s hull. What a world through new lenses.
He felt small, a child lost in a giant’s playground. The room felt immense, filled with the presence of heavy, silent furniture that seemed to watch him with invisible eyes.
And then, he felt it.
A sudden, startling change in the air. A column of heat, pure and unadulterated, washed over face and hands. Arthur stopped, turning head toward the source. It was the sun. He couldn't see the golden orb, but could feel its blessing upon his skin - a tactile light that tasted of life and sanity. Following the warmth until his palms pressed against a thick pane of glass and beyond that, the stone of a windowsill.
For a heartbeat, he let himself simply be in the warmth. It was a mercy he had not expected to survive for.
But the mystery of causes and consequences was a weight a true private investigator could not ignore. Arthur turned away from the sun, tracing the wall with fingertips until the plaster gave way to the heavy, carved frame of a door. His hand found a brass knob, cool and solid.
The door was not locked.
Should he or shouldn’t?..
Oh, fuck it all!
Taking a breath that tasted of dust and old books, Arthur turned the handle. He would not wait like a lamb in a gilded pen for his fate. Stepping out into the unknown, a blind victim entered the belly of the beast's palace.
The door clicked shut behind him with a soft, ominous finality. Arthur found himself in a corridor, though it felt less like a passage and more like a cavern carved from silence. His outstretched hands brushed against walls that were impossibly smooth, cool to the touch, and seemed to stretch into an infinite expanse. The air here was colder, imbued with a strange, melancholic stillness that hinted at vast, empty spaces. It was the scent of forgotten grandeur, of rooms long unused, of a profound and ancient loneliness. He walked, bare feet echoing faintly on stone that absorbed sound like a sponge.
Arthur navigated by sound, by subtle shifts in the air currents, by the faint, almost imperceptible echo of his own shuffling steps. The scale of the place was terrifying or at least it felt like that. Passing doorways, archways, columned alcoves - each a potential trap, each a whispered invitation into further bewilderment. He sensed soaring ceilings, distant and unreachable and the chilling proximity of unseen walls. Or maybe he was just hallucinating from self paranoia and slow panic. This wasn't a mansion. It was a labyrinthine castle, a fortress, and he was but a lost insect crawling through its deserted halls.
The emptiness pressed in on him, a palpable presence. There was no life, no distant murmur of servants, no creak of old timber, no hum of hidden machinery - only the vast, echoing hush. It was a silence that spoke of abandonment, of a sorrow so profound it had frozen the very air.
He was so engrossed in his silent, tactile exploration that missed the subtle dip in the floor. His foot found nothing but air, and with a gasp, stumbling. Gravity asserted itself, and Arthur tumbled forward, down a short flight of stairs. His bottom hit each stone step with a series of dull, humiliating thuds, the cacophony shattering the profound quiet of the castle. He slid to a halt at the bottom, bruised and disoriented, gasping for breath, a symphony of ungraceful noise in a world that had seemingly forgotten it. Ah, what a fool!
Then, a sensation. Something brushed against his outstretched hand - ethereal, gossamer-soft, like the finest silk or the wing of an unseen moth. It passed over his skin with a fleeting, almost imperceptible touch. Arthur flinched, heart hammering against his ribs from pain and shock.
And then, something else. A warmth. Not slimy, but scaly like a reptile, undeniably organic, impossibly firm and utterly alien. It wrapped around his forearm, just below the elbow, a sinuous, powerful embrace. It felt like muscle, like solid, heated flesh, but it moved with the fluid, silent grace of a serpentine coil. It was not gentle, yet it was not rough, it simply took hold, pulling man upward with an effortless strength that bespoke immense power.
As Arthur was lifted to feet, a deep, resonant voice rumbled from above him, a sound that seemed to vibrate through the very stones of the castle. It was a voice that belonged to ancient caverns and forgotten gods, a voice that carried the weight of ages and the chill of cosmic distances.
“I see, my guest has finally awakened.”
* * *
Arthur let out a series of strangled, incoherent sounds, well, a very simple primitive response to a terror that seemed to vibrate in the very air, so even he could feel little hairs on his arms standing up in unnamed fear. Recoiling instinctively, heels catching on the treacherous lip of the stone step. He began to pitch backward once again into the yawning, absurd fall, but the firm, sinuous appendage, that warm, snake-smooth leather like presence, tightened its grip around his arm with a sudden, unyielding strength. It held him suspended for a heartbeat before pulling him back onto feet with an effortless, terrifying power.
“Steady,” - the voice rumbled, his resonance so deep it felt like it was originating from the stone walls, - “it is well that you have finally woken up. I began to worry that you were hurt more than it seemed at first glance…”
Arthur’s breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. He turned head toward the sound, brow furrowed as if the sheer force of his will could pierce the obsidian veil over his eyes. Hands were shaking, clutching at the air for a sense of reality that was no longer there. Arthur in Wonderland, how funny!
“Who… what are you?” - he managed to croak out, - “where have you taken me and why?”
There was a long, heavy pause, a silence so profound it felt like the weight of leagues of water pouring down. Arthur felt the air around shift, a faint, dry rustle of something vast and silken moving in the darkness nearby.
“To answer the first question that would be a futile exercise in the limitations of your tongue,” - the voice finally replied, tinged with a melancholy that sounded like the wind howling through a long forgotten graveyard, - “descriptions are but cages built by humans of breath and sound. For a creature of your limited, three-dimensional perception, what I am would be… inconceivable. To look upon my true form would be to attempt to pour an ocean into a cup, your reason would simply fracture under the weight of the truth. So, don't even bother.”
Arthur swallowed hard, his detective’s grit sparking through the thick fog of his fear. He straightened his back, though knees still felt like cotton, - “well, try me then, O High and Mighty,” - he said, voice gaining a thin, desperate edge of defiance, - “I’ve spent recent part of my life looking at things people weren’t meant to see. I deserve the truth for getting kidnaped, blinded and sacrificed to somebody oh so limited in understanding for the human brain!”
The entity let out a long, resonant sigh - a sound that carried with some kind of age-old fatigue and, it seems, notes of embarrassment?! This can't be it…
“I am an interloper from the folds between realities in this world,” - the voice whispered, resonance echoing off the distant, - “I am the God of the Outer Dark worlds who is foreign to your dimension. For now, let that suffice. The rest - the names, the places, the lineages of why and how of no consequence to your survival.”
Arthur felt the warmth of the sinuous limb detach from his arm, leaving a lingering, phantom heat behind that felt almost like a bruise on his soul.
“Walk now after me,” - the entity commanded, his voice receding a few paces into the corridor, leading the way into the echoing depths of the castle, - “follow the sound of my words. I shall describe to you our arrangement. Come.”
And Arthur followed, guided by the leaden cadence of the voice and a sound that chilled his blood - a dry, rhythmic rustle like a thousand heavy quills or immense, silk-bound feathers dragging across the cold stone. It was a sound that suggested a shape too large for the corridor, a presence that moved with a heavy, avian grace.
“You shall be my attendant,” - the entity decreed, the words now vibrating through the air like the low notes of an organ, - “my companion in my castle. You will perform the tasks I set for you, and in return, you shall alleviate my existence. From now on you belong to the hospitality of this castle.”
Arthur’s mind reeled. A servant? Thinking, his jaw tightening. He had prepared himself for a thousand grim fates - to be devoured, to be sacrificed, to be cast into some boiling pit of black hole, but he had never expected to become a crooked version of Cinderella. Am I to be a chambermaid for a cosmic aberration? A domestic to a nameless god? Or am I merely a toy for a very eloquent lunatic, who is fucking with me right now? Just how did I end up here…
“Do not entertain thoughts of running away,” - the voice warned, sensing his internal discord, - “the boundaries of this place are not governed by the rules of your kind.”
He let out a sharp, bitter huff that was almost a laugh, - “very funny,” - Arthur muttered, sightless eyes fixed on the void, - “where exactly would I run? I’m blind, in case you hadn’t noticed. I can barely find a staircase without making a spectacle of myself, let alone run away from a trans-dimensional fortress.”
The rustling stopped. The air grew still, and Arthur felt the weight of an invisible gaze pressing against his skin.
“It is a mercy granted to you that you cannot see,” - the entity whispered, and for the first time, there was a jagged edge to its tone, - “if you were to look upon the geometry of my being, the sheer contradiction of my form would unravel your mind within a heartbeat. Your blindness is the only reason you are still capable of speech and thought.”
Arthur felt a cold shiver race down his spine. What?... The thought died in his throat, replaced by a sudden, jarring sense of the absurd. He took a breath, trying to steady the frantic beating of heart.
“And how am I supposed to address you then, ‘O great and terrifying indescribable God’?” - he asked, voice dripping with tired irony, - “if I’m to be your companion, I can hardly keep calling you ‘the voice in the dark’.”
The silence stretched out, long and thoughtful. The entity seemed to be searching for a concept he hadn't thought about for a long time.
“You may call me… John,” - the voice finally replied.
Arthur couldn't help himself, arching a single, brown brow in a silent question he was too weary to vocalize. John? Simply John? What kind of cosmic horror, what kind of ancient, reality-warping deity chooses the most mundane human name?
“John,” - he repeated, the name sounding utterly ridiculous in the echoing gloom of the castle.
“Yes,” - John replied, seemingly satisfied, - “now, listen closely. You will follow me to the east wing, where I will show you some rooms to which you will have access to, and you will…”
“Stop,” - Arthur said firmly. He came to a halt, hands balled into fists at sides. A wave of centuries, bone-deep exhaustion washed over him - the exhaustion of a man who had lost his sight, his world, and his dignity all in one night.
The rustling sound ceased instantly. The presence in the dark seemed to loom closer, surprised by the sudden defiance. Arthur felt a surge of reckless courage.
“You haven’t asked,” - he said, voice quiet but steady, - “you’ve spent all this time declaring my fate and choosing not to describe yourself, but you never bothered to ask for mine.”
The air seemed to ripple. There was a sense of profound confusion radiating from the darkness, as if the very idea of a human name was a foreign, puzzling piece of data. John hesitated, the ‘mighty’ persona momentarily faltering.
“And how,” - the voice asked, sounding strangely small for a moment, - “should I call you?”
“Arthur Lester,” - he replied, echoing with a dignity that even the dark couldn't swallow, - “my name is Arthur Lester, John. And you know, I am quite thirsty and hungry right now.”
John was clearly taken aback, sounding quite embarrassed, - “right, right…”