Chapter 10 - Part 1: Descent
It started with nothing.
No pain. No body. Just... absence.
And then, breath.
Or something like it. I wasn't sure. It didn't pass through lungs. It didn't sting like the poisoned air of the other place. It was just a sense—the illusion of breath, rising and falling in rhythm with a heart I wasn't sure I still had.
Where am I?
I didn't ask it aloud. I couldn't. There was no mouth to move, no throat to form the sound. But the thought echoed all the same, bouncing off the darkness like sonar.
Nothing answered.
Not with words, anyway.
Instead, the void around me pulsed. A ripple of pressure. And then, like the snap of fingers, reality bled into place.
I was falling.
Not fast. Not violently. Just descending. As if gravity had changed its mind about what it wanted from me. Below me—or what I assumed was below—stretched a sea of red storm clouds, boiling like ink dropped in water. Above, a pinhole of light receded. A memory, maybe. A doorway. Gone now.
This isn't the Upside Down.
I didn't know how I knew that. It was just... different. The air was thicker here. The colors wrong. This place didn't just rot. It seethed.
Something told me I shouldn't be able to survive here. But I wasn't dying.
I wasn't living, either.
And then the first image struck.
Not a vision. Not a flashback. More like a reflection across oil. It shimmered in the storm below me—a shape of a man screaming in silence as his skin tore and bones broke, stretching, twisting. Not from outside force. From within. As if the body rejected itself. As if something inside had... snapped.
I drifted closer, pulled by a current I couldn't see.
The man—blond, gaunt, eyes like knives—stood amidst a ruin. White walls splashed with red. Familiar walls.
Lab walls.
A young girl stood opposite him. A girl I recognised.
A girl with a buzz cut and a hospital gown, blood dripping down her nose and...a tattoo of the number 011 on her writs.
I blinked—if you could call it that—and the image changed.
The man yelled, pinned against the wall.
And only then did I see it.
The tattoo on his wrist...001.
The man flew backward, crashing through dimensions. Literally. The fabric of reality tore behind him like plastic wrap set ablaze. He screamed, not with pain, but with hatred, fury, defiance.
He didn't die.
He landed here.
This place.
So he was the first. just why am I seeing this?
I asked myself. This wasn't what I was expecting when being caught by...whatever was chasing me before.
I didn't know who the man I was seeing was. But I was starting to understand what he was. The first exile. The first breach. The first... seed.
The world twisted. Shifted again.
Now I hovered above a sea of storms, red and black and endless. But it wasn't the Upside Down I knew. There were no houses. No roads. No Hawkins.
Just... void. And thunder. And shapes in the dark. Crawling, moving.
Watching.
One of them rose. A spindly, massive shape. It looked like smoke given purpose. A mind, vast and wordless, coiling like a serpent across the sky. It didn't speak, but I felt something reach out.
The broken man—the exile—stood before it. Arms open. Mind open.
They connected.
Hive.
Suddenly, the void had direction. Purpose. Shape.
The man's memories flooded the realm. Streets. Houses. Light poles. School halls.
Hawkins.
And the realm obeyed.
It molded. Transformed.
Time fractured. The same day, again and again, frozen.
The exile smiled.
I felt cold.
This isn't a world.
It's a cage.
And he built it. Is that what its telling me? The History of the Upside Down? Why?
Lightning flashed again, and now I could see flashes of people being dragged through rifts. Screaming. Hurting. Dying. Creatures being born. Grown. Molded. All under the exile's gaze.
I felt my breath hitch—my mental breath, if that made sense.
What are you trying to show me? I thought. Why me?
Again, no voice answered.
But something... moved.
From the clouds below, a figure rose.
Tall. Thin. Draped in darkness. Not walking. Floating. Surrounded by flares of crimson static.
It didn't speak.
It just looked at me.
I drifted down, drawn like a magnet. I was close now. Close enough to make out the sharp lines of a face, pale and hard. Black veins like vines webbing across its temples. A number carved into the forearm:
001.
My breath stopped.
I didn't know this man.
But why...did it feel like he knew me?
And I wasn't dreaming.
The feeling of eyes piercing my back intensified more so than ever, the feeling of being watched making a nonexistent shiver course through my nonexistent self.
No—I was being studied.
The storm died to silence. The red light dimmed. The world around me crumbled until only darkness remained.
And him.
And me.
But I had no body.
Just eyes.
Just thought.
Just terror.
When the dark crumbled away, I wasn't in the storm anymore. I wasn't falling. I wasn't anywhere.
I was there.
And so was he.
No walls. No ceiling. No sky. Just a vast, consuming black. Deeper than shadow. It didn't feel like absence. It felt alive. And in that sea of black—cutting through it like a knife—stood him.
The man.
The same one from the vision. From the rupture. From the scream that tore a hole between worlds. His white uniform gone, replaced with darkness. A figure tall and sharp and still, drifting with the weight of meaning. His eyes weren't visible. His face, half-shrouded. But I knew it was him. I could feel it.
001.
He didn't speak. He didn't have to. The moment I saw him, it was like something snapped into place in my brain. Like I'd just solved an equation I didn't know I'd been working on. Like I'd always known.
This all started with him.
Not the Demogorgon. Not the Gate. Not the lab.
Him.
The Architect.
He floated in a slow circle around me. Not walking. Not gliding. Just...existing. As though space moved to accommodate him. The pressure of his attention made my nonexistent spine ache. No face, no breath, yet somehow I knew he was staring directly into me. Dissecting me.
Not my body.
My mind.
It's like I'm standing in a room made of mirrors, I thought. But they all point inward.
His presence wasn't just there—it was everywhere. It wrapped around me, filled the empty space. A silent orchestra of pressure, of awareness. I couldn't run. Couldn't hide. Not even in thought.
But I wasn't afraid.
Not exactly.
He hadn't attacked. He hadn't spoken. But somehow, he'd shown me everything. The fall. The storm. The fusion with the cloud. The moment Hawkins was pulled into this place like a rotting reflection.
I whispered to myself. "It was like it was being explained to me. Like I was being taught."
I didn't know why. But I knew what I had seen.
This place—this realm—wasn't always Hawkins.
Before, it was chaos. Storm and void.
Then he fell into it. The exile.
And when he connected with that thing—the black cloud, the shadow—it changed.
Not because the cloud wanted it.
But because he did.
"This isn't a natural world," I whispered again, this time louder. "It's a memory. A copy. A...reconstruction."
I turned, my eyes locked on him. He hadn't moved, but something shimmered where his arm should be.
And then it appeared.
His arm. Pale and withered like it had been drained dry. Black veins threaded through his skin like ink. But what caught my breath—what froze me in place—was the tattoo.
001.
And with a slow, deliberate wave of that hand, I felt the space around me shift.
No, not the space.
Me.
Bones.
Skin.
Clothes.
I was whole again.
A body formed around me, cell by cell, shaped from ash and memory. I stumbled, knees catching the invisible floor. My breath hitched as I looked at my hands. Then my arms. Then the number on my wrist.
000.
He was staring at it.
He still hadn't spoken. But I could feel what he was thinking. The way his eyes tracked the ink on my skin. Not with pity. Not with anger.
With recognition.
He knows.
Then he spoke.
His voice wasn't a voice. It was a soundless resonance, like bones creaking in an old house. Like something ancient waking up.
"I know what they made you," he said. "I know what they said you were. Nothing. A null result."
I stared, my eyes softening.
His words weren't cruel. They weren't comforting either. Just...true.
I stood fully. Met his unseen eyes.
"Well," I muttered, voice hoarse, "they were wrong."
The architect said nothing.
"I'm still here," I added, louder. "Still breathing. Still fighting...and I will have justice."
He tilted his head, just slightly. Then he stepped forward.
"You are not nothing," he said. "You have a purpose. One beyond your understanding."
My brows furrowed.
"This place. What is it?" I started to ask. I didn't know how long I had left here and I didn't want to waste it with him telling me things I already knew.
"Where are we really?"
His answer came slower this time.
"A mirror," he said. "Made by a scream. Painted with memory."
I swallowed hard. The words made no sense.
But they did.
"I don't understand," I whispered.
"You will."
The storm around us began to return—not as sound, but as presence. Thunder that pressed behind my eyes. A howling wind with no source.
I raised my voice.
"Who are you?"
For a second, I thought he might answer.
He paused.
Stared.
And then, without warning, I lost my footing, dropping rapidly.
My feet left the invisible floor. My body turned weightless. My arms flailed as I dropped into the void again.
The Architect did not follow.
He only stood above me, watching as I fell. As if peering down a well. As if satisfied.
My vision blurred. My thoughts slowed. The sound faded like I was drifting underwater.
And then, just before everything vanished—before thought dissolved into nothing—I heard him speak one last time.
"I am... a seed," he said, voice echoing across the dark.
"Looking for better soil."
And then came the light.
And then came nothing.
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I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting such a strong reaction so early. I know its only been a few days but I do really appreciate seeing every comment I get lol.
Also by the Powerstones racking up. Its the start of a new week so lets see how far we can get, eh? Thanks again for feedback!