Crimson Void

The war ended. The horror did not.

Deep in the Siberian tundra, hidden beneath permafrost and secrecy, Black Site Xibalba remained operational long after its benefactors in the Imperial State had been reduced to ashes. It had never been about the war, anyway. It had been about something greater. Something beyond flesh, beyond death. The men who worked there called it The Ascent.

The first subjects were prisoners—dissidents, spies, unfortunates swept from the streets of occupied cities. Then the war ended, and the source dried up. They needed better stock. Volunteers, soldiers, men trained to withstand pain. The promise of godhood made them eager to comply.

They didn't understand what the researchers had found.

It had begun with crude fusions—humans spliced with deep-sea predators, prisoners grafted with Chimaerae bred in glass vats. Aberrations of human ingenuity, all teeth and sorrow, screaming through gills that did not belong to them. They begged to die. Most were granted that mercy. Others became something… more.

Then came the texts. Unearthed from the ruins of an ancient city predating civilization itself, written in a script that was neither human nor sane. They spoke of The Crimson One, a being beyond form, waiting between the spaces of reality. They spoke of His gifts.

The experiments became rituals.

They carved the symbols into bone. The serum, refined from something dredged from the Mariana Trench, was injected directly into the spine. Subjects didn't change so much as they shed—flesh unraveling like an overripe fruit, revealing what lurked beneath.

The Ascent was real. The gods were listening.

Then Subject 731 opened his eyes, and the sky bled.

It took less than an hour for the compound to fall.

The researchers, the soldiers, the architects of this horror—they became the choir. Their bodies stretched impossibly thin, bound together in pulsing, veined masses of fused tissue. They sang hymns in a language the human mind was never meant to understand.

Some of them escaped into the tunnels. It didn't matter. The priest was already here.

Subject 731 was no longer a man. No longer even a thing. It was a door, an aperture through which The Crimson One peered into our world. The air vibrated. Reality sloughed off in layers. It was becoming here.

And then, all at once, everything stopped.

A figure stood at the heart of the carnage. Neither human nor divine. Its form shimmered, undulating, a silhouette against a backdrop of infinite red. It whispered in a voice like grinding metal:

"We have seen enough."

The world cracked open.

And Xibalba was gone.